Table of Contents Chapter 1: The beginning: Driving Miss Daisy ... crazyChapter 2: Tinkering: birth of the customer / mechanic / inventorChapter 3: The first shops: we repair bicycles, radios, plumbing and carsChapter 4: An improper education: The grease monkey arrivesChapter 5: Mid-century malaise: "You want to fix cars? You must be out of your mind!"Chapter 6: A new era: Birth of the bug huntersChapter 7: Final word: The aftermarket bond
Four walls, some service bays and basic equipment, a couple of
experienced techs and a manager with a good shop software system to pull
everything together. Looking at your shop, you may have caught yourself
thinking the auto service industry isn't that complicated.
All you need is some common business sense and a few competent, reliable
workers to help rake in the endlessly available work. You are, after all,
fortunate to be living in a country where most people own and are
completely reliant on their cars. Those cars need regular maintenance and
eventually break down, some with alarming regularity. With your own shop,
you can just sit back and watch the revenue roll in.
No business is ever that simple. Auto repairers, like anyone else, face a
host of daily challenges. Unlike most other businesses, shops (mechanical
and collision, independent and dealer-owned) also must wrestle with
serious issues created decades ago - issues that to this day continue to
create widespread public distrust and denigrate the image of repairers.
The auto service industry is haunted by its past and by ghosts that
threaten its health and future.
Your interest here is multifold. Foremost, this is your life. Genuinely
knowing the history of your industry could help you remedy the image and
labor problems that have plagued the automotive repair professional for
decades. The best way to accomplish all this is by fully understanding the
forces that built and shaped this industry.
We invite you then to step into our "Way-back" machine. Next
stop, the past, followed by a dizzying ride through a century of repair
history, concluding with a look at the present and a glimpse into a
future. In that future, the fortunes of the service and parts industries
are bound tight to one another and tied fast to past troubles that must
find resolution.
Fasten your seatbelts. The ride is going to get a bit bumpy.
(Photo source: "Automotive Service Industry Association: The First Twenty-Five Years.")
The spirit that built this landmark exhibition swept over the nation,
upturning entrenched social structures. Technology and techno-knowledge
suddenly were putting the rich and middle-class on much more equal
footing. This fact was proving to be a real pain in the backside of the
upper crust owners of the first automobiles.
Their problem - according to Kevin Borg, an auto historian and assistant
professor of history at James Madison University in Harrisonburg, VA - was
they relied on tech-savvy members of the budding middle class to drive and
maintain their new horseless carriages. These chauffeurs/on-board
mechanics (Borg considers them the first auto repairers) were nothing like
the venerable coachmen they replaced. The coachman was dedicated, loyal
and dutiful. Chauffeurs were anything but.
Tales abound of freewheeling chauffeurs running roughshod over their
employers. They went joyriding in the expensive vehicles, which they
treated as their own. They skimmed money from shops and parts providers,
as coachmen had, but "without the veneer of social decorum,"
according to John Leinhard M.D. Anderson, professor emeritus of mechanical
engineering and history at the University of Houston.
Chauffeurs had "the egalitarian instincts of people who'd created
automobiles in the first place," writes Leinhard. "They had no
sense of the old social stratification and weren't about to play that
game."
They also held a trump card over their employers that ensured their
continuing employment. "They were in control, for who else could deal
with those terribly complex new machines?" Leinhard writes.
So widespread was the problem that, in time, it caught the eye of the
press. In 1906, a headline in the New York Times rang: "Chauffeurs
Lord It Over Their Employers."
Vehicle owners had no solution, but time and vehicle evolution in due
course served one up. By the end of World War I in 1918, vehicles were
more reliable and most owners learned how to drive them. The chauffeur
didn't go away (obviously), but his power greatly diminished.
Borg says an important aspect of this bit of history hasn't gone away
either. This first struggle between vehicle owner and repairer set a
paradigm the service industry was not to escape. Then and today, a vast
technological divide separates owner and repairer. Borg calls it an
"asymmetry" of technological knowledge. This divide creates
suspicions since the owner is completely dependent on the repairer for
help.
Making matters worse and further widening this gulf is the gap in social
stature. Owners tended to be wealthy. Repairing was and still is (at least
for now) a blue-collar occupation.
Early chauffeurs aggravated this situation by being the worst sort of
irresponsible repairers. Undoubtedly, their example remained in the memory
of the wealthy and probably the general public for some time. A century
later, these original suspicions remain. Those suspicions, along with the
forces that have created and sustained them, form much of the history of
the industry and feed into the serious issues repairers face today.
About the Author
Tim Sramcik
Tim Sramcik began writing for ABRN over 20 years ago. He has produced numerous news, technical and feature articles covering virtually every aspect of the collision repair market. In 2004, the American Society of Business Publication Editors recognized his work with two awards. Sramcik also has written extensively for Motor Age and Aftermarket Business World. Connect with Sramcik on LinkedIn and see more of his work on Muck Rack.