Human Shock Absorbers
- abautomotiveca
- 1 day ago
- 16 min read
The Comfortable Explanation
Most people believe they understand how automotive service works.
They assume labor rates rise because mechanics want more money.
They assume technician wages remain low because shop owners or dealers are greedy.
They assume delays, burnout, and declining service quality are caused by a “shortage of technicians.”
These explanations feel intuitive.
They assign responsibility to visible actors.
They fit neatly into familiar moral categories: workers demanding more, businesses withholding pay, young people unwilling to enter the trade.
Most importantly, they feel sufficient.
And that is precisely the problem.
The popular narrative treats automotive service as a simple labor market: raise prices, wages should follow;
if wages do not rise, someone must be extracting excess value.
This logic works reasonably well in industries where labor is the primary variable and output can be scaled smoothly.
It works far less well in systems constrained by physical processes, human behavior, and unpredictable demand.
Automotive service belongs firmly in the second category.
Yet public discussion rarely reflects this.
Instead, it collapses structural behavior into personal motives.
Complex system dynamics are reduced to questions of fairness, ethics, or individual failure.
The result is a debate that goes in circles.
Labor rates rise.
Customers complain.
Technicians feel underpaid.
Businesses feel squeezed.
Everyone agrees something is wrong, but no one can agree on why.
What makes the situation especially misleading is that none of these surface explanations are entirely false.
Technicians do want higher pay.
Some owners do prioritize margins.
There are fewer skilled technicians entering the field than before.
But these observations describe symptoms, not causes.
They are the visible effects of a deeper structural arrangement — one that remains largely unexamined because it does not fit neatly into moral categories.
To understand why automotive service behaves the way it does, it is necessary to abandon the idea that this is primarily a dispute over wages or prices.
It is not.
It is a question of how a system absorbs instability.
Until that question is addressed directly, every discussion about labor rates, compensation, and shortages will remain incomplete — and ultimately ineffective.
Not a Normal Production System
Most people intuitively model automotive service as a type of production.
A shop takes in vehicles.
Work is performed.
Output leaves the building.
From the outside, this looks similar to manufacturing, mining, or any other industrial process where inputs are transformed into outputs through labor and equipment.
But this resemblance is superficial.
Automotive service is not a factory.
It is not a mine.
It is not even fleet maintenance shop.
And treating it as such leads directly to false conclusions about efficiency, pricing, and labor.
In manufacturing, production can be leveled.
Demand forecasts may be imperfect, but output can be smoothed through inventory, scheduling, and controlled throughput. Machines can be idled intentionally. Workers can be reassigned. Materials can be stockpiled.
In mining, extraction follows geological constraints rather than customer preference. Output may fluctuate, but the process itself is continuous and enforceable.
In fleet service, vehicle usage is tracked. Mileage is known. Maintenance intervals are calculated. Service schedules are imposed regardless of driver preference or short-term financial inconvenience.
If a fleet vehicle is due for service, it goes to the shop.
Not because the driver wants it to.
But because the system requires it.
The needs of the machine are primary.
Human preference is secondary.
Retail automotive service cannot operate under these rules.
Here, the flow of work is dictated almost entirely by individual customers.
Customers decide when to come in.
Whether to approve diagnostics.
Whether to proceed with repairs.
Whether to wait, delay, or walk away entirely.
Their decisions are shaped by:
personal finances
time constraints
risk tolerance
emotional attachment to the vehicle
competing priorities unrelated to mechanical reality
None of these factors are predictable in aggregate, and none can be enforced away.
This is often summarized with the phrase “customer is king,” but that phrase understates the constraint.
In automotive service, customer willingness and ability to pay are not merely important.They are sovereign.
This creates a fundamental contradiction.
The service exists to maintain machines — systems governed by physics, wear, and engineering limits.
But it must operate according to human decisions — systems governed by emotion, circumstance, and preference.
