A.I. Native Auto Hospitality - The Future of Customer-First Auto Repair
Now playing — Master Tech to Millionaire
About this episode
Joe Adams interviews Michael Floyd, Chief AI Officer at Auto Hospitality Group, about using generative AI (ChatGPT, Codex, Claude) to automate repetitive shop workflows—like splicing…
Key takeaways
- —AI can significantly automate repetitive tasks in automotive shops, improving efficiency.
- —Generative AI, like ChatGPT, has democratized access to advanced technology for businesses of all sizes.
- —Implementing AI requires a clear understanding of business processes and data to maximize its effectiveness.
- —AI can enhance customer experience by providing tailored communication and support.
- —Continuous learning and adaptation are essential as AI technology evolves rapidly.
Frequently asked
- How can AI help automate workflows in my shop?
- AI can streamline repetitive tasks such as video processing and customer communication, saving time and reducing manual errors.
- What are the risks of using AI in the back office?
- The main risk involves accuracy in financial tasks, where errors can have significant consequences. It's crucial to have human oversight to ensure correctness.
- Is it too late for my shop to start using AI?
- No, it's not too late. Many tools are available that can help you integrate AI into your operations without needing extensive technical knowledge.
▸Full transcript
What's up, players? This is Joe Adams with Adams Automotive, the number one shop in America. This is Master Tech to Millionaire, presented by Auto Shop Answers, where we take master technicians and turn them into professional business athletes, CEOs. We're here today with our Chief AI Officer, Michael Floyd, of the Auto Hospitality Group. We're going to talk about a lot of amazing stuff today, but I guess, well, let's get into it.
How you doing, Michael? Good. Thank you for having me. Okay, so I want to get into automation. I want to get into kind of some of the projects you're working on, where AI is that today, if it's going to steal my job one day. But, uh, I guess a little bit about your background, like how you got into AI and then, uh, how you made your way into our business.
Yeah, no, I'm happy to dig into that. So, um, I grew up in Austin and, um, went to college for computer engineering at the University of Texas, Hook 'em. Um, really didn't know what I wanted to do out of school, was, was kind of debating between big tech and, you know, being a behind a computer and coding all day or doing consulting and getting to see different kinds of businesses, different industries, travel.
I ended up going into consulting and got to travel, got to go to New York City, and then COVID hit. I realized very quickly that I didn't love making PowerPoints. I really missed building and really thinking through technical and logical problems. I decided to leave consulting and go into an AI company in Austin that was pre-ChatGPT. This is a different kind of AI than we'll be talking about for most of today.
But just joined an AI company as a software engineer and just really enjoyed it, but felt like, man, there were so few companies at the time that could really take advantage of AI. You could think of the ones that have famously done it, like Netflix with their algorithm and Facebook with their, and TikTok. Those are the companies with billions of dollars to pay the best engineers and all the data points.
Like we all joke how Facebook can hear every word you say and sell things. So there was very few companies that were actually getting value out of AI. And it was even hard to see with the company I was at, like people really getting a ton of value out of it. And so I kind of started to get a little bit disenfranchised with it.
And then ChatGPT came out and I was like, oh my gosh, this is free on the internet. You know, it's a new form of AI called generative AI and you don't have to train your own model. You don't have to spend millions of dollars. And so that's when I was like, this is going to be like our generation's version of the internet.
Like, this is going to change the world. And that was a little bit of a crazier take a couple of years ago. Obviously today it's the only thing you see when you open the news or LinkedIn. Like, we're filming this right now and the government shut down the latest model from Anthropic. And so it is like the— and the stock market is at a record high.
So it's pretty clear that it was life-changing. But yeah, 3 years ago, I took the leap and I started my own business and started to consult for companies in different industries, kind of married both the things I love, which is seeing in different businesses and actually creating an impact, and then being technical and really understanding AI. And so got to do a ton of cool work for commercial real estate firms, energy trading firms, just Fortune 500 all the way down to Series A startups and worked with some of my best friends and built a company.
And then that's kind of what led me to you guys a year ago. And you can kind of talk about how that, how that came to be. Yeah. Okay. So, okay. Yeah. So I, we hung out at the beginning of January 2025 and I was reading in an earnings report for some company that they were like using AI to automate things and like workflows.
And if you're, if you've been to Houston or seen a bit of our concept, we talk about MotoVisuals a lot. And we had this manual process for like we literally had an app that everybody paid $22.99 a year for where you could like download the MotoVisual, download the video that we send to the customer, and you had to like compress it and splice it.
And we do it with every single video. And so that was like a 3 or 4 minute manual process. And when you got really fast at it, wasn't that bad. But, you know, we had 115,000 repair orders last year times 5 minutes. You know, I was like, man, I wonder— I know Michael's doing— I talked to him last month about doing some AI stuff.
I don't know anything about AI, which I want. I want you to explain a little bit more about AI, like to people who may be ignorant to it. And so I called him. I was like, hey, could you like— this is like a repeatable thing that we do every single day. Could you use AI tools to like automate it. And he was like, yeah, we could, we could kind of explore that.
And then one thing led to another and now we have the button. And I guess I'll— we'll back up to kind of talk about how you got into the company as well. But let's switch gears and let's talk for a little bit about AI in general. So like you said, in 2022, ChatGPT came out. How does that have anything to do with like automating a workflow at my family shop in 2025?
And then now we're in 2026 with all the Codex and Claude stuff going on. Like how was artificial intelligence a thing at the companies you were working for before ChatGPT and then after ChatGPT came out? Like what were the differences? And then how did you know that it was going to be a big thing? And just generally talk about what it is and help people understand that are listening.
