Do I Really Need a Helper?

Someone recently asked me an interesting question: Is it difficult to repair vehicles without an assistant? After all, sometimes you need someone to hold or pull something, watch from another angle, or press a pedal while you inspect the vehicle. How can you do it all on your own?

In reality, that is not the main difficulty of working alone. In the vast majority of cases, one person can repair a passenger vehicle without much trouble. An inventive mind can almost always find a way. Heavy machinery is a bit more complicated. Sometimes one pair of hands is simply not strong enough to handle heavy components, and certain operations would even be unsafe to perform alone.

Where an assistant is genuinely needed is in administration, communication, logistics, and parts delivery. Fortunately, my wife now handles much of the administrative work. Otherwise, I would be completely buried. There have been days when I spent nearly all my time on the phone or driving around town and barely had an opportunity to touch a vehicle. The busier my shop became, the less time I had to do the actual work and the less money I was able to earn. Isn’t that strange?

Not really.

The unpleasant truth is that the automotive repair business is inherently inefficient. Too much of the work involved is not technical at all.

Less than half of all labour hours in our business are spent on the actual repair and maintenance of vehicles.

The rest goes into phone calls, messages, estimates, locating and delivering parts, discussing options, waiting for decisions, completing paperwork, and explaining to customers what is happening with their vehicles. In other words, more than half of our time is spent doing things that cannot be billed directly.

This is why automotive repair can seem too expensive to the customer while paying too little to the mechanic. I earn a reasonably good living, but I still would not recommend this profession to others. It is difficult money. With a similar amount of effort, you can earn more in another industry.

The main problem with automotive repair is that the final technical decision is made not by the specialist, but by the vehicle owner. The mechanic is responsible for the result but has no authority to make the decision independently.

Every vehicle has a different owner, and every owner has a different level of knowledge, financial ability, priorities, and understanding of what constitutes a reasonable repair. As a result, almost every job becomes not only a technical task but also an individual exercise in communication, logistics, and education.

Automotive service is not simply the repair of vehicles. It is the repair of vehicles complicated by the need to educate each new owner just enough for that person to make a decision. Or, in a rude mechanic’s language, you need to fix the owner before you can fix the car.

The mechanic must explain how the particular system works, what has failed, what may happen if nothing is done, which options are available, and why one option may be preferable to another. Each explanation must also be adapted to the individual customer’s level of technical understanding.

The simplest and most logical approach would be: establish a budget, set guidelines for the expected quality and reliability, and allow us to perform the most rational and highest-priority work within that budget. Most customers, however, first want to know the cost of everything together, each repair separately, and every possible version of the job, including, “How much would it cost if I brought my own parts?”

The problem is that, in most cases, an exact price is simply impossible to provide in advance. At best, we can give a reasonably informed approximation. Most “estimates” you see in this industry are, in essence, just bets—a marketing tactic aimed at luring in a customer with a promise while simultaneously shifting all the risk onto the mechanic. Typically, it is the mechanic who pays for every wrong guess with unpaid labour. This is how the industry works. It is cruel, but it is real.

Even after every option has been calculated, the customer will frequently ask me what I recommend doing anyway. I therefore spend time preparing several possible scenarios, only to make the final recommendation myself without knowing the customer’s actual financial situation.

The question, “What would you do if it were your vehicle?” is not always helpful either. My attitude toward my own vehicles may not be rational from another person’s point of view. If I like a particular vehicle, I may buy original parts and spend money on it simply because I want to keep it in excellent condition. That does not mean the customer shares the same enthusiasm or has the same budget.

I therefore try to recommend the option that appears most “rational” for the customer—or, rather, for the image of that customer that I have in my head. However, rationality means different things to different people. For one person, it means the lowest possible cost today. For another, it means long-term reliability. Someone may prefer to repair the air conditioning even though the engine is already showing signs that it will soon require major work. Completely irrational to me, but hey, the weather is hot: “I WANT my AC working NOW!”

All of this creates endless communication. The same explanations must be repeated again and again, even when the subject has already been covered in an article or video. Sending a link often does not help. The customer wants everything explained personally and specifically in relation to that particular vehicle.

I am comparatively good at this part of the work. I do not particularly enjoy talking at length, and video production is not one of my strengths, but I can explain a technical situation clearly in writing and adapt the explanation to a particular customer. AI has made this easier, especially when translating between Russian and English.

For the record, this article was also written with the help of AI. My written English is not as good as my Russian.

In shops where there is little ability or willingness to communicate effectively, the situation becomes considerably worse. The administrative, legal, and organizational parts of the process become so extensive that even with dealership labour rates of $200–$400 per hour, only a small portion of that money reaches the mechanic. Customers complain that repairs are expensive, while mechanics leave because the pay is low and the working conditions are poor.

The same technicians often move into fleet service or industrial maintenance and suddenly receive reasonable wages, benefits, pensions, and opportunities for advancement.

Fleet service is more efficient not because the equipment is that much easier to repair, but because there are not hundreds of different customers, each making decisions in a different way.

Even if a fleet manager has limited technical knowledge, the mechanic needs to adapt to only one person and one decision-making system while servicing dozens of vehicles or machines. The proportion of technical work relative to administrative work, therefore, becomes much higher, even when some standard paper form must be completed at every step.

The same principle applies to maintaining my own fleet. Yes, I am talking about working on my own cars. The budget is already known, decisions are immediate, approvals are unnecessary, and bureaucracy is almost nonexistent. For the same overall labour cost, a much higher standard of work can therefore be achieved. The time is spent on the machine itself rather than on negotiations, estimates, explanations, and attempts to reassure the owner that the mechanic is not trying to overcharge them.

My own vehicles are maintained in excellent condition. Now that it is becoming increasingly difficult to find new vehicles that I genuinely want to own, I intend to pay even more attention to the older ones. In the past, I could reasonably expect a vehicle to last ten years and then simply replace it. That seemed more rational than spending time and money preserving its condition. That approach is becoming less practical because new vehicles are overly intrusive, not enjoyable to drive, overloaded with unnecessary technology, overcomplicated, and deliberately designed in ways that prevent me from repairing them myself. No, thank you. I do not want to buy THAT! I would much rather spend the money keeping the old machines on the road.

For a customer’s vehicle to receive the same level of care, the owner must either participate directly or place a reasonable degree of trust in the specialist. Repeated demands for an exact price before an unknown repair has been investigated do not make the work cheaper. They simply increase the amount of unbillable time, which must ultimately be included in the overall cost of doing business.

I am not trying to extract as much money as possible from customers. I charge a reasonable amount for taking responsibility for someone else’s vehicle. When automotive service seems unaffordable, the problem is not necessarily greed on the part of the shop. The owner may be underestimating the true cost of maintaining that vehicle, or the vehicle may simply no longer fit the owner’s budget. Do not blame me for that. I definitely was not the one who made car ownership unaffordable.