The technical needs of the vehicle and the personal constraints of the owner are rarely aligned.
A vehicle may require immediate attention, while its owner prefers to wait.
A repair may be unavoidable, while the budget is not.
A failure may be predictable, while approval to do the work to prevent it is not.
This mismatch is not an operational flaw.
It is the defining condition of the industry.
Because of this, automotive service cannot organize itself around steady production.
It cannot enforce schedules.
It cannot level demand.
It cannot guarantee utilization.
Any attempt to treat it like a normal production system — by optimizing for constant throughput or near-perfect labor utilization — ignores the reality that demand arrives irregularly and unpredictably.
The system does not control when work appears.
It reacts to it.
Understanding this distinction is critical.
Without it, every discussion about efficiency, labor rates, and wages begins from a false premise — that automotive service could behave like a factory if only it were managed better.
It cannot.
The system is uneven by design, not by mistake.
Permanent Demand Oscillation
Once automotive service is understood as a customer-driven system rather than a production line, one consequence becomes unavoidable: instability is not a failure state. It is the normal operating condition.
Demand in automotive service does not fluctuate around a predictable mean.
It oscillates.
These oscillations take many forms.
They are seasonal: winter breakdowns, summer travel, spring maintenance, fall inspections.
They are weather-driven: cold starts, heat stress, flooding, corrosion.
They are economic: pay cycles, layoffs, fuel prices, inflation.
They are psychological: hesitation, second opinions, deferred decisions.
They are logistical: parts backorders, shipping delays, warranty approvals.
None of these forces originate inside the shop.
They arrive from outside, irregularly and without coordination.
Crucially, these fluctuations are not noise that can be averaged away.
They stack.
A customer delay coincides with a parts delay.
A seasonal spike overlaps with staffing limits.
A price increase increases hesitation, which increases idle time, which increases scheduling pressure.
The system does not experience “high demand” and “low demand” as clean phases.
It experiences continuous variation in both volume and composition of work.
One week brings diagnostics-heavy jobs that occupy bays but generate uncertain outcomes.
Another brings quick services that clear rapidly but do not fill idle gaps evenly.
Another brings major repairs that depend on customer approval cycles extending days or weeks.
From the outside, this appears chaotic.
From the inside, it is simply how the system behaves.
At this point, it becomes important to make a distinction that is often missed.
Uneven demand is not the same as inefficiency.
Inefficiency implies waste that could be removed through better organization.
Oscillation implies variation that cannot be eliminated without changing the nature of the system itself.
Automotive service cannot remove customer hesitation.
It cannot eliminate weather.
It cannot force people to have money when machines need attention.
It cannot align human decision-making with mechanical necessity.
These are not operational problems.
They are boundary conditions.
Systems that operate under permanent oscillation face a specific challenge.
If oscillations are not absorbed somewhere, they propagate through the system.
Schedules break.
Utilization collapses.
Cash flow becomes unstable.
Labor becomes volatile.
Rigid systems fracture under irregular load.
This is not an economic observation.
It is a mechanical one.
A structure designed for steady force fails when exposed to vibration.
A process designed for constant throughput fails when inputs arrive unpredictably.
Automotive service lives in that state permanently.
Once this is understood, the next question becomes unavoidable.
If oscillation cannot be eliminated, and if rigidity leads to failure, then where does the system allow itself to flex?
Every system under irregular load must include a mechanism that absorbs variation.
The only remaining question is what that mechanism is, and who bears its cost.
That is the point where design choices begin to matter.
An Engineering Problem, Not an Economic One
To understand how automotive service responds to permanent oscillation, it helps to temporarily remove economics from the discussion altogether.
Imagine a system exposed to irregular forces.
The forces are not constant.
They arrive unpredictably.
They vary in magnitude and frequency.
They cannot be eliminated at the source.
In engineering, this situation is not unusual.
It is expected.
Road surfaces are uneven.
Loads shift.
Vibrations propagate.
