Transcription
I bought my dream BMW about a month and a half ago, and I only had it for a week before it broke down, and it's been in the shop ever since.
You could go to jail for working on your own car. Sounds dramatic, but that's exactly what the manufacturers were pushing on that last little field trip to DC.
I just put my two weeks' notice in. I've been a Ford transmission tech for 12 years now. This industry has changed a lot in the last 10 years.
I took my Bronco in for an oil change and a tire rotation. As soon as I made the left turn, my right front wheel fell off of my car. I'm inserting photos here.
There is a war going on between car manufacturers and owners. They do not want us fixing our own vehicles, going so far as to try to make it illegal.
I got quoted $500 to fix my stupid sun visor. You know why they said it was $500? Let me tell you. Uh, because of parts. I found a replacement on Amazon for 50 bucks. About to watch probably like two TikToks, maybe a YouTube video. I'm going to replace this. Oh my god. Who did that? Me.
This is exactly what car manufacturers are fighting to prevent: a car owner with no car knowledge watching a YouTube video figuring out how to fix their own car, saving over $500 to replace a sun visor. It was recently revealed that Ford, General Motors, and Roger Pinsky met with President Trump to discuss the right to repair. All the CEOs declined to say what the meeting was about, but the president made it clear, claiming the automakers, "They don't want people to fix their car. They want a bill that prohibits people from fixing their car." After Trump's comment, a reporter caught up with Ford CEO Jim Farley to get his thoughts.
"But you don't want people repairing their own vehicles?"
"No, that's that's fine. Not for warranty work, though. These are very complicated cars, and we don't think that's uh safe uh for many of the repairs on our vehicles. Uh, someone at home like myself could never do it. I mean, I I I have no problem working on a '73 Bronco, but to work on a brand new Bronco, I need all sorts of specialty tools. That's something that um, you know, we would put people's lives at risk."
The two things he really focuses on are the safety of the vehicles and the complexity, claiming these vehicles now require special tools and that Ford would be putting people's lives at risk by allowing owners to fix their own vehicles. About those special tools, here's a comment from a retired GM technician: "They created proprietary scan tools, special tools that only they can buy and vehicles that are difficult even for dealership-trained technicians to work on so that you have to go to the dealership. That's the whole point. Cars now require special tools because the manufacturers have built them to require special tools." And this comment echoes what other technicians are saying online.
"Look, man, if you guys are considering being a mechanic, don't. This is one of the most intense and like the amount of tools required, the amount of investment required, the amount of training required, it beats up on your body. You're 30, feeling like 70, your hands are all beat up every day. It's a thankless job. You're underappreciated, severely underpaid. Just the knowledge and training that you have to go through to get to any sort of proficient level. Cars are getting more and more complex by the day. They're no longer just, you know, four wheels and an engine. It's 42 computers on board. And you're more of a software engineer than you are a mechanic. Cars today require way more knowledge of software and hardware. Things that previous generations didn't need to know. But it's not just the software, it's how they're physically putting these cars together. Almost as if they don't want them fixed."
I had to take a 20-minute break. Bro, look at this. I don't even know what the [ __ ] I'm doing, bro. I got to replace a fuel pump. I only got 5 hours. I got to take out the seat. I got to rew technicians anymore. And they're tired of this [ __ ]. You got to do all this. You got to take all this out. Got to take all that out just so you can change the [ __ ] one little bolt right there on the bottom. You got to do all that just so you can change one bolt right there. [ __ ] this thing. That car.
So, this is why nobody wants to be a technician anymore. Had to fully remove the front bumper. Fully remove the lower shutter grill. Remove the upper cowl. About 18 clips. About 16 screws. Had to loosen the right side of the intercooler here. Dislodge the outlet just to add washer fluid. Sh technicians from BMW and Honda complaining about these same vehicles. If it's hard for trained technicians, how are independent mechanics or owners supposed to fix these vehicles? And it's not just how they put it together. It's these components themselves. They should be easy to swap out, but they're making sure you can't do that.
"They are literally building these cars so that you throw them away when they break. Literally, just throw them away when they break. Don't replace it. Don't fix it. Just throw it away."
