Ford Has A Huge Mechanic Shortage. Here’s How Long You’ll Have To Wait To Get Your Car Fixed

[Zoidz]

Autopian - Posting two links as a parallel to RIvian's backlog of service. If Ford has a problem hiring ICE mechanics, the problem has to be worse for RIvian. A small subset of people with an automobile mechanic skillset want to work on EVs. Also, young automotive tech school grads are being pulled into heavy truck (diesel) service where the work is more stable, less high tech overall (Semi trucks don't have CarPlay, Gear Guard, etc. lol) and tends to pay better, according to a friend of mine in the business.

Ford CEO Farley: "This morning, when I woke up, there were 6,000 bays in our dealerships with no technicians.
[Yahoo Finance:] So can’t get my car fixed?
"No. Two weeks. Average wait is two weeks. Not because we don’t have the parts, we don’t have the mechanics."

Ford CEO Farley: "There are literally a million openings right now. At Ford, we have probably 6,000 [open positions]—400,000 repair technician shortages across the economy. I think it’s a couple of things. First of all, the productivity has not caught up with the white collar [positions], in fact, it’s gone down over the last 20 years. Number two, the jobs aren’t as glamorous as a white-collar job from college, and I think the permitting and all the regulations has really stunted the growth of these kind of jobs."

Ford Dealership General Manager: “Technology has exploded with complexity. That’s one of the things that a lot people don’t think about when they think ‘Why do we have a technician shortage?’ ” Butman said. “It’s because technology has complicated the repair process to the point where it’s much more difficult to repair cars.”

Even with a degree from a trade program, Butman said, much of the higher level technical training falls to dealers and automakers. He said some of his best technicians never went to college; rather the dealership invested in training them and getting them certified.


Motor1 - Interview with a mechanic:

Clearly, Ivanovko (an auto mechanic) thinks he’s got an idea why Ford is struggling to hire skilled mechanics. And it doesn’t have to do with lack of trained workers. It’s all about engineering and flat-rate pay for repairs under warranty.

“You’ll have to do this oil pan gasket on this F-250,” Ivanovko says, mimicking a Ford dealership manager. “You’ll have to pull the cab off of the frame to do it. And it’s under warranty, so it pays like .6 [hours]. Why don’t you want to work for me?”

Estimates vary, but online consensus is that it will take at least a few hours to remove the cab of a truck, and upwards of an entire day. But if the warranty pays a flat rate of just 40 minutes for a repair that requires removing the cab first, the mechanic is essentially losing time and money.

Many self-identified mechanics who commented on Ivanovko’s post blamed the engineers who design vehicles for making them difficult to work on.

“Engineers should design them to be worked on. Not to speed up the assembly process,” wrote one.

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[COdogman]

WTH are you talking about? CarPlay requires no attention from the manufacturer at all - it magically appears in your vehicle like a lightning bolt from Steve Jobs' grave.

Around here they have been talking about shortages of Automotive Techs for years. I can only imagine how tough it is to convince people to not only join that industry, but join it with a company that is new and extremely tech heavy.

 

[beatle]

Sounds like the flip side of the condescending trite advice, "if you want to make more money, leave and get a better job." It would appear a number of techs have done just that and now it's the company that's unhappy because they're not able to attract workers with substandard pay and unreasonable expectations.

 

[savethemanual]

Start paying these mechanics what they are worth.

 

[antimatter]

If you have a shortage of mechanics, why not try increasing the pay and improving the working conditions? I don't think the complexity of the machines is an issue, as long as the technician is compensated for their time and effort. When you use service as a profit center, and you maximize that profit by squeezing the people who work for you, I'm guessing they might not want to work for you.

 

[beatle]

If you have a shortage of mechanics, why not try increasing the pay and improving the working conditions? I don't think the complexity of the machines is an issue, as long as the technician is compensated for their time and effort. When you use service as a profit center, and you maximize that profit by squeezing the people who work for you, I'm guessing they might not want to work for you.