Inputs fluctuate.
The question engineers ask in such situations is not how to make the forces disappear.
It is how to design the system so those forces do not destroy it.
Rigid systems fail under irregular load.
A structure designed to carry steady weight will crack if subjected to vibration.
A mechanism designed for uniform input will bind or run away when inputs vary.
Trying to enforce rigidity in a variable environment does not create efficiency.
It creates stress concentration.
Engineering does not solve this problem by demanding perfect inputs.
It solves it by introducing compliance in controlled places.
This is where damping enters the picture.
When oscillations cannot be prevented, they must be absorbed.
Energy must be dissipated.
Motion must be smoothed.
The component responsible for this does not create output.
It does not control direction.
It does not increase capacity.
Its function is protective.
It allows the rest of the system to remain aligned, rigid, and optimized by taking the abuse itself.
In mechanical systems, this role is assigned deliberately.
Designers identify where oscillations will occur.
They decide which components must remain stiff.
And they choose specific elements to absorb variability.
Those elements are sacrificial by design.
They wear.
They degrade.
And, eventually, they require replacement.
Their consumption is not a flaw.
It is the price of stability elsewhere.
The important point is not the existence of damping.
All complex systems require it.
The important point is where it is placed.
In engineering, damping is assigned to components that are:
cheap to replace
standardized
easy to access
designed explicitly for wear
The system assumes these components will fail and plans accordingly.
Once this logic is understood, the parallel back to automotive service becomes unavoidable.
The system operates under permanent oscillation.
It cannot eliminate variability.
It must absorb it somewhere.
The only remaining question is whether that role is assigned to capital — space, infrastructure, idle capacity — or to people.
That question is not moral.
It is architectural.
And it is at this point that the design of automotive service reveals its most consequential choice.
The Critical Design Choice
Once a system is understood to operate under permanent oscillation, the range of possible responses narrows sharply.
Variability cannot be eliminated.
Demand cannot be leveled.
Inputs cannot be forced into regularity.
At that point, every system faces the same fundamental decision:
where to allow flexibility, and where to enforce rigidity.
In practical terms, there are only two viable options.
The first option is to absorb oscillation with capital.
This means designing excess capacity into the system.
More space than is strictly necessary.
More bays than are continuously occupied.
Infrastructure that is allowed to sit idle during slow periods.
It also means paying for availability rather than just output.
Treating idle time as a system cost rather than a failure.
Accepting that resilience requires slack.
This approach is expensive in visible ways.
Idle bays look wasteful.
Unused equipment appears inefficient.
Fixed costs remain even when demand drops.
But it has a critical property:
it protects people from volatility.
The second option is to absorb oscillation with labor.
In this design, infrastructure is kept tight.
Capacity is optimized for average or peak utilization.
Idle time is minimized on paper.
Variability is pushed downstream.
When demand drops, workers wait.
When approvals stall, workers wait.
When parts are delayed, workers wait.
Income becomes irregular.
Utilization pressure increases.
Responsibility for smoothing variability shifts from the system to the individual.
From a balance-sheet perspective, this approach looks attractive.
Idle capital is avoided.
Costs scale downward when demand slows.
Risk is externalized.
But the flexibility is illusory.
It is not removed — it is transferred.
Automotive service overwhelmingly chose the second option.
Because it minimizes visible inefficiency.
Idle bays are obvious.
Idle people are easier to ignore.
A confirming diagnosis waiting for approval to proceed does not appear as lost capacity.
An unpaid technician waiting for work does not appear as an accounting entry.
The system looks lean.
The instability is hidden.
This design choice reshapes the role of labor.
Technicians are no longer treated as protected capacity.
They become the variable element.
Their "flagged" time flexes.
Their income flexes.
Their workload spikes and collapses.
The system remains rigid so long as they absorb the motion.
At this point, labor is no longer just labor.
It becomes a structural component.
This is where the discussion stops being about management style or compensation philosophy.
