How Mechanics Cheat Women: A Guide to Honest Car Repair

By Doris Chan

Get honest car repair without scams

Mechanics scam women. This is a guide for outsmarting mechanics and getting your car fixed well, at a fair price.

A sample of topics:

• Never trust dealership service advisors
• Engine flushes are a scam
• New tires won't improve your fuel economy
• There's no such thing as "dealer-only" parts
• Most people overpay for transmission repairs
  
  Doris Chan is a lifelong car enthusiast from Los Angeles who loves helping other people figure out the world of cars. How Mechanics Cheat Women is everybody's guide to how the car repair industry works for its own benefit, and how you can take charge -- without having any mechanical ability or knowledge yourself -- to get good, honest, low-priced car repairs.
  
  Get a $800 transmission replacement when your neighbor paid $3,000. Know when and how to say "no" to your mechanic. And overcome your fear of mechanics so that any car, even an old high-maintenance car, becomes easy-peasy for you and your budget.

• Language: English
• Publisher: Doris Chan
• Release date: Jan 1, 2018
• ISBN: 9781386817017

Book preview

Introduction: Why mechanics cheat

Read the manual

Service advisors are commissioned salespeople

Don’t change your oil every 3,000 miles

Don’t go to quick lube shops

Engine flushes and other outright scams

The mythical dealer-only part

Don’t upgrade your fucking spark plug wires

Don’t let them spray WD-40

Cabin air filter fever

New tires won’t improve your fuel economy

Don’t replace your radiator

OBD2 and the case of the missing blinker fluid

Tranny trouble

Car manufacturers might help you out

What dealerships are good for

Finding a trustworthy mechanic

Conclusion

Introduction: Why mechanics cheat

-Heard the one about the honest mechanic?

—No.

-I haven’t either.

Mechanics cheat everybody, not just women. Mechanics do, however, tend to be more shameless about cheating women than cheating men, upon the assumption that women have no idea about car repair, and maybe also that women won’t resort to physical violence if they find out they’ve been cheated.

This isn’t a guide specifically for women. It’s a guide for everybody. You don’t need to have a vagina to want your car repaired competently. But women do stand to gain the most from knowing about their cars, simply because mechanics tend to cheat them so badly. I think the average woman should actually know more about cars than the average man, because mechanics don’t do to men what they do to women.

I’m thinking of a friend of mine, a guy who likes buying and driving cars, but has no idea about their internals or repairs. He never has trouble getting honest repair, because somehow, he looks like a car expert, even though he knows much less about cars than I do. Mechanics go into deep technical jargon with him, with a few mentions of I know you already know everything about this—and he’s too scared to admit that he has no idea what they’re talking about, because that might mean the end of him getting honest car repair. Because he’s a guy, a 6’3" fat white guy.

Me, on the other hand? I seldom deal with mechanics I don’t already know. But when I do, of course there are the assumptions. First off, maybe that I don’t speak English, since I’m ethnically Asian. Second, that I have more money than brains, because I’m usually driving (old, depreciated) luxury cars that look expensive. And third, that if I know anything about cars, it must be because my boyfriend taught me. Or that one time when a mechanic asked, Your boyfriend taught you all this? and when I shook my head, he followed up with, Ahhh, you have a girlfriend, right? Because I’m a girl, a 5’4" skinny Asian girl. So either my boyfriend taught me about cars—or I’m a lesbian.

Anyway. The unspoken assumption here is that mechanics are all men. And they generally are.  In all my years of loving cars, I’ve seen female mechanics at only two shops. At the first shop, the mechanic was an old Chinese guy (in his seventies maybe?) and his assistant mechanic was his wife. At the second shop, which I found on Yelp when my Lexus overheated when I was on a road trip through a city I didn’t know, it turned out that all the mechanics were women, lesbians. (How did I know that these female mechanics were lesbians? They told me so. Many times. Many, many times.) Other than those two occurrences in my fifteen or so years of driving—I’ve never laid eyes on a female mechanic.

In the ideal world, people are individuals and everyone treats everyone fairly, but in the real world, we know that mechanics tend to cheat people they see as less knowledgeable. Back in my college economics classes, we called this situation information asymmetry: where one side to the transaction has crucial information that the other side doesn’t have.

That’s why you don’t often hear about lawn mowers or car washers who trick