Well there's the catch. Some of the comments in the Autopian article reference the book times for jobs already being way too short to do the job. If you have to do a lot of troubleshooting with a computer, your effective hourly wage is even worse if you can't make that book time. It's not really a matter of just grinding it out and getting paid for all of your effort. If you can't make the book time, you go into OT (own time) to fix it. Computers are complicated and opaque to the tech in a lot of cases, so pinpointing the root cause and fixing it in the amound of time the book says can be a fool's errand. A lot of people have already figured this out and abandoned the manufacturer / dealership since they'd rather volunteer somewhere else.

 

[antimatter]

Well there's the catch. Some of the comments in the Autopian article reference the book times for jobs already being way too short to do the job. If you have to do a lot of troubleshooting with a computer, your effective hourly wage is even worse if you can't make that book time. It's not really a matter of just grinding it out and getting paid for all of your effort. If you can't make the book time, you go into OT (own time) to fix it. Computers are complicated and opaque to the tech in a lot of cases, so pinpointing the root cause and fixing it in the amound of time the book says can be a fool's errand. A lot of people have already figured this out and abandoned the manufacturer / dealership since they'd rather volunteer somewhere else.

I think as all the margins of industry are getting tighter, dealerships seem to be depending on the service center to generate more profits. I wonder if internet pricing is one aspect of this, where more pricing transparency has lead to lower sales profits, which in turn means mechanics and service writers need to produce more revenue.

 

[savethemanual]

Perhaps a paradigm shift is needed in pay structure for mechanics, how about putting them on a good salary and treating them like white collar employees? These can be very lucrative careers, smart people and continuous learning are required with how high tech vehicles are getting.

 

[sfvR1S]

Isn't Rivian SC labor around $250/hr? Unless Rivian is keeping most of it, seems as if techs should be getting decent pay.

 

[Ilovejunebugs]

Our local mechanic shop hasn't been able to find help for a while now...the owner asked his dad to come back out of retirement to help in the meantime.
When we had Subaru's (2021-2023) there was a 2-3 week wait to get in for service, sometimes longer, due to tech shortages. And out of my 3 sons (youngest just graduated high school) and all their friends, only 1 has any interest in this field.

 

[beatle]

Perhaps a paradigm shift is needed in pay structure for mechanics, how about putting them on a good salary and treating them like white collar employees? These can be very lucrative careers, smart people and continuous learning are required with how high tech vehicles are getting.

That's how pretty much how a lot of IT work is. There was at least one person commenting in that thread how they abandoned auto tech and went to IT where they they make more money and don't have to provide their own tools or grind their body into hamburger on a daily basis.

 

[Magicbus]

My step son quit being an auto mechanic after 10 years due to flat rate pay. Moved to heavy equipment service.

 

[portdirect]

Isn't Rivian SC labor around $250/hr? Unless Rivian is keeping most of it, seems as if techs should be getting decent pay.

They are getting between 1/5 and 1/6 of that (geo dependent) afaik.

here’s an example: https://www.ziprecruiter.com/c/Rivi...chnician/-in-Bellevue,WA?jid=061c6bacba9e89d0

 

[Nixapatfan]

It's a shortage created by the dealers and manufacturers, if they actually took a lesser cut of the rates they charged and paid the mechanics what they are worth more of them would stay in the field.

 

[Donald Stanfield]

I like how Farley blames productivity. The vehicles are more complex, the work space under the hood is smaller, and techs are constantly nickel-and-dimed out of a decent wage. I was talking with the Rivian tech when he was out to do my recall work and he was from another dealer previously.

He spoke about how many people in the auto repair industry are leaving for other jobs because of flat-rate pay for warranty work. Manufacturers build vehicles with known flaws and monitor the time the repair takes. They are known to trim all the fat off the repair, and the hours are usually only enough to perform the job under ideal conditions. I'm not sure how many of you have worked on cars before, but anything mechanical rarely works the way it should ideally. Bolts rust, clips break and twist off, and wire connectors get stretched.

So we've cheapened up the cars to maximize profit, making them harder to repair. At the same time, we've reduced techs' pay to where they need to put in 12 to make 8 hours pay when a repair goes bad. Gee, I wonder why there's a shortage.

That tech said Rivian treats him well and that his pay is fair for what he does.

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