Once variability is assigned to people, every downstream outcome follows mechanically.
Income volatility.
Burnout.
Skill loss.
Attrition.
None of these are aberrations.
They are the normal behavior of a system designed this way.
Labor as a Structural Component
Once oscillation is assigned to labor, the role of the technician changes in a fundamental way.
From the outside, technicians still appear to be workers performing tasks. From the inside, their function in the system has shifted.
They are no longer only producing output — they are stabilizing the system.
Consider how variability is actually handled in day-to-day operations.
When work slows, technicians wait.
When approvals stall, technicians wait.
When parts are delayed, technicians wait.
This waiting is not treated as productive time and therefore it is often unpaid or underpaid.
And, crucially, it is framed as inefficiency at the individual level rather than a system condition.
The language used inside the industry makes this clear.
Idle time becomes “poor time management.”
Uneven workload becomes “low productivity.”
Operational mismanagement becomes “technicians not pulling their weight.”
By defining oscillation as a personal failure, the system protects its own design.
If inefficiency is individual, nothing structural needs to change.
This framing collapses the moment technicians leave the environment.
The same people — with the same skills, experience, and work ethic — move into fleet service or industrial equipment maintenance, and something remarkable happens.
They stop being “inefficient.”
Utilization stabilizes.
Downtime is expected and planned.
Availability is compensated.
Output becomes predictable.
No miracle has occurred.
The technicians did not suddenly become better workers. They simply were placed into a system that absorbs variability with capital instead of people.
Fleet service does not depend on customer hesitation.
Industrial maintenance does not wait for discretionary approval.
Scheduled downtime is treated as an operating cost, not a character flaw.
As a result, behaviors previously labeled as inefficiency disappear without correction, discipline, or motivation programs.
The problem was never the technician.
It was a system that assigns oscillation to labor and then blames labor for responding to it.
Inside retail automotive service, however, the expectation remains.
Technicians are still required to compensate later:
by working faster,
by stacking jobs,
by accepting overtime,
by absorbing physical and cognitive load during peak periods.
Infrastructure does not flex. Capacity assumptions do not change. Schedules remain tight.
Because the person absorbs the motion.
At this point, it becomes inaccurate to describe technicians purely as labor.
In system terms, they are performing a damping function.
They absorb idle time.
They absorb income volatility.
They absorb scheduling instability.
They absorb the mismatch between customer behavior and mechanical necessity.
Their presence smooths oscillations the system refuses to accommodate elsewhere.
This is not a metaphor — it is a functional description.
In mechanical systems, components that perform this role are not considered productive capacity.
They are protective elements.
They exist so other components can remain rigid, aligned, and optimized.
They are designed to wear.
Their degradation is expected.
In engineering, such components are standardized, accessible, and replaceable. The system assumes they will fail — and plans accordingly.
This is where a parallel from outside the industry becomes clarifying.
In The Matrix, the machines did not reduce humans to batteries out of malice.
They solved a systems problem.
The machine world required stable sources of power.
Humans were repurposed into a functional component that provided it.
They were no longer participants in the system.
They were no longer seen as beneficiaries or enemies.
They became infrastructure.
What makes that scenario unsettling is not cruelty, but logic. The system did not hate humans. In fact, it depended on them.
Automotive service followed the same structural logic.
It did not turn technicians into batteries — it turned them into shock absorbers.
Their role expanded beyond repair and diagnosis. They became the element that absorbs oscillation so everything else can remain rigid.
Just as human batteries in The Matrix provide stable energy flow, technicians’ labor and pay structure stabilize business processes.
In both cases, the system appears efficient precisely because stress is transferred to humans.
Once people are treated as infrastructure, their exhaustion is no longer interpreted as a design failure.
It is treated as maintenance.
A depleted or worn-out component is replaced.
The system keeps operating.
Nothing personal.
No one feels resentment when discarding a drained battery.
