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Chapter 6: Manufacturer-Dealership Relationship If you work as a technician for an auto dealer, the time you spend making repairs bears little or no relationship to the time for which you are paid. Sometimes you can spend forty hours at the shop, but if you didn’t flag enough time, you are paid for only twenty. Other times you can spend forty hours but get paid for as much as a hundred. There’s nothing wrong with incentives unless the reward is achieved by shoddy work. The dealership effectively makes a portion of what the technician flags, so it, too, is interested in having the technician flag as many hours per day as possible. There is little motivation to be honest, and quite a bit of motivation to rip off the consumers. The Flat-Rate Pay System and Part-Swapping Part-Swapping: A vehicle repair technique employed by inexperienced or incompetent technicians. Because they do not understand the problem, they try replacing various parts until the problem goes away, or until they stop trying to fix it. The auto repair industry has changed over the years as more complex automobiles have created a new kind of technician. Some of these changes have created smarter, better-trained technicians. However, they have also made the part-swapping approach to problem solving much more widespread. Part-swapping can sometimes be a legitimate trouble-shooting technique. But what about when the problem is intermittent? What about the cost of all those good parts that needn’t have been replaced? The flat-rate pay system only encourages part-swapping. Poor or inexperienced technicians are not paid for the time it would take them to diagnose and repair a problem properly. One way they can make sure that they don’t spend more time than they can flag is to throw a part at the problem, bill for it, and hope the problem goes away.

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