Yeah, no, I'll try to kind of give the— I mean, I could do this for hours and we actually teach a class on this. So definitely come next month. But My very dumbed-down version is, so generative AI is AI that generates text. Most people probably listening to this have at least seen ChatGPT by now. You could type in a prompt, plan me a Super Bowl party, and it's going to shoot out a list of 20 different steps of, okay, you need nachos and queso and you need to invite people.
It answers your questions. It's like a Q&A. Engine and it's generating that text. I think the best analogy, it doesn't work exactly the same, but you can almost think about these AI models like ChatGPT as the human brain a little bit. We ask someone a question and a bunch of things go on in their brain and then they have an answer that is based on their life experiences and their things they've learned in their specialty and that's what gives them whatever that answer is.
These models are trained on basically all of the data on the internet and so much more and can answer all of these questions that you need. Oh yeah. So basically I was reading like the earnings reports for this AI company in 2025 and they were talking about automating workflows and how it's like a cheat code. And the key word was creating the self-driving company, which I thought was really interesting.
And then I had talked to you about a month before about some of the things you were working on, your company that you'd launched and how you were like providing services, AI services to other companies. And I was like just thinking internally, like, what are some things that we do every day that's like just a series of hitting the same button over and over and over again that we could theoretically automate?
And one of them was splicing MotuVisuals onto the end of our videos that we send to customers. It was like an app that we had on our phones. It took 4 minutes every time. And we had 100,000 repair orders last year. You can do the math on how much time we were spending on just like this one task. And there's not like— it's hard to like measure an ROI, like if we could automate that.
But it was just like the idea, right? How can we get AI into our business? And so I reached out to you and, you know, one thing led to another and you ended up coming into our business. But for those that are not informed, I definitely want to take a step back and kind of explain how does, how does ChatGPT coming out in 2022.
So you said you worked in AI before ChatGPT, and then ChatGPT came out, and ChatGPT is generative AI, whatever that means. I need you to help me understand what that means. And how does that lead to 2025, I can automate buttons on a screen for putting videos into TechMetric at my mom and dad's shop, and then all the Codex and Claude stuff we're doing now.
Like, how did you, one, know that it was gonna be kind of like a category-defining step change in technology and to bet your career on it? And two, I guess just provide some color on AI for people that are ignorant or maybe don't have as much context that we do in our company. Yeah. So pre-generative AI, you really had to have so much money to build these models and then you would build the model once and pray that it was good at predicting something or sending you an ad on Facebook or something like that.
And then when ChatGPT came out, you know, you just get to use the best model in the world for free or for $20 a month. Uh, and then what I realize is every 3 months it just gets better. You know, they just release the next version of it and it's a little bit smarter and it's a little bit smarter. And that's when, after I think 2 releases, I was like, okay, I think, you know, this seems like it's not going to slow down.
And eventually Right now it's fun to use to plan a Super Bowl party or something, but eventually this is going to be, you know, the most important thing for a business to use to make their business better. And so generative AI, you know, I can kind of give my 2-minute spiel on it. We do a whole training day on this, and I've done this for tons of different auto repair shops as well as other, you know, companies.
But my 2-minute slimmed-down version is essentially, you know, I like to think of a generative AI model You know, if you've seen ChatGPT by now, you know, you, you type in a question, it sends out an answer. So it's generating text. That's all that it means. That's all generative AI. It sounds so fancy, but it just means, you know, it's generating some sort of output from your input.
So if you've used the image models too, it can generate an image. But it's— and how it works is it's essentially trained on the entire internet. So I like to give this example of like, think of yourself taking a test in high school and the AI model. So when we say like the new model from ChatGPT is out, it's basically like the brain.
And so when you take a test, you know, you might study, you might go to watch YouTube videos, you go to class, you go to office hours, and you're learning more and more. You're not memorizing everything, but you're learning more and more. And almost like your IQ is getting better at whatever task you're learning. And then that is basically what you use to get a perfect score on the test.
You're not memorizing every word of the textbook and regurgitating it, but you're basically getting a better proficiency around it, and then you can do better on whatever subject that is. So they're basically training these models or these brains on the entire internet so that it gets better at everything across the board, from diagnosing a car to, you know, something, you know, planning a party or something like that.
And then Basically, these models have what's called a context window, which on a test you can think of as a cheat sheet. And so the more information we can put on the cheat sheet, the better we can, you know, have it memorized and go and remember on a test. And so when you combine basically smarter models and bigger cheat sheets, um, and then access to things like the internet, or, um, you know, for example, for us, getting access to things like Techmetric or Google Ads or anything like that.
You know, really the, the goal is to just set these brains up for success. And once we kind of saw it getting better at using the internet and using different tools, we saw like, okay, we're going to be able to, you know, really make people's lives easier and use this as a part of our business to make it more efficient. Okay, that's super interesting.
So one thing that I've found helpful for me to understand AI and how it works in general is like the context window thing. Yeah. So if you just ask ChatGPT like a question about how to run an auto repair shop, it's just going to spit out junk. But if you give it all the context of our business, it's going to give you much more sophisticated answers.
So like the easiest, you know, for those that may not have as much knowledge about AI or how it works, like I love the human brain analogy because it's like, you know, an adult, if you've got a hot stove and it's red, you know that it's hot and it's like, don't touch it because it'll burn your skin. But like a 4-year-old, you know, or a 3-year-old, they literally don't know that.
And so like they're going to— everybody's done it. Like when you're a young kid, you touch something and it burns you and then it's like in your context window in your brain, you're like, okay, never doing that again because that was a horrible experience. And it's like, check for the rest of your life. Another example is, you know, and this is in your section in our AI training, which everyone definitely needs to come to in July.