So, I'm installing a camera system and I messed up. Somehow I got locked. So, basically the door was shut. I pulled on it really hard. Door opens, but as you can tell, I broke this. Just a little plastic piece. I broke it. No biggie. No biggie. I'll look online. Can't find it. I understand it's a newer car. It's this is '23. Let's call the dealer. So, the guy on the phone was like, he spent like 10 minutes. He actually had to call me back. Calls me back and says, "Actually, we can't just get the door handle." I'm like, "What do you mean you can't just get the door handle? You have to order the entire door panel. Even said it comes with a new window switch." And then I realized, cuz I took the dang thing back off. He's not kidding. They've molded the plastic around it. You cannot get this off. You cannot get that out. I get like this. This should never break, right? But how many times have you replaced a window switch in a car? It gets wet with water. What are you going to tell me? I need a whole new door panel. It's only a cool $525. Just like how Apple has soldered all of the components together so that if you try to repair the iPhone, you break all the parts inside. That's what car manufacturers are now doing. You can't just buy the door handle. You have to buy the entire door panel.
Going to the commons. Just like televisions, washing machines, vacuum cleaners, there used to be repairmen, and businesses that used to exist for things. There's a reason they want legislation requiring us to take our vehicles to the dealership. The dealership is going to price gouge us on the parts and the labor. They charge a high door rate. That's the hourly rate for service done by a technician. But that money doesn't even go to the technician.
"Mechanics are not paid what the door rate is. We absolutely aren't. And if anything, the higher the door rate goes, our wages stay the same. So the door rate's been going up and up and up, and our pay has been staying the same for almost 40 years. This is the reason I quit my last job. The door rate went up and they took money away from us. It's incredible, and you'll see in a lot of videos why mechanics are quitting. It's the same old story, and it's a powerful story: corporations, huge conglomerates, they're nickel and diming mechanics when we're the money makers. When I first got in, my teacher said it was supposed to be 33% of the door rate. We're not even at 20% anymore."
The dealerships are charging a crazy hourly rate, and the technicians see a fraction of that. Looking at the comments, "The Toyota dealership I worked at before I left to work for the city was paying me less than 10% of the door rate. The door rate was $200 an hour, and I was making $20. My Firestone charges $175 per hour, but I only get paid $24 an hour." And it's not just the labor that they're marking up. Ford has spent years patenting parts like hoods and headlamps, using these patents to block or at least severely limit third-party manufacturers from making spare parts at a cheaper price. This forces owners to buy the part from Ford, who marks it up anywhere between 200 and 800%, depending on the part. And the other way they're squeezing people is by simply discontinuing the part or the entire vehicle, hoping you'll just buy a new car. Last year, Ford announced they were discontinuing the Ford Escape, leaving the Ford Bronco to absorb demand for a compact SUV. So, where did Ford Escape owners now get their spare parts from? Well, they could go to a self-service junkyard, one like LKQ, the largest auto recycling operation in the US, buying more than 600,000 cars to sell for parts every year. But there's now a huge problem with this. LKQ just sold that part of its business to Pacific Avenue Capital Partners, a private equity firm. And it makes sense. Auto manufacturers are selling new vehicles for astronomical prices. In fact, the average just hit a new record at almost $52,000 for a new car. Naturally, people want older, more reliable vehicles, and private equity saw the opportunity to price gouge us on the spare parts for said vehicles.
So, that's everything for the complexity claim. But Farley made a second argument. He said Ford would be putting people's lives at risk by allowing owners to fix their own vehicles.
"A couple weeks ago, my Bronco Sport 2022 Big Bend burst into flames as I was backing into my driveway. I shifted my car into reverse, tried to back up, saw the smoke in my car, got out, and then this is what it looked like within a minute of me exiting the car. Ford has an active recall on Bronco Sports from 2021 to 2024. This active recall was for a possibility of having a cracked fuel injector. Ford has not issued instructions to stop driving your vehicle under this safety recall. Ford Motor Company rather makes sales than care about the safety of their customers, as you can tell, because if they cared, they wouldn't have these trucks on the road still without having a permanent solution to this. I called Ford to file a claim about this to like let them know that this happened. And they called me back the next day saying that it wasn't their problem."
That cracked fuel injector looks pretty life-threatening to me. Someone commented, "Ford famously decided it was cheaper to deal with a wrongful death than repair the Ford Pintos on the road." And if you don't know, this is true. In 1971, Ford launched the Pinto and then realized the gas tanks were leaking. But rather than spend just $11 per vehicle to fix, instead, they calculated there would be 180 burn deaths that would cost about $200,000 each in court. By simply ignoring the problem, letting the vehicles kill people, Ford saved nearly $70 million. So, it makes you wonder if Ford was running these cost analyses in 1971, are they doing that today with their active recalls? Because in 2025, Ford had 153 active recalls. And about those recalls, Ford replaced hundreds of engineers with AI. They introduced 900 AI-powered cameras to detect quality issues at the source. They also fed AI their design requirements, hoping it would produce a high-quality product. They're now rehiring some of those humans because, surprise, AI is not good at quality control or coming up with new ideas. And it's worth noting with the Bronco we saw on fire, Ford's initial response was to push a software update. That's how reliant these modern vehicles are on software. One bad line of code can set the entire vehicle on fire. So, how are technicians trained on physical engine parts supposed to fix a fuel injector controlled by software? They can't. So, it's no wonder they're quitting.
