#also the nissan juke is the ugliest car i've seen on the road at regular intervals

[delphictrip]

Gahahaha, I feel this. It's also the knowledge that most dodge challengers are running around with minivan engines. How long have you been at it, and what do you do?

I used to work as a lube tech and I give even more space on the road to cars that look a little wonky. It's a little terrifying to tell someone "hey, your axle is falling apart. if this breaks while you're on the highway it's going to take out your entire braking system" or "hey you are down to 1mm on these pads you might want to change them" or "hey so you're missing a caliper bolt and you will eventually lose your brakes. not sure how this hasn't locked up on you by now tbh." or "hey man these are BALD" or "hey uh. you need tie rods. dude you are going to lose a front wheel and that won't be pretty" or a number of other inspection fails and they just shrug you off. "Yeah, I'll get to it" or worse "I don't believe you, you're just trying to take my money." The axle falling apart lady wouldn't even talk to me. The caliper bolt lady actually got the problem fixed.

I don't miss working at a stealership because essentially the more work I could sell writing up on inspections (usually shit they needed like brake pads and rotors but sometimes shit they didn't really need, like a 3box or a brake flush), the more money I would make, and that didn't feel right to me. It made me feel gross to get spiffs. So eventually I quit and went fleet, and I don't regret that at all. If you're doing PM on internally owned equipment, there's 0 incentive to rip anyone off.

Working with cars means i actually can recognize a lot of car models at a glance now, which means i get to have internal monologues like "huh, a C-HR, you don't see those very often. Probably because it looks like it was designed by bionicle circa 2009" and that's just a normal part of my life now