It's on the Friday before Key2Key in Houston. You know, basically your section on how to get more out of AI is, it talks a lot about giving as much context as possible. And so the anecdote that we use is for a shop owner is everybody's got a shuttle probably, you know, you take customers to and from their house. And so, you know, a human who has like a 20-plus-year context window adult brain, if you told them, hey, we take customers to and from their house at the shop, they would generally understand that that doesn't— like, there are edge cases.
Like, if you in Houston, Texas got in the shuttle and you were like, hey, my house is in Florida, the shuttle driver would be like, okay, well, I'm not going to drive you to Florida. That's like a 20-hour drive or a 10-hour drive. But an AI, you know, like a super brain AI, it might be like really excited to work and it might work 24/7 and it might be like the smartest thing in the world, but it would just take the command and it would be like, Okay, yeah, I'm taking the customer home and it would get in the car and drive.
And so the more that we, as far as I understand it, and correct me if I'm wrong, the more that we can basically point AI, which is like, think about it like a human, like they work 24/7, they're the smartest person in the world, you know, and they just, they want to work, you know, it's like, and you can have 100 of them.
The more we can point them at, you know, a business model or at like data or at a, you know, like Todd's concept is how we like talk about it. The more effective you can be. So do you want to talk a little bit about, you know, Todd talks about this a lot. He's like, everybody's trying to use AI, but they don't have a business model, you know.
So do you want to talk about how that kind of clicked in your brain before you decided to join us full-time? Like, you know, it's not just AI, it's fine, it's marrying AI with somebody with a lot of like industry knowledge or wisdom or experience or stuff like that. Do you have any thoughts on that? Yeah, no, I think, I think Another analogy we use is just think of it like an employee.
It's your smartest, most eager employee, but it's their first day. Yeah. And so you have to really guide them. They have to get access to the tools you use, and that is how you can set them up for success. They can't just come in and magically read your brain. They are getting smarter, but they're not reading your brain. But before you go on to the next one, it's like opening a ticket in Techmetric and closing the books or closing a ticket or checking in a customer, like a human, like you have to teach them a couple of times how to do it.
Like, just like an AI, like you wouldn't get a human on their first day and be like, oh, they suck. It doesn't work. Yeah. You know, like it's not working. Like I see people all the time with ChatGPT. They're like, oh, it's wrong, you know, like it's not working. Yeah. It's like if you hired somebody and you just told them to go to work, they would do stuff wrong.
It makes no sense. But after like literally 1 day or 2 days of them opening a repair order, or closing it or uploading a picture into the inspection part of TechMetric. Like they get really fast at it. Yeah, because that's how it works. So anyway, I hate to interrupt, but I love that analogy, thinking about like a human. So continue in talking about how marrying it with industry wisdom and experience and stuff.
Yeah. So I mean, what we've found, especially as the models get smarter and better at using tools, and when I say tools, I'm saying the internet to look things up that they don't memorize. I'm thinking of Techmetric, I'm thinking of Google Ads and all of the different— RingCentral, all the different things we use. It's tools and then it's those steps. Yeah. And so the fact that this business has the auto hospitality model and it is just, it is so well trained and so well kind of laid out for how we run this business, it actually makes using AI so much better and it kind of increases the probability that we'll go from, oh, this is
a helpful tool at helping me automate a certain task to this can fully automate a certain task because the way we coach on doing things is like very detailed and very disciplined. And so by having that and having access to the data and kind of the standard operating procedure, is a perfect marriage for AI because every 3 months it gets a little smarter and we'll get closer to automating more and more tasks that, you know, we don't want our people to be bogged down with, like the button.
Okay, so a couple things. People generally, people get kind of scared of AI because they think it's going to like take their job away or, you know, it's going to— they're just, they just don't really know what it is. So it's like, I don't even want to dip my toe in the water, but I want you to— so continuing on the thought of like marrying two, like you couldn't just go open an auto repair shop because you have software engineering experience, right?
Like you could use AI to teach you how to like file the right paperwork to open an auto repair shop, but like you're not going to learn how to fix the car or— well, I don't know how to fix the car, but you're not going to— you don't have the operating procedure. Okay, so I like to tell anecdotes because it makes more sense.
So like what are a few, a handful of workflows or use cases in our business that you've utilized? Like, okay, here is how the executives and the management team think about the business. Here's how they think about the data. Here's the questions they're trying to answer. Here are the tasks that we do every single day in the business. How now that we have this superpower AI, Chief AI Officer, how do we point your talents into the operating model to make it more efficient?
Like, do you have any use cases you can think of? Yeah, I think like the simplest one that kind of touches on both of those. And this was one we implemented immediately a year ago, and we're kind of way more advanced now, but it's just, you know, what makes our model Auto Hospitality so good is just the way we answer the phones and the way that we sell jobs.
And we have very specific scripts on how to do that. And so we built, you know, basically a tool in ChatGPT that can take any sort of, you know, thing you're selling, a water pump, brake job, whatever, and put that into, you know, because we have those scripts, actually tailor that script to whatever that part is and then to whatever that customer is.
So we're kind of combining our standard operating procedure plus the data that is, you know, what we're trying to sell. And that has allowed us to have consistency across all of our shops, you know, and we've grown since we implemented this. To basically answer the phones. Like, it's just even, even better, like even more consistent. And so that's a very simple example of kind of marrying the data plus the standard operating procedure and AI just, you know, reducing friction there.
Yeah. So that's kind of like where it started. And you said last summer, like very simple, like, okay, we read scripts to our customers when we're presenting work, total investment, and then we were able to create kind of out-of-the-box ChatGPT tool to help new service advisors be able to like build a custom script immediately. Okay, so fast forward to kind of some of the things we're doing now and maybe we'll talk, maybe this isn't the best setting to talk about Codex and Claude and all of like the tools we're using now.
