How the Automotive Technician Shortage Hurts Everyone… and What to Do About It

Sound the Alarm: A Growing Shortage of Automotive Technicians

• For a while, it was little more than one doomsayer prediction out of thousands, but it’s rapidly become a clear and present reality: we’re losing our automotive technicians. Maybe even more to the point, we’ve lost them.

How did we get here? What does it mean? And how can smart companies compensate for a grievous lack of repair and diagnostic resources?

The Causes Behind Our Automotive Technician Shortage

• The automotive technician shortage didn’t just happen—it represents seismic shifts in culture, education and technology. Plenty of ink has already spilled over cultural attitudes regarding the technical trades. The work simply

So, as mass numbers of veteran technicians retire from the field, the repair centers where they work find no new technicians to take their place. The automotive technician shortage removes decades of tribal knowledge from the shop floor, a factor which can’t be overstated given the role mentorship and word-of-mouth plays in day-to-day repair work.

For sure, none of this is great news. But with all these circumstances in mind, consider current trends in product development—specifically, the fact that products are becoming more and more complex at an exponential rate. Electrical operation—once relegated to a few isolated systems—is now integral to every vehicle function. And those functions are rapidly becoming more and more integrated with complex technical systems. Automotive technicians were never the crude luddites some stereotypes made them out to be, but the current technological landscape expects technicians to be full-on IT specialists as much as mechanics.

The end result isn’t simply service shops with fewer techs and no seasoned veterans—it’s shops where, increasingly, no one knows what they’re doing. In such an environment, what’s a rookie technician to do? Without a veteran to consult, the options are trial and error or static diagnostic procedures.

Symptoms, Causes and Tests

Lengthy diagnostic procedures have been a mainstay of the repair environment from time immemorial—I still remember the Chilton repair books in my brother’s room in the early 1980s—but no veteran technician worth their salt had to rely solely on those books. Rather, they drew from experience, from having seen the same symptoms countless times, knowing which tests to run on which symptoms, and eventually figuring out the most likely causes through repetitive task execution.

Without more experienced cohorts to speak with, newbie technicians might rely on step-by-step procedures. More likely, however, they’ll simply start replacing parts and trying different things, hoping that something—anything—might solve the problem. Neither approach is time efficient.

• Worse yet, as Mike Reynolds—owner and operator of South Carolina’s Mobile Automotive Service Solutions—explained in a

The High(er) Cost of Fewer Technicians

• What that means, first of all, is

• And, of course, that’s only half the story.

• This means disgruntled, impatient customers and, perhaps, less-satisfied customers more likely to switch brands at their next purchase. (Does that matter? Well, according to Forbes,

But the real core concern here should be repair bay throughput: the more vehicles you can repair in a day, the more customers you can charge in a day. As long as technicians can perform those repairs quickly and accurately—the more revenue you can log and keep. And it becomes pretty freakin’ difficult to maintain a high throughput when you’re dealing with an automotive technician shortage.

Or does it?

How AI Could Compensate for the Automotive Technician Shortage

If there’s any silver lining to the current technician shortage, it’s that it arrives precisely at a time where we could leverage technology to balance the resource gap.

• AI diagnostic and repair tools are finally being developed to dramatically level the playing field and close the distance between rookie technicians and their highly seasoned counterparts. Tweddle Group’s electrical diagnostic tool, TRACER™, eliminates the need for lengthy trial and error in—among other contexts—factory end-of-the-line testing. TRACER analyzes even complex clusters of diagnostic trouble codes (DTCs) to

• Tweddle Group also frees technicians up from lengthy diagnostic trees with

Of course, solutions like these can’t entirely resolve the automotive technician shortage, but they can empower manufacturer service operations and aftermarket repair centers to maintain bay throughput despite having fewer techs on the floor. Cultural attitudes will hopefully shift once again and people will recognize automotive repair as a crucial, secure and potentially lucrative profession. In the interim, service operations should consider AI tools designed to turn newbies into seasoned veterans, and veteran techs into even faster, more accurate versions of themselves.