"This car has a nail in its driver side rear tire. But you look on the dash, driver assistance warnings, parking brake warnings, stabilization faults. This thing has 30 hard faults set in this car because of the tire pressure sensor. Now, you'd think you'd be able to pull this car in, take the nail out, put a plug in, and send it on its way. No, you have to do that and scan the car, erase all the faults, do a drive to re-adapt, all for a half hour. All for a half hour. Have you wondered why there's a shortage of technicians right now? Let me show you. Because of [ __ ] like this where in order to remove a rear differential, you're not going to have the clearance to pull the axles out. So, you have to remove the entire rear suspension just to pull the axle out. In most older cars, you're going to have plenty of clearance to slide these axles out of the differential. But with all modern, newer cars, everything's electric. It adds size to the components. Now I got to remove the entire rear suspension just to do this rear differential. And on top of that, it's warranty. So I'm only getting paid 3 hours to do it because the manufacturer thinks that we're superhuman or robots, for I I don't know. Either way, it's ridiculous."
Cars today are a complex mess of software and sensors, and even the engineers building them don't always know what they are doing. Trust me, I've worked with these vehicles. But then there's the warranty pay side to this, mentioned in both clips. The manufacturers only want to pay for the number of hours that they think the repair should take.
"We have a Ford Escape, right? And the Ford Escape, the water pump goes bad in the Ford Escape. Okay, Ford made the car. Ford made it. They're the ones who produce the vehicle with the failure. Okay, and here's what happens is let's say that water pump pays 2 hours to replace. Ford expects all their technicians to replace that water pump for an hour or less. But the only one that takes the hit in this whole equation is the technician. The salesperson, they get their same rate. The parts people get their same rate. The guy that on the line that produces the car gets his hourly rate. The technician is supposed to to suck that up and get that water pump done in half the time for half the pay."
So, if the technician needs 6 hours to properly fix something, but the warranty claims it should take 3 hours, well, they're not paid for those additional 3 hours. And as we've seen, they're making it hard to fix. Despite Ford sounding the alarm over the technician shortage, making it seem like no one wants to work, this is why technicians are quitting.
But going back to the meeting between Ford, General Motors, Pinsky, and Trump, did anything come from that?
"And if you bring the bill, and I'm going to let uh Lee explain exactly what it means, but it means a lot to people that own vehicles. It's going to save them a lot of money, and they're going to be able to do it themselves."
"Please."
"Mr. President, this is a presidential memo to the Environmental Protection Agency. A presidential memo supporting the freedom to fix. Americans have the freedom to fix their vehicle. President Trump insists upon it."
The choice of words in this meeting makes it sound like they support the right to repair until you actually read what this memo entails. The memorandum directs the administrator of the Environmental Protection Agency to issue guidance clarifying what actions individuals may take to fix their own vehicles' emission systems, consistent with the Clean Air Act. The EPA should also expedite alternative certification pathways for aftermarket parts, again, in compliance with the Clean Air Act. To be very clear, this only covers the vehicle's emission systems, things like catalytic converters and oxygen sensors, things that the car manufacturer has to ensure is in compliance. They say freedom to fix their own vehicles, but this doesn't include brakes or the transmission system or say a cracked fuel injector, things that are required to actually keep the vehicle in motion. It's almost as if they don't want people to fix their cars. Just buy a whole new one, trade it in like an iPhone, and roll that negative equity into a new car loan, which seems to be exactly what more and more people are doing. So, if you have an older vehicle, hold on to it because at this rate, 20-year-old vehicles are going to be worth more than the overpriced plastic they're producing today.
"Hey, I just bought a brand new Mercedes EQE, and I can't figure out how to get under the hood. I looked everywhere, but I can't find a latch anywhere. Am I missing something?"
"You're not missing anything. The hood on those cars just doesn't open. The hood doesn't open?"
"Well, technically it does open, but just not for you. You need a Mercedes-specific computer at a dealership to get the thing open."
"But I own the car."
"You own the car. You don't own access to what's in it anymore."
"Why even add a hood that can be opened if I can't open it?"
"It's for the technician working on the car. You take it to a Mercedes dealer. They plug in their fancy computer and then they run diagnostics and turn off the safety systems and allows the trunk to open."
"So every time I need to look under the hood, I have to go to a Mercedes dealership now?"
"Every time."
"Yes."
"That's insane. I paid $100,000 for this car."