But one of the things that we are using those tools for is connecting basically, actually let's just rip the bandaid off. Let's talk about it. So Codex is, as I understand it, it's ChatGPT, but it's on your desktop, it's on a laptop or a computer. It's not on your phone like in the cloud. What most people that are listening to this probably understand as ChatGPT on their phone, correct?
So it, it can be, but I think, I think the best way to explain Codex is it's ChatGPT, but it can access everything on your computer and it can run for longer and longer amounts of time, which allows it to do harder and harder tasks and validate its answer, which is the big thing because it basically checks its work before it gets in front of you.
So it wastes less of your time. Everyone hates to get a response from AI that's wrong. And so by Codex being able to run for this long amount of time, we're just getting much more reliable responses to whatever sort of task we're trying to do. Okay, so let's go backwards to try and explain how Codex works or something like this works and where it's going.
You know, 2 years ago, 3 years ago, you asked ChatGPT to write a poem for you and it's like, that's pretty cool. And now, but if you asked it like, if you just asked out of the box ChatGPT, like, what's my best record? What's my, who's my best service advisor in the shop? Like, obviously it wouldn't know. Like it would be like, well, you'd have to tell me who your service advisors are first.
But now we have Codex that is basically ChatGPT advanced mode and it's on your laptop and you can use it to write code. To connect to your tools is what you're saying. And your tools— think about a human. Think about a human and what tools they use. They use Techmetric, they use RingCentral, they use Gmail, they use Ramp as our credit card, they use QuickBooks or NetSuite or whatever our ERP is.
And you can basically ask ChatGPT, hey, go connect to that tool that has all of that context and data in it and report back to me what you find. Instead of having to like dump, you know, what I was doing 2 years ago is I was downloading spreadsheets out of Techmetric and putting them in ChatGPT and trying to, you know, make decisions out of it.
So an anecdote to tie it all up is, like you said, the phones where we're at today versus last year on the scripts is I can point the AI machine gun, I can point it at Techmetric and at our phone system and I can actually have it download all of the phone calls and transcribe them and run them through ChatGPT. Which one of these are, you know, customer opportunities?
Which one of them are calling for a brake opportunity or an oil change or a state inspection? And how well are we converting them? And then it goes into TechMetric and it says, did this phone number show up? Is it a customer that spent money? And I can actually very fluidly get data out of both of those systems now where I literally couldn't do that 2 years ago.
2 years ago, You know, and for 40 years, Todd has taught the very— the number one thing in our business is the phones. Listen to your phone calls. Make sure your customers are experiencing customer service, hospitality, and make sure your service advisors are answering the phone with the Anytime presentation. Well, what that looked like even 2 years ago was go into your VoIP software, download it like 10 MP3 files.
You know, that takes 10 minutes because the internet's slow or whatever. Manually listen to them and there's no transcript. So you just have to listen to the first one. Oh, that's a vendor call. Listen to the second one. Oh, that's a really good customer looking for an update. Listen to the third one. Oh, that's a sales call. We can coach on that.
Let's save that for later. Oh, here's a— here's somebody listening to the Anytime script and you get one data point and then you like email it to your manager and it's like, okay, we can coach on this tomorrow in our morning meeting. Whereas now I can literally have AI listen to 10,000 calls all at the same time. And like, hey, Codex, go and find me 10 calls where we dropped the ball and didn't convert the customer.
You know, and then it just works for 30 minutes straight, which it couldn't do 2 years ago. And it brings them back to me. It's like the most, it's the most crazy thing in the world. So I'll get off my soapbox and hand it back off to you. But that's like one use case that I'm seeing a tremendous amount of value. You know, do you have any other use cases that we're kind of automating that might open the minds of some shop owners to AI?
Yeah, I think I love I love what you bring up with the kind of the calls all the way through to, you know, the money in our bank account, essentially. Like a click on Google turns into a phone call, which turns into an RO, which turns into, you know, a mix of approved and declined jobs, and then that hits the bottom line.
And so for us to be able to kind of connect that vertically with a tool like Codex has given us so much more kind of insight into the leads that we're generating, which, you know, one of the biggest things about the concept is, you know, you get more people to show up and you increase your ticket average. And so I think the inbound call center story is just super powerful where you had listened to some calls manually and just had this thesis around like, man, you know, our service advisors are amazing, but they love to sell jobs.
Don't love as much to get cars to show up for an appointment. And, you know, if we could kind of train people to be specific for just that, you know, could we essentially increase that ticket app or could we increase that show rate? And so we took that thesis and had Codex run for pretty much days at a time, accumulatively, and kind of prove out that theory.
That, man, if we transcribed 10,000 calls across our shops, then from those calls we figured out who actually showed up and then what was their average ticket and on different types of jobs. And so we were able to see, man, we think there's meat left on the bone. We're well above the industry average already, but there's meat left on the bone. And so that allowed us to build basically a platform that our inbound call center team uses to essentially, you know, raise our— I mean, it raised our booking rate by 50%, which is just mind-blowing.
Yeah, we could not have done that without AI and Codex. Yeah, it's actually like Charlie— yeah, Charlie said to me on the phone the other day, he's like, Joe, I don't need to look in a computer. There are cars everywhere. It's like, it's working anyway. But the number you're talking about is, you know, the calls that roll over to the shop floor have a 42% arrival rate.
And the calls taken in the call center have a 61% arrival rate. And so it's like, bang, like that is data that we are— that is coming into our systems that we're pointing AI at and we can validate with the tools. It's like it's gotten so granular that now we've got it broken out into buckets of lead type. I don't even know if you know this.
It's like how many calls across our platform were oil changes or state inspections? How many were tire estimates? How many were brakes? How many were alignments? How many were second opinion from dealer? That's a really good one. And then connect it to— so how many were there? Our number one lead source is definitely oil change. It makes sense. And how many of those showed up and what is the ticket average?
