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A Master Technician, a microphone, 30 years of experience in the Automotive Industry: buckle up! Come along as we take a look at the current state of the automotive industry from the point of view of the guys and gals turning the wrenches. So no matter what you fix, how you fix it, or how many tools you have to fix it with: welcome to the Grease the Wheels Nation. Also once in a while we take a look at the makes and models of cars we work on through the lenses of history, economics, politics, our own personal experiences and the experiences of our listeners. Special thanks to The Wrenching Network, Curien, Surfwrench, and Murray the dog.
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Send a text On this week’s episode of Grease The Wheels, Uncle jimmy starts in on a series that is addressing the technician shortage. Throughout the history of media that has included cars, mechanics (and their modern iteration of technicians) have been unduly vilified as grifters, cheats, and scumbags. While there are some bad actors in the field, the same can be said for literally other occupation on earth (most notably, the ones that actually deal with the customers and complete the trans...
Send a text On this week’s episode of Grease the Wheels, Uncle Jimmy takes a common problem and solves it in the most insane way that he possibly can! We have all seen manuals, repair instructions, and bulletins that seem to be written by someone who has never turned a wrench in anger, but sometimes they are egregious enough to actually be a problem. Such as the one that attempted to have Uncle Jimmy start messing around with battery connections on a live battery - pro tip; don’t do this! So ...
Send a text On this week’s episode of Grease the Wheels, Uncle Jimmy outlines the service advisor boot camp that will break your service advisors of all of their bad habits, and build them back up with all of the right ones. All it will take is sheer psychological torture for a few days, weeks, or months! The real idea here though is to make Service Advisors do the job the way that everyone wants them to do it. From actually walking around the customers car and possibly pre-selling the repair...
Send a text On this week’s episode of Grease the Wheels, we delve into the world of statistics, and come up with some genuinely novel applications of baseball numbers and terminology to help your shop run better. RBI for service advisors, Errors also mostly for service advisors, and techs having to bat 1.000. There area already hundreds of datapoint for shops to utilize to make better decisions, but more often than not we find that the data is being underutilized, and no one really knows what...
Send a text On this week’s episode of Grease the Wheels, we go over some of the highlights and lowlights of automotive management. One of the main things that we have noticed is that in the rise of the corporate owned, multi-location dealership group era, there are a lot less nepo-hires in management. It still happens, especially at smaller family owned dealerships, but on a whole the quality of management in the automotive space has actually gotten significantly better in the last 20+ years!...
Send a text On this weeks episode of Grease the Wheels, we answer a question that absolutely no one asked: what if the safety systems in your car could be funny? To do this, we use the framework of our personal favorite retired New York State Trooper, Jimmy’s brother Bob! This is a natural fit because Bob did the nitty gritty work of crash scene reconstructions and even taught it at the Trooper Academy for years. Needless to say he knows pretty much all of the ways that things can go wrong on...
Send a text On this week’s episode of Grease the Wheels, we close out our anthology on the Video MultiPoint Inspection, DVI, vMPI, etc -- with the most important part of the equation: the customers. Taking a step back, part of the reason why our customers are so unreasonable at times when it comes to our recommendations when it comes to facing or maintaining their cars is the immense amount of anxiety that they have about it. It is a known fact that the less you understand about a situation, ...
Send a text On this weeks episode of Grease the Wheels, Uncle Jimmy loosely defines the roles of the management staff when it comes to doing Video MultiPoint Inspections. The main part of the management role in video MPI adoption is to properly incentivize their technicians on doing them, setting them up for success, and getting the right training into the shop to make it effective - insert shameless plug here- However, often times the management of a shop is a direct hindrance to gett...
Send a text On this week’s episode of Grease the Wheels, Uncle Jimmy follows up part one about Video being a tool for mechanics with part 2 about Service Advisors. When a Service Advisor has technicians doing the video, or in some rare instances is doing the video themselves, they have an undeniable advantage over a fixed ops department where there are no video MPI’s performed. This is why it is infuriating when service advisors fail to leverage the high definition evidence of work or mainten...
Send a text On this episode of Grease the Wheels, Uncle Jimmy goes over some of the finer points of the Video Multi-Point Inspection; more specifically all of the very valid reasons that technicians do not want to do them! From being camera shy to not being the “loquacious type” and tons of background noise and poor lighting, there are a myriad of reasons for technicians to want to shirk this responsibility overall. We haven’t even mentioned that the vast majority of shops are not paying tech...