The problem — as the next parts will show — is that skilled humans are not spare parts.
Why Labor Rates Rise While Wages Stagnate
The most visible symptom of instability in automotive service is the labor rate.
It rises steadily. Customers notice. Technicians expect that some portion of that increase should reach them. Yet technician wages remain flat, volatile, or only marginally improved.
At first glance, this appears contradictory.
If labor becomes more expensive, how does that labor remain underpaid?
The contradiction dissolves once the structure of the labor rate is examined.
A shop labor rate is not a technician’s wage.
It is the hourly price placed on the so-called “book labor time” that must be collected to keep the entire system operational.
That rate must cover:
regulatory compliance
insurance and legal liability
facility costs and utilities
administrative staff
diagnostic equipment and software
training requirements
warranty exposure
customer communication overhead
unbillable diagnostic time
parts logistics and approval delays
As vehicles become more complex, these costs rise. The labor rate rises with them.
But at the same time, something else happens.
While labor rates and parts prices increase, book labor times are often reduced. Standardized repair times are compressed. Efficiency expectations are tightened. Margins are increasingly shifted toward the sale of parts.
Technician labor beyond a pre-set book time effectively becomes free.
If a job takes longer than the assigned time — because of corrosion, access difficulty, diagnostic uncertainty, or quality control — that additional effort is rarely compensated proportionally.
It is absorbed.
This is where the mechanism becomes clear.
Technicians are paid primarily for billable pre-estimated hours.
They are not compensated for availability. They are not compensated for idle time between approvals. They are not compensated for the extra effort required to “get the job done right the first time.” They are not paid for that because their unpaid labor is needed to stabilize the system.
The system depends on free elasticity.
As labor rates rise, customer hesitation increases. Approvals slow down. Second opinions become more common. Discretionary repairs are deferred.
Oscillation intensifies.
Under a capital-buffered system, this additional friction would be absorbed by idle infrastructure.
Under a labor-buffered system, it is transmitted directly to technicians.
More waiting.
More unpaid time.
More volatility.
Management cannot simply raise wages to compensate for this, because wages in this system are tied to throughput, not presence. Raising wages without stabilizing throughput increases financial risk. So the system raises prices to survive —but preserves volatility by keeping labor as the absorber.
More money flows through the shop.
But the structural instability remains.
Until oscillation is reassigned away from labor, rising labor rates will not reliably produce rising technician pay. The paradox is not economic. It is architectural.
A Practically Unique Arrangement
The structure described so far is not merely inefficient. It is unusual.
Most industries that operate under volatile demand distribute risk differently. They may exploit labor in various ways, but they rarely combine all of the same burdens at once.
Comparison clarifies this.
In construction, demand fluctuates with interest rates, weather, and project cycles.
Workers may face layoffs during downturns. But when they are present on site, they are paid.
Heavy capital — cranes, excavation equipment, structural tooling — belongs to the employer. Downtime is treated as a cost of doing business, not as a personal defect.
When work slows, workers are released. They are not expected to remain physically present without compensation.
Construction externalizes volatility through employment discontinuity, not unpaid presence.
In healthcare, demand can spike unpredictably. Staff may be overworked. Schedules may be irregular. But presence is compensated. Equipment is institutional. Training infrastructure is system-supported. Burnout may exist, but unpaid standby is not normalized.
Volatility is absorbed through staffing models, overtime budgets, and administrative cost — not through systematic uncompensated waiting.
In gig work, drivers or delivery workers supply their own vehicles. They absorb fuel costs, maintenance, and depreciation. But they are not required to remain present in a facility. They can log off. They are not obligated to wait unpaid between tasks. They are also not expected to maintain high technical qualifications or continuously escalate skill levels.
Gig work transfers capital costs to workers, but it does not combine that with mandatory unpaid presence and escalating certification demands.
Automotive service combines constraints that most industries separate.