And so here's a good one. Second opinion from dealer. If you're a shop owner listening to this, you know that that's like a money ticket. That's like you want to get that customer in. And the data suggested that we had like a $1,700 ticket average, which makes sense. It's a broken car. They're a customer who's accustomed to spending money at the dealership who has higher than average prices, and they're looking for a second opinion, which means they already are having a bad experience with another company.
And we have the opportunity to earn their business. And we found that we had a low booking rate. And so it's like, okay, what can we— we had a low booking rate but a high ticket average. So what kind of initiatives can we put in place in the business to get that? Like, you want to get that as high as possible. So we implemented— we just do 15% off, you know, just as a first-time customer.
We'll just give you 15% off that dealer estimate and then we'll get you in the door. And oftentimes it's not even that, it's some completely other thing. But what we found is it doesn't matter. We just have to get the customer in the door so that they can experience hospitality. Yeah. And experience the systems in the business. So it's really, it's really like alignments.
You know, we have a lower booking rate on alignments, so it's like, okay, we're looking at are we charging too high for our alignments? Like, are customers just more price conscious and they push through the Anytime presentation harder, should we look at that? And it's, it's less about— you can get analysis paralysis and looking at all the data, but it's like, think about the business a lot.
This is how I use it. At least think about the business a lot. Where are there areas to improve? How can I use AI to get unstructured data out of the phones and out of Techmetric and convert it into like an actionable thing that drives car count or drives ticket average or whatever? So I love it. I'll pause there. Is there anything else you want to touch on, on, on Just systematizing the business in general so that it becomes AI native.
You know, like Todd did such a good job systematizing literally like every objection, you know, every type of car breaks the same way. Like, how do you handle a new customer introduction? Like that allowed you to infect the company with AI and make us AI native. Do you want to talk about like why that's important? Yeah, no, I think what we just talk so much about is we're, we're not, we don't think AI is some silver bullet that's just going to replace fixing cars or replace the hospitality aspect of the business.
Like what differentiates us from the shops down the street is our outrageous customer service. You know, it's the white glove service. And so we're not trying to, hey, how can we save, you know, some money on the bottom line by automating away the conversation with the, with the customer? Like that is not something that makes any sense for our business. And so where we see so much value out of AI and being AI native is just adherence to the concept.
Yes. So it's extracting using all that data. For example, you know, some other low or like, you know, use cases we have simple is just like AI call scoring. So not only do we generate the script with AI to be specific to what they're selling, but then we can score that conversation to know, did they talk about our 3-year, 36,000-mile warranty? Did they do positive, negative selling?
Did they do the things that Todd has proven over 40 years? If you do these things, you will be kind of a, you know, a, like a very above average shop in America. And so by us being able to extract all this data and put it in the hands of people like you on the management team, or shout out Mike Quinn, you know, or Glenn as GMs, or even the service advisors who are using these tools on a daily basis as well, you know, we can give them access to this data so that they can adhere better to the concept.
Yeah. So another example is so like the concept is actually just a series of steps. Yeah. And if you follow the steps, you will have a higher ticket average is the idea. And Todd has spent 40 years trying, you know, desperately and successfully getting people to take quality pictures and videos, you know, read the scripts and do positive, negative selling. You know, did you— did part of the script is did you watch the picture and video?
And so how are you using AI to like You know, Todd's got this thing called the board and bag. Yeah. So one of the things that we always look at is like the quality of the video and the quality of the little text that you sent to the customer. And there's just 100,000 repair orders now. I can't look through every single one and there's context to every single one.
But we can, you know, what we would do previously is literally click through random ROs that didn't sell. It's like you came in for a check engine light, you know, you came in for brakes, and you didn't get your brakes fixed. Why? Like, most people are— they have external locus of control. It's like, well, they didn't have any money, or, oh, well, he wanted to talk to his wife, or, oh, well, you know, he's just, you know, he gets paid next week and, oh, he just didn't want to do it.
Or like, he's going out of town on a trip. Like, they just say stuff. Whereas Todd has always been like, no, no, we dropped the ball. Like, where's the issue? And it's probably a series of steps that was missed in the presentation. So you want to talk about how you're using AI to kind of be a second set of eyes for people like Mike and Glen.
Yeah. In TechMetric. Well, I think we, we definitely want to use out-of-the-box technology. And I think if you're listening to this, not everyone is going to have enough shops to have a Chief AI Officer and be actually building a lot of these tools. So even for us, we would rather just use something off the shelf that's amazing and gets the job done.
So there's a lot of great out-of-the-box technologies like Rilla who help us with call scoring and call tracking and call coaching. But yeah, we've been able to really like because of the investment made and just making this a really AI-native business, we have people building things across the company. Our head of our call centers, Gary and Josh, you know, they basically build tools that fit their workflows.
And so, for example, the board bag audit, which Joe talked about, this is really the kind of the 50,000-foot view of are we adhering to the concept across our shops? You know, we're not shy about the fact that we are a growing business. And so our best people that have made this business what it is can't be in every store every day.
And so we're able to essentially plug into all this data across all these stores and surface the things that, you know, need to be looked at, like you mentioned. So we, you know, this was something we built just in this last couple days is basically, okay, we score all of our calls, but what about our videos? And so now we're transcribing all our videos and then figuring out which ROs did we have declined jobs on, and those videos get surfaced to Mike and to Todd so that they can actually see very quickly, you know, we're again, we're not taking the human out of the loop here, but we're trying to make it less or reduce
the friction to them being able to see into that business and see, okay, you know, we, we tried to sell a leak and the car wasn't even on, so you can't even see it leaking. So of course the close rate on that job is going to be lower. And how do we essentially, you know, do that with everything, whether it's how we fill out tickets, how we build the videos, you know, everything in adherence to the concept, like how do we surface that information so that Mike can then go and coach or Todd can go and coach.