Send a text On this weeks episode of Grease the Wheels, Uncle Jimmy makes a comprehensive wish list of things that we would like to see in the automotive industry. This list doesn’t leave anyone out either, with special focus on customers to start it off, and special callouts for management and ownership that does it right. We also get into the wishlists for our fellow technicians, and our wishes for parts people. The most pivotal wish that Uncle Jimmy has this year is for service advisors to...
Send a text On this episode of Grease the Wheels, Uncle Jimmy goes over some very interesting survey results from inside the automotive industry from WrenchWay. They asked a lot of the right questions when it comes to things like job satisfaction, training opportunities, and how well their facilities are kept — but there are a handful of things that we feel like might be actually 100% in agreement across the board. There were points of major agreement, and a few that surprised us! Also ...
Send a text On this weeks episode of Grease the Wheels, Uncle Jimmy goes over an oldie-but-a-goodie with his 10 thesis on automotive diagnosis. With modern automobiles becoming more and more complex, checking batteries (especially when there are tons of weird or seemingly unrelated problems) is always a good Bet. Things like Visual Inspections and Scanning the vehicle for faults seem to be a given, but can be complicated when an advisor is diagnosing from the chair. Any time that you have acc...
Send a text On this episode of Grease the Wheels, Uncle Jimmy outlines all of the ways that flat rate technicians lose time and money to the inefficiencies of the dealership system itself. Support staff and Service Advisors are key culprits, between not separating items on repair orders, repair orders that are poorly written or feature hand written add-ons, and not going over cars to check and see what else is wrong with them such as check engine lights. This problem is massively amplified wi...
Send a text On this weeks episode of Grease the Wheels, Uncle Jimmy talks about the nature of customers. No one likes having to pay for their car to be fixed, except some of weirdo’s who can tell when we are running the right gas or not. No, most customers will actively chafe when we recommend repairs to their vehicle, no matter how badly they are needed! This becomes compounded when you do a video explaining what is wrong with their vehicle and the service advisor fails to mention a single r...
Send a text On this weeks episode of Grease the wheels, Uncle Jimmy dreams of electric sheep - er, service advisors! Ai is filtering it’s way into dealerships more and more. Some of the immediate casualties of this are going to be in sales, as a well put together data set and website are coming straight for the heads of your underperforming sales people. Getting it into the service department will also completely cull the industry of underperforming service advisors, because an AI will never ...
Send a text On this episode of Grease the Wheels, we talk about some of the pull factors that are in fact causing the tech shortage. This is a significant problem in the industry, and thankfully some seriously high up people are actually talking about it. To illustrate this, we talk about the massive tug of war that happens regarding the money in the industry, and how to fix this massive problem that is causing people to leave the industry or more likely avoid it all together. The shop and de...
Send a text On this week’s episode of Grease the Wheels, Uncle Jimmy takes to task a newsfeed article that stumbled across his unnamed homepage (it was probably AOL) regarding the common warning lights in cars and what they mean — according to someone who has never worked on a car. These ones are always fun, from the teapot of doom and the drunk robot, to more obscure and abstract examples — people really have no idea how their cars work and when the car tries to tell them something this is c...
Send a text On this week’s episode of Grease the Wheels, Uncle Jimmy watches the interview with Jim Farley, who unsurprisingly completely misses the point of why there is a technician shortage. He does mention that there is one, so that actually gives him a ton of credit in our book. To hammer the point home, Jimmy winds back the clock to the mid-50’s to the time of duck and cover drills, unprecedented economic prosperity, and Edsel’s. In this era, the average earnings of a mechanic was signi...
Send a text On this week’s episode of Grease the Wheels, we look through the archives at some of the hits and misses of the previous 325 episodes of the podcast. We have undoubtedly had some ridiculous fun so far, including pondering children’s programming aiming to get more kids into the trades with incredible titles such as Mr. Rogers Dyno Room and Sesame Street Outlaws. We also get into some of the early episodes where we talk shop dynamics, how not to get on your coworkers nerves, and how...
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love ur podcast Jimmy
They tow the Rangers to the dealer and then we drive them in and replace the igniter without disconnecting the battery as per manufacturer instructions. Saves them .3 per recall if we don't have to properly safe out SRS before performing maintenance.