I honestly have found the opposite. There have been times when I've taken my truck to a "licensed mechanic" and they failed to even torque my wheels to spec.
Like most things in life there's a wide range of skill even in licensed mechanics. Add to that the current trend of paying auto techs by the job instead of hourly in many dealerships and you have licensed techs rushing through jobs or low-dollar jobs done by apprentices.
That's how you get wheels falling off from not being torqued, bearing failing prematurely, brakes improperly adjusted or pads popping out, and the list goes on.
Unless you have a tech you know and trust (preferably an independent garage) do not rely on the fact they are licensed to guarantee safety. I could spend the next hour listing off instances of shoddy or incomplete work by licensed folks.
Maybe, maybe not. There's plenty of horror stories about mechanics. There are some things on my car I wouldn't trust other people to do, even if they were licensed, certified, trained, etc. I just want to be able to be picky about each little thing, and know it's done right.
People give "experienced mechanics" far too much credit. Sure, many of them are great and have fantastic diagnostic skills, but many of them have also been fixing the same 10 problems for 20 years.
Case in point: years ago I took my (modified) pickup truck to a transmission shop because it was leaking gear oil. I had the Factory Service Manual and knew exactly what the problem was, but didn't have the tools or interest in doing this particular repair (required dropping the transmission and I knew from experience what a pain in the ass it was without the right tools).
The transmission shop refused to believe me when I told them what the problem was: "in all my years, I've never seen that happen" etc. They even made me sign a document to guarantee that I'd pay them after they pulled the transmission and I turned out to be wrong.
Result? The shop manager came out shaking his head, "sonofabitch, you were right. I have never seen that before. It's an easy fix, but we need to keep the truck overnight so we can order the part."
There are many, many cases of an untrained individual whose self-interest leads them to research and become deeply educated on something important to them that the so-called experts have only a passing familiarity with. Usually it's something medical-related, in this case it was automotive.
I know of a pretty famous car tuner in the US (I won't get too specific for various reasons) and despite most people in my community going to him for service over the years, multiple people have come out and proved he rarely if ever torques anything to spec. For the longest time he even allowed customers to watch in the shop space as he worked on their cars and he'd hand-torque many things that the car manual was very clear needed to be specifically torqued for safety and operational reasons.
The fact that people would share this and it didn't curb the amount of business and referrals he got just proved to me what you've said for the longest time.
People don't like to be troubled with details and they'd rather be ignorant of them.
"doing jobs that become much harder because of location, etc etc all for 30% less money" --- our mechanics make $75 an hour flat rate. That's 3x what they make at their respective dealerships (on an hourly basis). The fact that master technicians (all 8 ase certs, 20+ years of experience) from mercedes, ford, nissan and toyota are offering mobile car repair services and have already finished over 1000 repairs on our platform is probably a good indicator that not every mechanic thinks the way you do.
I am not claiming that you are wrong or that YourMechanic will succeed (only time will tell).
p.s. Of the 1000+ cars we have fixed, not a single customer ever came back to us claiming that our techs made the dents, scratches, stole stuff etc. I am sure we will one day run into some of those interesting people. I may be cynical and/or naive, but I happen to believe that most people are basically good.
Anytime I've had to bring my car to a shop, for any reason. I've run around each bolt, loosened, and properly torqued. Things like an inspection, will take at least a wheel off, and dealing with warped rotors, blows.
Your faith in dealerships is unreasonably high. Based on my experiences maintaining a fleet of trucks for my company in addition to my personal vehicles, there are most certainly dealerships / mechanics that are incompetent and unable to fix certain problems within a reasonable amount of time. Their mechanics are not magicians, and they vary in skill level significantly. Sometimes a quick 5 minutes spent on the internet will find a solution for a problem that the dealer's mechanics are clueless about, as was the case with the anti-theft lockout on the Alero I had. The stand-pipe issue on one of the older diesel trucks took the mechanic $3k worth of time to diagnose and fix, but once we knew about it, we found out that the issue was quite common for engines of that vintage (and we later found out that the other stand pipe in the engine had already been replaced by another mechanic prior to our purchase of that truck).
Other times a mechanic shows a degree of cleverness that makes them well worth compensating them for the time, like using an infrared camera app on their phone to find a wiring harness short in a minute rather than spending hours crawling around the chassis.
I was able to find a trustworthy mechanic. If they did a poor job or were sabotaging my car when I brought it to them, I would choose another mechanic.
I told my current mechanic about my last mechanic's quote for a job and they laughed and said it was a rip-off and otherwise derided them. And my current mechanic works fast and doesn't waste my money.
I always took the cars to mechanic and got the okay in each case, but either the mechanics I took the cars to were not looking for the right stuff, or I was just unlucky with whatever came up.
If I had a good mechanic in my family I’m sure I would have been good.
Theybare because they are trained to be. You are actively dissuaded from any diag work, because it can be harder to justify your hours to the customer and dealerships are awful. For a mechanic, its a good and bad job. Nevermind ASE certification that encourages the same. Only small indie mechanics have the freedom to do good work.
I mean, duh, but most shops aren't dry to begin with. Odds are that your last brake or oil change was done well past any legal limits. Especially if it is a franchised place. Independent and local auto-shops are your best bet for quality service. The franchise places may have 'rules' but they are overlooked usually as the franchise owner has pressure from above. Generally, they get the bottom of the barrel employees that have washed out of the independent shops for being piss-ants.
This goes triple for YourMechanic and anything else that smells like Uber-but-for-auto-repair. Those techs are flat-backing on a neighborhood sidewalk in whatever rain or heat there is, likely in huge violation of local ordinances and HOAs, with whatever tools they got in their truck. It's a shit job with big risks that only real addicts and drunks are going to take when they have no other options. Turns out, auto-repair is hard and can't be done without a lift or a pit.
To be honest a lot of your suggestions are probably very solid but come off like the "Find a mechanic you can trust" solution.
By that I mean the advice of "find a mechanic you can trust" only is applicable to someone already familiar enough to know how to determine if a mechanic is trustworthy.
A lot of your advice is probably 100% valuable, but as someone working through a lot of these same concerns I'm stuck wondering "Well, how do I know I'm actually doing that?" It leads me to wonder if I'm actually successful at any of this or just Dunning–Kruger-ing my way through it.
I'm not sure what your experience is, but it may not reflect the 'average'. I have experience from working in automotive diagnostics for many years, and am speaking from what I've seen, having spoken and dealt with thousands of dealer and independent mechanics.
Very much easier said than done for most people. Assuming you aren’t lucky enough to have a mechanic in your circle, how do you tell whether they are trustworthy?
I'm well aware of that, I've personally changed my own oil, replaced the starter on an ex's car, replaced my mass airflow sensor, and have my own OBD-II scanner (crappy one).
I'm not sure why this thread turned into multiple attempts to convince me that independent mechanics are a good value that can do the same or better work than a dealer. I never claimed they couldn't, I stated that I don't think most people have a trusted mechanic that isn't the dealer. So far I've gotten a lot of down votes, anecdotes, but no data. I very well could be wrong, I was stating my opinion based on what I've seen and experienced.
Look at YourMechanic, it's filling a need in the market to link independent mechanics to car owners. It is using a verified user trust model to rate them. If the vast majority of people had trusted mechanics they wouldn't be gaining much traction in the market.
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