If you were a shop owner listening to this and you're like, oh my God, I can't— yeah, like what, what would you do? Like if you're just a shop owner with one or a couple of shops and you just— all you do with AI is like you have ChatGPT on your phone and you're feeling probably like, okay, I'm behind the eight ball a little bit.
How do I keep up? Like, where would you start? First of all, yeah, I would say it's definitely not too late. I think so much of LinkedIn and so much what's said online is just, you know, they realize if you just say AI, their stock price goes up and it created this kind of ecosystem of like everyone just has to say they're doing everything with AI.
Okay, let's say you're a shop owner right now and you're listening to this and you're like, Man, I have one shop. Like, this is scaring the crap out of me. You know, like, how do I, how do I catch up? You know, how do I— sorry, I lost my train of thought. Let me, let me, let me start over. Ready? Yeah. Okay.
Let's say you're listening to this and you're a shop owner and you've had one shop for 20 years or you have a handful of shops, but you're— the extent of your AI knowledge is like you have ChatGPT on your phone and you play with it sometimes and you use it as like a pseudo-Google in a way. But you're not really applying it in the business.
You feel like, you know, you should. I feel even with as adept as we are and having you on the team, I feel overwhelmed sometimes. Like, are we doing enough? You know, but a lot of people don't feel that way. Like, how would you, if you were in their shoes, how would you kind of like attack learning the language of AI? Yeah, no, I'm really glad you asked this because I think we're talking about all these concepts and models and all these big words.
And I think there's always like it's not as scary as you think. And I think also just the world has kind of realized like, oh, if you talk about AI, you know, your stock price goes up. And so it just created this mass, like everyone's just saying how much they're doing with AI. And I think the world really isn't that far along to like, you know, like we haven't automated a huge part of our business and we use this, you know, religiously.
And so I would say don't be discouraged and I would honestly say take the transcript of this podcast. It's a good practice of taking that data, put it in ChatGPT and say, hey, where can I start? But my answer would be, yeah, I think just looking at the out-of-the-box tools I think is a great place to start. And whether that's Arilla or what Techmetric has or RingCentral has AI, just seeing where you can turn things on to start to get more value out of the AI.
I would not expect you to go and build all of the tools and things that we've done. I think what's been so amazing about this company is it's growing and we're not shy about our desire to grow and to have our concept be used in more and more shops across the country. The reason we're doing this is, 'Cause we want to be able to support hundreds of shops down the line.
And how do hundreds of shops adhere to the concept? And I think that required us to go all in on AI and really make sure that we're building the things that we're supposed to. So kind of a shameless plug, if you want to use the best AI technology in this industry, come to class, come to AI training next month. And just, you know, reach out to the Auto Hospitality Group and kind of start that conversation of getting to know us because so much of what we think about with AI isn't, oh, I can, you know, automate this manual task.
It is how does this allow us to make, you know, everyone's heard of the Blaylock location and the crazy record numbers they've done. How does every shop in America have access to the same or every shop in the Auto Hospitality Group have access to the same tools, data, and also like the, the ways that Blaylock or some of our great shops are running so that they can run things the same way.
And we're really building toward this. Okay, right now it's a lot of, okay, get the data to adhere to the concepts. But eventually, as we, you know, we keep betting that AI is getting better, the money is still being poured into The big companies, they're about to IPO and we'll see what happens there. But we believe these will continue to get better and we'll be able to make life easier and easier for service advisors and technicians and shop owners who are on our platform.
Yeah, the thing about like if I was a shop owner and I just had little literacy in AI, I would just— if I were in your shoes, what I would recommend is, you know, information is free now. Like it's like there's no friction to getting information. And the cheat code is to just ask the AI again. You know, just ask it again.
Just keep asking it. Like for example, 40+ years ago, Todd, you know, he had to get the knowledge out of his father-in-law's brain. Like it was kind of gatekept, you know, like how to have a business model and how to run a business and how to like, what an earnings multiple was. You know, he tells that story all the time. Like, you know, get audited financials.
Like if the earnings multiple thing, like if you leave your money in the business, it's worth a multiple of your earnings. If you take it out, you have to pay tax on that to go spend it on stuff. I like to keep as much as I can in the business, yada, yada, yada. That was literally context that was just in his father-in-law's head and he had to get it out in order to start his business.
But now it's like we had the internet before, but you couldn't talk to Google for 3 minutes about some complicated issue in your business like you can basic ChatGPT. And so I would say, you know, and following up on the platform thing, like there are like 40 years ago there weren't best practices groups out there and now AutoShop Answers literally exists and you can like one, you can just keep spamming the ChatGPT button, like keep just using the tool as much as possible and trying to teach yourself.
But number two, like shameless plug, like that is kind of the whole idea of the platform. The whole idea of the platform is like, hey, if you partner with Auto Hospitality Group, like we're going to lift your numbers. Yeah. And that's it. And we're going to experience arbitrage as a platform. That's like the whole playbook. So what happens when you come on the platform is inbound call center immediately.
So you're going to get more cars. Like we have the data internally to suggest that like if we're answering the phone with a consolidated service professionally, not only is the phone going to ring less at the shop floor, to allow us to be more productive, productive and talk to customers in person and get better service. But two, you're going to have a higher booking rate because the guy answering the phone is a pro and he's not busy talking to 7 other customers looking for updates, you know.
So you're going to get more cars, you're going to get more access to visibility in terms of operationally, are my shops— is my shop or are my shops executing the concept? Like, do I have access to a tool where I can look and see that all my team members are putting videos on the on the, on the inspection reports, like, are they adhering to the scripts?
