I didn't mean to imply that the factory was just easy money, I know those days are over. But from my time at a dealer, they were way more willing to try throwing a part at a problem than a customer ever was. Warranty seemed happier to "try" something and send the car on it's way than I as a tech ever have been.

Customers want to bring the car in and go home with it fixed, which is an entirely reasonable expectation. I hated, as a service advisor, having to tell a customer that they should mark their survey that we had fixed the vehicle in one visit when we diagnosed it one day, ordered a part, and had them come back at a later date for the actual repair. True, the actual repair was done in one visit, but no one with any bit of sense would count it that way. Correct diagnoses is part of the process, and if that's done on one day, and the repair on another, that's not one visit. I suppose we could have just held the vehicle for a week while we waited on the part, but for a window switch, that seems rediculous. Even if it does make the survey come out in your favor...

I felt that at the dealer, vehicles exhibiting syptoms of a known pattern failure were often just assumed to have that actual problem, the standard parts were installed, and it was sent on it's way. As an example:

While it is true that many a misfire is caused by a faulty plug wire, not all of them are, and when you replace wires and send the car out, without checking every aspect of it, you leave yourself wide open for the comeback when it turns out to have a bad injector. Sure, better than 9 out of 10 are wires, but for that tenth one... man, can you blame the customer for feeling like you messed up?

Warranty was happy to go the first route, and worry about it later if the problem persisted, paying customers, not so much... And a creative warranty clerk at the dealership could make sure that the dealer got paid for every visit. That doesn't work when it's one on one with the customer.

Don't get me wrong, I think the problem lies mainly with the factory and their warranty standards. They don't want to pay for the time to correctly diagnose, so the techs don't want to do it. I can't blame them. Very few people I know want to work for free. Even less whose work consists of cuts, scrapes, burns, and bruises (sore backs and necks aside...). The real problem lies in the fact that this approach leaves very few techs who have the desire to correctly diagnose vehicles, and fewer still it seems who have the skills. It's hard to justify a day spent looking over wiring diagrams to trace out one circut, for an hour's pay, when the guy in the next stall has booked 15 hours just swapping out the parts the factory tells him to. Then when the vehicle comes in where "the normal thing" isn't the problem, there isn't anyone around who knows what to do. Somehow, that factory who was so full of advise before, dissappears right quick. It does fantastic things for a dealer's image, that's for sure.

Perhaps the biggest problem? I don't know how to fix the current situation. Dealers and factories don't want to pay to train expert techs, when 9 out of 10 times it's not needed. Customers don't want to pay for the time it does take to diagnose a problem. Employers don't want to pay for skilled techs, until that problem car rolls through the door, usually for the second or third time. Without pay, how does one keep skilled techs working?

Myself, I'm a sucker for good old fashioned work. I love the challenge of diagnosing problems, and I love that at the end of the day, I can say "Look what I did". I could easily make more money delivering boxes, or working packing boxes at a number of local plants. But I couldn't live with myself knowing all I did was fill a box with potato chips, and tomorrow, I'd fill more boxes. Besides, I'll be spending next week upgrading the brakes, swapping the differential, and adding over 100 horses to a M3... That's much better than any plant job I can imagine...

MV