While most of the cars pulling into repair shops around the country still are the same vehicles and same technology shops
have been servicing for years, there are more and more hybrids pulling in for repair and maintenance.
PHOTOS COURTESY: HONDA & ANDREAS SCHLEGEL/GETTY IMAGES ILLUSTRATION: STEPHANIE PARKER
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The good news is that more repair shops are seeing this business, meaning more consumers are taking their cars away from the
dealerships. But that also means that shops need to be ready for this trend that isn't going away.
"They're not new. They're new to shops that haven't been studying," says Craig Van Batenburg, who operates Automotive Career
Development Center (ACDC), a training facility centered around hybrid repair.
That is true. Hybrids have been in the market since 1999, when the Honda Insight rolled off the production line. A lot has
changed during these last 10 years, and more hybrids are more affordable and more common on today's roads. At Tom Gebbie's
shop, Gebbie's Auto Care in Landsale, Pa., about 20 of the 1,500 customers in his database drive a hybrid. "It's just been a steadily increasing thing," he says. "There was maybe a little blip when gas prices were so high last year
when people maybe bought some Priuses."
Gebbie services a mix of models, some new and some older. A few years ago, he followed the buzz circulating about this new
technology and picked up on the fact that some of his customers were asking about the new hybrids.
But Gebbie and other techs like him who have started to service hybrids still are in the minority, Van Batenburg says.
"My guess is that since it's been almost 10 years since they've been here and we have such a very low number of techs for
a number of reasons," he says, speculating that on a given day only about 10,000 techs work on a hybrid. "One, technicians
by and large prefer what they're used to. Technicians that work flat rate don't like to learn a whole new technology because
it's very hard to make a living when you're not making very much money on something that's new."
He says a number of people also don't like the new technology because it is green, and there still is a percentage of techs
who don't believe global warming exists.
According to the Green Car Congress, there were just under 300,000 hybrid registrations in 2008 in the United States, so techs
should start looking into this line of service to make sure they're ready when one pulls into the bay.