Are they selling in the way that we want them to adhere to? And then the last thing is just learning from, from people like us. So I would just stick around the concept as much as possible, stick around people that are, that are, that are like, that's kind of the cheat code, you know, like having a consultant. Todd was a consultant 6 years ago, like trying to figure something out by yourself is always going to be harder than just like going and finding somebody else that's figured it out.
And copying them. You know, one of Tommy Mello's rules is success leaves clues. And so it's like we've stolen a lot of stuff, including the inbound call center from his company, from their industry. And it's like, just clone them. Just learn from somebody that's doing it in their space and try to do it in your space. So let's get back on AI.
It's moving really, really fast. Like we were talking about in the car on the way over here, 3 years ago, it was like Write me a poem, you know? And then like words come out. And then a year ago, the deep research function kind of was getting popular. And it's like, oh my gosh, it can like Google 100 websites and like bring back report, like data.
Like that's cool. What can we use that for? And I use it for a lot of stuff, you know? But it's like, you know, it's like kind of growing in the direction. And then in December, right? Yeah. Do you wanna talk about how it like learned how to, work for 20 minutes straight and now it's working overnight. I'm sure you have prompts running right now.
Yes, I do. I want to hear what prompts you're working on right now. But do you want to talk about how fast it's moved in just 3 years and then dovetail that into where you think 1, 2, 5 years from now is both in the world and in our company? Yeah. No, I love this question because when I'm done with work, this is what I go read about.
I'm not on social media. I'm like, okay, what came out today? Where can we use it in our business? And I think, yeah, it's a blessing to love what you do. I think I see that a lot here. But yeah, to answer your question, you know, it's always kind of— you could see just— you could see the vision where, you know, if it could generate all this text, like, you could have asked it 3 years ago, like, tell me how to run an auto repair shop, and it can kind of like hit the right bullets, but it gets too many things wrong.
And it's just, you know, it's not— it's too surface level. And so, but you could see the kind of the, like, you know, the vision was there. And so over time, it's just gotten more and more reliable and just more and more thorough. Like, it's almost like, you know, your IQ, like, as you're growing up, you just get smarter. Like, some of it is the learned experiences and the access to tools.
But some of it is you just get smarter. These models have just gotten smarter and understand just the world better and how to interact with it in business, which has allowed it to get all of these new capabilities. That's how we think about it as a business is we track all these different use cases across our business from turning the customer concerns into the call script and all of these things.
All the way to more complicated use cases like doing a three-way match for accounting. And not every use case is at a good point to where it's automated. But as every 3 to 6 months when a new model comes out or a new way to use the model comes out, we see some of those use cases become— they get to that threshold.
Where we're like, wow, we can actually offload this. This makes our service advisor or, you know, the like data analysis that we talk so much about, that makes Joe's life so much easier. He can look at the business in so many different ways with the same amount of hours because of that threshold that was hit. And so, you know, in 2025, at the very end, like the kind of breakthrough that happened was the models from OpenAI, which is ChatGPT, and Anthropic, which is Claude, became reliable enough to run for 20 to 30 minutes.
And we've been seeing this in software engineering for even longer. And that's again, because that's my background. I kind of see that and I'm like, man, how can that, how can it run for 30 minutes coding? How can it run for 30 minutes on Todd's concept on some sort of workflow in Todd's concept? And so every time a new model comes out and again, we're in that, We're in this phase where we're filming this, where the government just shut down the next big model, which is called Fable, that people are raving that is the next step change.
We're about to find out whenever they unban it, does that then allow us to get to a place where we can fully automate some of the AP tasks that are manual and weigh down on our controller and our accounting team? Because across the business, we're so AI native, we have people using, you know, it's not just me as a software engineer using Codex or Joe as someone who gets so much time with me using Codex.
It's, you know, people across the entire business from the back office to the front of the house to the back of the house to the call center using this every day, figuring out what's it good for, what's it not yet good enough for, and really just building like that. It's legitimately a new skill like riding a bike. You know, you fall to the left, okay, lean more right, fall to the right, and then eventually you get it.
It's a big feel thing with these models of, I can kind of tell like, oh, this is probably not the right, you know, we're not sending our P&L, it's not doing our P&Ls right now because we know that's way too many manual steps to give to AI. And there's great systems out there that can help us with those P&Ls. And so, you know, where I see AI going is just continuing to get smarter.
And continuing to get better at using the same tools we use on a daily basis. For example, we're not just giving a spreadsheet to AI and saying like, okay, make our, you know, match this with all the tech metric data so that we know every dollar that came into our business is accounted for. We're having AI connect to Ramp, which is a great AI company.
We are having it connect to NetSuite. We are having it connect to QuickBooks. We are having it connect to Techmetric and use those tools the way that, like, that we use them. And that is really what I think a point that I want to get across is that the AI is not necessarily just a black box that just outputs, you know, the automated workflow.
It doesn't just output the P&L, but it uses NetSuite to use the P&L. And you'll start to see that. I think that'll be more and more mainstream And people will start having that aha moment that they'll remember of like, oh, I see what he meant by, we're not asking AI to do the impossible. We're just asking AI to use the same great systems that we use on a daily basis to make our lives easier, to essentially be our interns or new grad employees.
It really is crazy. It's like a person. It's like raising a kid. I've never raised a kid, so I can't speak from experience, but it's like, When you're a baby, it's like you have to be like constantly monitored 24/7 to like make sure that everything's okay and everything's working properly. And then you get a little bit older and like you can leave them for a little bit, you know, and then they still are there.
It's a great example. And then it's like, you know, they go through grade school and like you can, you know, go to baseball practice and you can leave the kid and you know that he's got like the skills to like survive at baseball practice and he like knows how to hit the ball and like engage. And then it's like they get their driver's license and they can kind of like go drive around town.