Technicians are expected to be physically present. Large portions of that presence are unpaid. They supply their own tools — often at substantial personal cost. They finance ongoing training and certification, either directly, or through uncompensated working time.
But the structural inversion does not stop there.
Higher qualification does not reduce volatility. It increases responsibility. The more knowledgeable a technician becomes, the more diagnostic complexity they are expected to absorb. The more junior staff rely on them for problem-solving. The more informal management functions they perform. The more warranty-bound work they handle — often within extremely compressed “book” labor times.
Their increased competence does not result in proportionally stabilized compensation — instead, it results in higher expectations for unpaid labor. "We are paying you less, because you are too expensive".
Diagnostics often extend beyond billable estimates. Knowledge transfer to colleagues is rarely compensated. Quality control and “getting it right the first time” require additional effort that exceeds preset labor allocations.
In effect, the most skilled technicians are expected to absorb not only oscillation, but complexity. The better they become, the more free elasticity the system extracts from them.
This accumulation of burdens is rare.
It is the convergence of:
unpaid availability
personal capital investment
output-based compensation
escalating qualification demands
and externally dictated demand cycles
Few industries combine all of these simultaneously.
Historically, systems built this way do not retain skilled labor over long periods.
They may appear efficient during growth phases. They may function as long as replacement labor remains available. But once skill development slows and exit accelerates, the system encounters its constraint. It becomes dependent on labor it no longer knows how to retain.
The arrangement is not simply demanding.
It is structurally unstable.
And that instability sets the stage for what is now commonly described as a "shortage of technicians".
The Meaning of the “Technician Shortage”
The industry frequently describes its condition in simple terms.
There is a shortage of technicians. Fewer young people are entering the trade. Training pipelines are insufficient. Schools are not producing enough graduates. We need more people.
This explanation is convenient.
It frames the issue as a supply problem. It implies that demand is healthy. It places responsibility on recruitment, marketing, and education.
But the persistence of the shortage suggests a different diagnosis.
If rising labor rates, increasing vehicle complexity, and steady demand were sufficient incentives, the labor market would eventually respond. Higher prices should attract more workers. Scarcity should command higher compensation. Shortages should correct themselves.
Yet they do not. The "shortage" persists.
What is described as a shortage is, in reality, predictable depletion.
Skilled labor in automotive service is developed slowly and at significant cost. Years of training. Experience accumulated through trial and error. Judgment refined under pressure. Technical intuition built from repeated exposure to failure modes and system interactions.
But once developed, that labor was not stabilized.
It was assigned the role of absorbing volatility.
Technicians absorbed idle time. They absorbed approval delays. They absorbed compressed book labor times. They absorbed diagnostic complexity beyond predefined estimates. They absorbed responsibility without structural insulation from risk.
Over time, they wore out.
Not suddenly. Not dramatically. But steadily. Some moved into fleet service. Some moved into industrial maintenance. Some left technical work entirely.
In many of those environments, the same individuals — previously labeled inefficient or underperforming — functioned predictably and productively.
Their skill did not disappear. It was redeployed into systems that did not treat it as a consumable component.
The shortage, therefore, is not mysterious — it is structural.
When a system treats skilled labor as a damping element — something expected to absorb oscillation indefinitely — it assumes replaceability.
That assumption holds only while a surplus exists. Once that surplus declines, the system encounters its limit.
Skilled humans are not standardized parts.
A worn-out shock absorber can be replaced in a couple of hours. A depleted battery can be replaced in seconds. But it takes years to replace a competent diagnostician or a highly efficient mechanic.
Development cannot be accelerated without loss. Experience cannot be mass-produced. Judgment cannot be ordered from a supplier.
The technicians did not vanish. They were not unwilling to work. They were not incapable of adapting.
They were consumed by a system that relied on their elasticity while failing to protect their stability. What is called a "shortage" is the visible consequence of structural wear.
The system assumed that labor, like a mechanical component, could be replaced when depleted.
That assumption was incorrect.