Comment by cgearhart | Hacker News Reader

Comment by cgearhart | Hacker News Reader

“Never attribute to malice that which can be adequately explained by stupidity.”

I bought an old BMW some time back. I took it in to the dealership for an inspection before purchase and I mentioned that the A/C wasn’t working before inspection. They charged me what you’d expect (plus extra to diagnose _just_ the A/C) but gave the car a completely clean bill of health aside from the A/C, which they attributed to a bad blower motor.

I asked the seller to have that fixed before sale, and they took it to another shop who replaced the blower…and still nothing. That shop kept the car for 2 more weeks and came up with nothing for answers. They took it to another BMW dealership who inspected it for another week and came up with nothing.

So I turned to Google. Found a likely problem, but needed BMW dealership to confirm with proprietary tools. The BMW dealership had no idea what I was talking about. I had to literally tell them “can you plug in the foo widget and go to the bar screen and check the baz value shown there? Now can you hit Reset in the corner?” Magically, the A/C started working.

I’m not sure how “right to repair” plays into my story. My real point is that technicians are human and imperfect; troubleshooting is hard. It’s not necessarily a conspiracy that they make mistakes, nor is it personal that they believe the diagnostic data in front of them over some random person _convinced_ it’s a specific problem—even when it seems completely obvious once the problem is fixed.

With cars specifically, shops get paid to replace the blower whether or not it fixes the problem, while troubleshooting doesn't really pay. As a result there's a significant incentive towards scattershot parts replacement as a diagnostic tool.

I'm not saying it's done out of malice, but incentives drive behavior. You'd probably only develop solid diagnostic chops in the shop if the shop placed "bids" on fixing an undiagnosed problem, betting they can figure it out & fix cheaply.

In my experience with tech-heavy luxury vehicles like BMWs, dealerships have a relatively small time window from when the vehicle is introduced to when their knowledge about that vehicle drops off sharply. For example, I would trust a BMW dealer right now to work on a 2018 car, but I would take a 2000 car to an independent specialist.

One reason is turnover in dealer mechanic staff. Independent specialists tend to be more stable and have a genuine interest in and affection for the older cars of a particular brand.

Another reason is that most new luxury brands are highly focused on leasing brand new cars or getting customers to trade in on the latest model. They really only want to sell brand new cars at the top of the depreciation curve. People who own older cars will usually not buy them from the dealer and tend to not use dealer mechanics (often because the dealer is the most expensive option around). So dealer mechanics see less older cars, and service managers largely don't consider owners of older cars to be good/profitable customers that they need to keep happy.

A related issue that causes poor experiences like you describe is the "book time" job scheduling/pay system used by most dealer mechanics. This system favors a "parts swapping" approach where mechanics try to fix problems by quickly installing new components with a minimum of diagnosis time. This gets expensive for the customer due to dealer parts costs and strongly disincentivizes thoughtful, time-consuming diagnostic procedures and research. There is also usually an informal seniority system in dealers where the senior mechanics will take the easy "gravy" jobs that can be completed quickly but cost a lot. Junior mechanics will get stuck with the difficult, hard to diagnose jobs that suck up a lot of time and reduce a mechanic's earning potential. So you end up getting the least qualified mechanics working on tricky, unprofitable issues like yours.

To be fair, these issues aren't exclusive to high end vehicles, but they are especially noticeable at this market segment.

This is what happened in my case. Not my first older German car, nor my first experience with the dealer. I knew what I was getting myself into. :-)

I don’t hold it against them. In fact, I think it confirms my original assertion that there’s no malice involved.

This kind of thing is what makes some software engineers think they can solve problems or have an informed opinion about almost any other field :)

Sure there are experts in every field who really know their stuff, but 95%+ of the people we run into day-to-day just aren't that good at their job and don't pay much attention to what they are doing. So with a bit of research, experimentation, and logic, we can figure out stuff that should be other people's job that they can't seem to do. (... but the average software engineer probably isn't any better ;)

It's also what makes doctors|lawyers|physicists|$person_who_survived_rigorous_schooling think they can "solve problems or have an informed opinion about almost any other field." I think the reality is, 'smart people are smart'.

Obligatory: https://xkcd.com/793/

"Right to Repair" would hopefully mean that instead of that diagnostic tool being a BMW proprietary exclusive there would be some open source tool with the same functionality that you could load on your phone and connect to the $10 ODBII reader you bought off of eBay to solve the problem.

Already there are tools that do most of the basic ODBII functions, but some brands are bad about hiding away specific codes in $50k+ tools as a way to extract money from shops and funnel customers to the dealers.

The tool is actually already available (maybe a gray market thing though…), but it’s windows-only and a little pricey. I’m not convinced that “right to repair” will result in custom open source software for every smart fridge in existence, and I don’t really trust average folks to make good decisions if everything was open to all anyway.

ODBII codes are exactly the sort of thing that a community will form around to keep their tools useful though. Already the open source tools are pretty good except where the manufacturers are deliberately keeping them private. If the right to repair meant each car company had to publish a CSV or something similar with all of their proprietary codes I guarantee that they would be incorporated into all of the tools pretty much instantly. That is a textbook Right to Repair move.

It also shows why Right to Repair isn't going to happen anytime soon. Those codes are worth money to repair shops and implementing something like that is a direct threat to the revenue stream.

With BMW however, you can get the factory tools - so you didn't do your research well. They're also available from BMW legit www.bmwtis.com aos.bmwgroup.com

Just search for ISTA-P, ISTA-D, INPA, E-SYS and realoem, TIS, ETK for parts (you can get them for free* too)

My biggest problem of all is the company aren't updating their internal system with these sort of information. If you happen to meet a technician who really really knew his craft, 99.9999999% it has nothing to do with the training provided by the company. But it was his dedication and enthusiasm to solving the problem for their customers.

In the very early days Apple Store has a similar internal system where Genius gets to report and share these sort things. I think it was written by an employees as well. Pretty sure now that thing is gone.

I grew up in the Deep South. Stupidity is a weapon of malice.

There is no mutual exclusivity. They are interdependent in many ways.

Right, as in the naturally occurring stupidity perversely sometimes produces good results, thus reinforcing the stupid behaviors, which ultimately become weaponized...

Hanlon’s first corollary: sufficiently advanced stupidity is indistinguishable from malice.

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