Dan says to me from around the hood,
“Come over here, I’ll show you. I’m gonna get in the car and hit the gas. Look right here.”
He pointed to a spot on the left side of the engine.
“You ready?”
“Yup!”
He hit the gas, and I immediately also knew what the problem was — the motor mount was busted. Sheered clean through. As soon as he hit the gas, the whole engine torqued and moved about an inch.
“To verify this causes the noise, let’s turn the wheel to the left and do it again.”
I got in the car, turned the wheel, and hit the gas.
“Bingo!”
We switched places again, and I saw that as the engine torqued and moved, it touched some of the wheel structure. Case closed.
“I can have this fixed in 15 minutes.”
I stood there as he grabbed the welder, got suited up, and went to work on welding the engine mount. When he was done, I asked him how much I owed him.
“I don’t know. How about $25?”
I handed him $25 in cash and asked, “How did the dealer miss this?”
“You gotta understand how they’re trained. They’re trained to diagnose and treat problems as a black box — which means they narrow down the problems described by the customer to a particular system. In your case the front right wheel system. Then, they just replace the parts inside the box. They don’t look inside the box for exactly what might be the problem. They’re rewarded — paid — for the number of jobs they can do in a day, not how many times they found or fixed the little gadget that was the real source of the problem.
Most of the time, black box fixes work fine. They fix your issue. But it is the costliest way to fix the problem because you’re paying for a lot of new stuff you don’t need.
Mechanics like me — we’re white box mechanics. When you come to me with a problem, I find the box, and then open it up and look inside. My goal is to not only fix your issue but do it as efficiently as possible. That saves you money and makes you really happy with me.”
Then I said it out loud, just to verify,
“The bottom line is that I would have spent $1700 to have them replace all of the wheel infrastructure, but that wouldn’t have actually addressed the problem. As soon as I turned left and accelerated, I would have heard the noise. Man, I woulda been pissed.”
“Yup. In your case, the black box approach would have failed. If you had come in with better information about what caused the problem, for example, pinpointing it to when you accelerated and turned, they may have found the problem. But the solution would still have been an expensive replacement of the motor mount, rather than welding the current one in place.”
I drove out both elated and a lot wiser.
