I read the first few posts of this thread a few days ago. It took a boring Sunday morning to read the rest.

I doubt I can do much to add to Peter's reply, as it contains as much truth as any of the posts.

Many have touched on the reasons for the situation as it exists and many have stated that it isn''t exactly as it appears. I believe the problem is basic economics. The most basic problem is the way technitians are paid. The first problim is that there is great disparity in the qualifications necessary at different levels of repair. The guy doing water pumps just doesn't need the brains, training or tooling that a drivability diagnostician needs. The mechanism for pay in most shops leaves the water pump tech being paid more than the genious. Most shops pay by piece work "flatrate" (or flatrape as it is refered to in the industry). A tech doing a 3 hour waterpump in a hour and a half gets duble pay while the diagnostician on a hard case may spend half a day for an hour or less. Good shops realize that they need the genious so they keep them making atleast as much as the laborer. They do that a couple ways. One of them is to keep a ceratin portion of their work the easy well paid stuff. This reduces the shop's overall capability to do the tuff stuff and places a certain amount of it in the hands of the laborer.

If the industry paid the diagnostician a relative pay versus the laboroer, cars would cease to be professioanlly repaired. You think costs are high now. Would you wish diagnostics to do be done like medicine. Personally I'll wager the good techs already do a better job than medicine in instances atleast as taxing. Would you wish all the CYA that is passed to insurance companies to be included in car repair.

Would you pay for no results? I've got a Volvo at the shop sent to me by another shop. It has an intermittant problem. The other shop has tickets for over 1200 dollars of parts changing and I have over 6 hours of designing tests, installing equipment, and driving the car waiting for the event. I must just be stupid at this point as it isn't solved yet. Is anything I've done worth paying for? Do I keep trying? Who is going to pay me? If I never find anything and the problem still exists do I work for free..... ever see a doctor do that? Our prices are set by expectation! Do I set up a research team and fix the car, maybe a 5-10,000 dollar exercise if it were a government project (actually maybe I should say 50-100,000).

BTW, I threw in a few mis spelled words and grammatical errors for those of you who do your best work shuffling paper. They also camouflage the real errors, after all those of us who do honestly get things done have better things to do than spell check.

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Steve Brotherton
Continental Imports
Gainesville FL
Bosch Master, ASE Master, L1
33 years MB technician