To catch some BS, sure. I wouldn't expect them to fall for obvious lies. I doubt a mechanic would be significantly educated metallurgy or production techniques to spot BS in part lifespans. Or to spot pseudoscience in air filters.
I would expect them to notice their repeat customers not getting the benefits. But keep in mind that doctors saw their patients appearing pain free and high functioning.
I think it depends. If the mechanic is attempting to mislead the customer by insinuating longer or more difficult work then it's deceptive. But if it's because customers refuse to believe that their car could be fixed so quickly and assume that no work had been done then I don't think so.
Anything that keeps mechanics honest is a great idea in my book. However, I think this misses the crux of the problem: diagnosis.
It's easy enough for me to call a mechanic or two to find out how much they would charge to replace my transmission, but how do I know that my car actually needs a new transmission? My primary fear when going to the mechanic is that they'll claim that my car's problems are much more serious than they actually are, so they can charge me for the more expensive repair.
They can easily get away with this, because I'm not knowledgeable enough on the subject to second guess them. Oddly enough, the situation isn't much different with doctors and dentists. Every time my dentist decides to drill into my teeth, I can't help but wonder if they just see it as an opportunity to make a large sum of money.
If anything, the situation is worse in the medical industry. They almost never give price quotes up front. What's up with that? And there's basically no way of knowing how much your insurance will cover. Generally I just do what the doctor/dentist says and save my pennies while I wait for a huge, seemingly arbitrary bill to arrive in the mail. This system is obviously broken.
Now, one of you HN readers looking to start a company: go fix it! :)
I have no clue if the bushings in my car really did need replacing. Not even sure what they are. My mechanic sure has an incentive to say they do, as he'll make money that way, but if what he says sounds kinda reasonable and I don't get weird vibes from him, I am not taking a gamble with my 1600kg, 120km/h destroyer-of-pedestrians-and-passengers.
Most people aren't medical doctors, and most aren't gonna gamble with their health. It's a transaction where one side has way more information, less to loose, and therefore more power. Hopefully they use that power for good.
I tend to think of doctors as mechanics. Often when something breaks on my car, the explanation is "it's an old car, that happens eventually." And when they talk about it after fixing it, it's usually "Toyota's a good brand. Take care of it and you'll get another 100k miles from that engine." If I took my car to my mechanic with nothing wrong and asked what I should be doing to make sure the transmission lasts as long as possible, they will give me some generic intuitive advice, but they have no real insight because they are not in the business of maximizing the lifetime of healthy cars.
Doctors are kind of the same way. They see patients who have problems and need them fixed. If you walk into a doctor's office and say your family has a history of heart disease and you're concerned, they'll run a standard diagnostic to see if there is a problem. If there isn't, they'll give you generic advice. Outside of that, they are not really likely to have much insight into how to prevent heart disease in your specific case. Maybe you'll get lucky and the doctor will have recently read a relevant paper.
This seems to me like a problem that you're better off having answered by a medical researcher rather than a physician in the trenches. Researchers are the ones who are taking the long view on outcomes in patients. Keeping with the same analogy, you're probably better off talking to a mechanical engineer at a car company about maximizing the life of your currently healthy transmission.
Also, I generally see this as a problem that will be best addressed by machine learning researchers collaborating with medical researchers. Then again, I'm an ML PhD student working on health applications, so I'm biased. :)
Except that people are quite often ripped off by car mechanics. Whenever there is an information asymmetry some proportion of the individuals with more knowledge will take advantage of it. I know nothing about cars, so when a mechanic tells me my car needs a $1000 repair, I have to take them at their word or get a second opinion, which is usually more effort than I'm prepared to expend. That sort of imbalance is irresistible to some people in all walks of life, including auto-repair, sales, and engineering.
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.
What standard of care are you proposing? Please be specific.
Auto mechanics frequently misdiagnose problems, especially those caused by electrical or software faults. But in the worst case they can usually just keep following the manufacturer's service manual and replacing parts in a trial-and-error process until the vehicle works again.
The human body is orders of magnitude more complex and there is no service manual. We have a few evidence-based medicine clinical practice guidelines but those cover only the simplest of cases. For anything more complex, physicians have to fall back on theory, intuition, and experience. It's not surprising that they sometimes get it wrong. And sometimes there's just no way to make a definitive diagnosis for the root cause of a patient's complaints and so treatment is necessarily symptomatic; this can be tough for patients to accept. I'm not trying to defend clinicians who make preventable errors or dismiss legitimate patient concerns but we need to be realistic about what is achievable given the current limited state of medical knowledge.
You know when a mechanic has a sign out front that says "free brake inspection", how often do you think he says "brakes look great, no work needed"? You should only take advantage of a offer like that if you already suspect something is wrong or in the case of a orthodontist when you think your kid needs braces to begin with.
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.
she does read medical journals and keeps up on the latest in her specialty.
1) I don't know much about doctors' scheduling, but I've known a few that seemed to schedule a batch of patients, then hours for paperwork, document review, and peer review/help. So I wonder how much of this happens in their "free time".
2) There's a difference between reading up on new technologies versus creating a project and seeing it through to completion. Similarly, there is a difference between reading medical journals (study) versus seeing patients (practice).
would you trust an auto mechanic who didn't change the oil on her own car?
Absolutely. That's a very simple job, and if my mechanic can have it done for $20 at Walmart while he shops, it's well worth his time. If he's a good mechanic, he bills at, what, $70+ per hour? By the way, the mechanics I've known tend to drive inexpensive, late-model cars, and get rid of them after a few years. Why? Because they don't want to fix cars in their spare time.
IIUC, you're implying that that mechanic is disdainful of poor customers, and that this just provides convenient political cover.
If so, I'm not sure why you'd assume that. It seems more likely to me that the mechanic is simply choosing his work based on personal interest and perhaps profitability. I don't see why we'd ask anything more than that from him.
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.
Do people have "garages" and yearly checkups? Maybe it's a European thing?
In the U.S. we have Jiffy Lube and the "checkup" is just another way for them to squeeze the customer for cash. We are so distrustful of auto mechanics in general that, no, I don't think most of us go looking for a yearly fleecing, ha ha (not funny, really).
Ive got two actual personal encounters with them. Long ago someone who talked up his souped up motorcycle/gokart engine (with reason) explained it to me, shortly before that engine died wide and energetic. That was fun, and may have had other causes :)
Then my wife paid $1,800 for a "packs & plugs" job at a dealership, when our usual guy was aware that our Honda Insight had that issue and needed that attention and said he'd have charged $200 for it. Individual part numbers for 3 plugs. But still. She was out of town and they talked her into "it's sputtering but it could blow up at any moment!"
I would expect them to notice their repeat customers not getting the benefits. But keep in mind that doctors saw their patients appearing pain free and high functioning.
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