They Really Are Out To Get You- How The Automakers Have Made Life Miserable For The Average Mechanic

The one I hate, is the elimination of the transmission dip stick. Insane greed.

Another thing they did around here was "cash for clunkers." What that did was eliminate almost all the easy to work on cars, leaving only specific desirable cars to survive the crusher.

My sons girlfriend was an engineer for one of the big 3. She quit a 6 figure job because she could design things that would be accessible and last for hundreds of thousands of miles but was told to design things to make it through warranty period only! And be inaccessible to the general mechanic.

I’m 67 years old, and live in a state where an auto over 15 years old only needs to pass a safety inspection. No emissions testing needed. I own a 1965 Chevy Nova with an inline 230 six cylinder, three on the tree. It’s my personal FU to the car industry, the parts industry, and government regulators. Being a three on the tree, that makes it an effective anti theft device for about 50 percent of the population as well. I love the car. And get more thumbs up than ire from the community.

I worked 30 years in a bus garage. When I started we overhauled literally every single part of the bus. We rebuilt 30 amp relays, every part of the engine, brakes, radiator. nothing left our shop to be overhauled. by the time I retired 90% of the benches were empty and all the parts were scrap and replace or send back as cores.All the parts became sealed units with no way to repair or parts available.

I’m only 25 and the cars from the 90’s and early 2000s barely even resemble cars these days. I can’t even imagine how much worse it feels growing up in your generation. You guys REALLY had the best cars for the working class. I wish we could go back.

As a mechanic of 34 years I completely agree. We have been getting screwed for years with cars e.g. no drain plugs on trans and diffs, fuel tanks scaring you , no access, special tools, restricted technical data I could go on and on. The technology is over complicated and less reliable now. In addition mechanics have poor pay, poor benefits, poor conditions and have to buy expensive tools, that's why there's a shortage of good mechanics.

My brother was dropping a tank on a car to replace the fuel pump, and the gas shot out like a fire hose he said, burnt the shop to the ground, he had 3'rd degree burns on his right arm, but the gas hit the drop light, the bulb exploded, and ignited the gas. Hats off to you guys, he had said for years they are intentionally screwing the 'shade tree mechanics', I believe it.

Tony as a retired new car dealer, this was always the manufacture plan. Don’t forget “special tools” we had to buy from the car maker. This made it even harder to work on a car without these tools.

"Things are weird now and they're going to get weirder." This man does not lie! This is the first one of his videos I've seen, and he is 100% correct on both the mechanical front and how we're getting screwed by the corporate/global government.

When the $5 circuit board cost $ 1,000 to be replaced, and the shop need $ 10,000 in computers to do the repair ! CAR VS COMPUTERS WITH WHEELS !

Planned Obsolescence - You can thank Edward Bernays who came up with this practice and sold it to the big 3 auto makers. This business model is now the standard among most major manufacturers of virtually any type of appliance or machinery.

Auto makers have made it crystal clear, they don't want us working on our own cars, mechanics or otherwise. They want you to just buy a new car once yours is broken. Or take it to them so they can charge you a premium to "fix" it.

Something you reminded me of that happened to me several years ago. I hurt the engine in my truck, and I was across town at a friends house. He had a coworker of his over that day that I was there. Those two worked at the Mercedes dealer in town; the coworker being a service tech. I proceeded to remove the engine from my truck in his driveway with hand tools. This tech, was completely blown away that I was able to take the engine out of a vehicle, fix it, and put it back in using just hand tools (and a hoist) in a driveway over a weekend. He had never seen or heard of such a thing because it's not possible on newer cars.

I love how you’re trying to say it without actually saying it and have YouTube censor you. Just by what you’re saying tells me you know exactly what’s going on and why. We need more people like you to help wake people up. As the Patriot Nurse would say, “Beans, Bullets, and Band-AIDS.”

I worked at a shop in high school, the one that I always remember was when a Lumina Z34 rolled in and my boss chuckling and saying, "hope it doesn't need an alternator." It did. and I learned about what you are talking about.

I worked in appliance repair in 1976 and the guy I was learning from tried to explain to me how the industry was moving toward planned obsolescence. The idea was to create an endless market for products that weren’t serviceable, thus allowing for more profits for established manufacturers.

The same thing happened to hearing aids and other electronic devices. I repaired them for 25 years and watched them get more expensive and less repairable. (1990 to 2015)

My 86 Camaro needed a fuel pump. I have the factory service manuals, and the procedure included dropping the entire rear end to remove the fuel tank. Instead of following that procedure, i cut a hole over the tank to access the top of the tank, cut the steel fuel lines, removed the assembly, changed the pump, put it back together, used neoprene fuel hose and clamps to hook the lines back together. Created a fiberglass cover and attached it using nut-serts and bolts. Later i did the same thing to my 2002 Yukon. I expect that with the convenient hatch, the pump will never fail again.🙂

Tony - just to let you know, not all automotive manufacturers did things intentionally to make things harder to service. I worked as an engineer at GM Saturn in the 80's. ALL of our product development meetings included someone from both the service side, as well as UAW rep from the assembly side. We specifically worked to make things easier to service, even for a novice. I especially remember how we as engineers HATED to do auto trans fluid changes, and wondered why we just couldn't have a spin-on filter same as for the oil, as well as a drain plug, so you didn't have to do 30 bolts and drop the pan making a huge mess and requiring a pan gasket to boot. Auto writer idiots panned the motor as to having inadequate power and making too much noise. What they didn't know was that those motors were understressed on purpose, as well as having a mean time between failure of well over 500,000 miles. Yes...timing chains can be noisier than belts that have to be replaced at 60k miles, but they are bullet proof, and weren't as quiet and sewing-machine like as the Japanese motors. Same thing with the space frame construction, the same as race cars, as well as having totally rust-free polymer body panels. But once again, idiot auto "writers" panning them because of the large body panel gaps (as if that mattered) that were required to allow for expansion clearance due to temperature. I could go on and on. Rant over.