And I remember being 16 and like driving to College Station for the first time and it was like an hour and a half. And it's like I wasn't allowed to like go further out, you know, because I probably wasn't like— the model in my brain wasn't like developed enough, you know, to be like where it's guaranteed to my parents that like he knows how to get home safely.
Yeah. You know, and then I remember like being 18 and like flying out of the country for the first time. And then like eventually you become an adult and your parents like it's— they don't, they don't, they don't monitor your activity, you know, it's fully automated. Yeah, it's like totally fully automated. And it's like that's a 20-year process. But like, think about all the context that's in my brain from 20 years.
It's like how to take care of yourself, how to make food for yourself. Like a 6-year-old doesn't know how to do any of that. They can't drive a car, they can't make doctor's appointments, they can't like make full sentences, but eventually they can. So, you know, it's kind of the same thing in accounting right now, like in all the businesses, parts of the business.
But you mentioned back office a handful of times, so I want to follow up on that. Like the back office particularly is less of the Wild West because like it's such critical— like if the AI messes up in the call center, it's like fine, you know, like the service advisor can still like— is a human and human in the loop and they can talk to them.
Whereas if I'm paying an invoice and I get a decimal wrong, or if I'm doing the P&L, or if I'm making payroll, and I get a decimal wrong and I pay somebody, you know, $10,000 instead of $1,000, that's like, that's like a huge mistake, you know? And that's like, that's like the flying out of the country. You don't let a 6-year-old do that.
You might let them like try to ride their bike down the street, but you're not going to let them like, you know, do things that maybe an adult— you need an adult in the loop for. So do you want to talk about more like kind of the risks we're seeing in the back office and then, you know, where do you think the most leverage is in the back office and where it's going in the next couple of years?
Yeah, no, I think, yeah, we really try to assess the risk of every use case, just like you said. And so we can be more aggressive with ones that are lower risk. Like, it, you know, it makes a lot of sense. I think the back office, you know, this is so important to us because one, we want to attract amazing business owners who want to join the Auto Hospitality Group, and for us to be able to make their lives easier with a centralized back office that is AI-enabled and AI-native is a massive selling point.
You can talk to Charlie, you can talk to the Slacks we get, and we actually run our entire company off Slack. Why? Because Slack is a very AI-native platform. It's what OpenAI, who makes ChatGPT, it's how they run their business. That's why we decided to do that. We can send things into Slack, take things out of Slack because we're trying to mold our business to be as AI-forward as possible so that when the next model comes out or when the government, you know, unbans the model, you know, we're ready to take advantage of that.
And then the owners that are a part of the hospitality group, Auto Hospitality Group, have peace of mind that we are doing as much as we can. And so I think just from the back office, I think, you know, this business, AP, and the amount of volume our shops do and the scanning of invoices, you know, for example, scanning an invoice and actually having like an AI read it like a human as opposed to just like taking the text out of it is something that was literally impossible 3 years ago.
Yeah. And so now we're able to take the next best model and have it read that invoice. And, you know, we're not— it's not perfect. And I'm sure everyone knows here there are some— I've seen some egregious looking invoices. Yeah, it's crazy where there's just like, like Sharpie. Like, if you can't read it, the AI is not going to probably do better than you.
So it's not going to be perfect. But these are examples of use cases that As it gets better at reading that invoice or making that next decision of, is this something that needs to get escalated to the controller or to the CFO or to the service advisor to fix because they clearly fat-fingered, you know, a parts number? You know, those are things that it doesn't automate our entire back office, but it makes it much less frictionless and it allows the people in the back office to think more about, you know, the, the more important questions that drive the business of, you know, are we getting the best deals for our parts and are we consolidating
purchasing well enough? And, you know, there's so many things, higher leverage things that they can do that AI will free them up for. And it's already happening today where they still, you know, I think a big thing to mention is like a human still has to own the outcome. Yeah. So if AI today could perfectly put out a P&L, our CFO would still have to own that outcome.
And if it's wrong, it falls on our CFO. So if we can automate it, great. And then he can focus on other things. Strategy. But, you know, until we can confidently have it to where those humans are comfortable, you know, letting— like, they still have to own that outcome. And so anything in the back office, which is higher risk and affects our entire business, You know, we really need AI to get to that level where, you know, we can automate things but still feel confident in the humans who own that outcome, that it's just as good as it was when it was fully done by humans.
Okay. Just for some context too on the, on the accounting and like looking at risk tolerance, like one of the things that I learned recently is Matt, you know, Keys, our CFO superstar, he was like, yeah, our business in accounting is pretty much 98% accounts payable. Like, we order a lot of parts and we have to pay a lot of parts bills and make sure that they're right.
And about 15 to 30 times a month per location, there's an instance where it's a 90% chance that the service advisor put the wrong number into TechMetric, and then the invoice shows up and it's different, and then the numbers don't match. Okay. And so it's like, and so we just were riffing one day and it's like, Okay, well, what if theoretically we could put the number in right every single time?
And Matt was like, well, then I would, I would free up like 80% of the manual labor, like the fires that we're doing in the accounting office. And so it's like, okay, how can we use AI to, to kind of leverage, be leverage in this situation? We first thought about getting Codex to just automatically input the numbers off of the invoice directly into the system so that it would theoretically be 100% accurate every time.
And it's not there yet, but, but we'll get there. But it's like a perfect— so what we're doing is we're literally scanning the invoice and it's picking out the quantity, the cost, and RO number, the RO number, right? And then part number. And then it's inputting all those into Tekmetric or no, no. Then it's scanning against the numbers in Tekmetric every day before we close all the tickets.
Okay. And that way it's allowing us to basically be the second set of eyes. It's not inputting anything. But it's double-checking at the end of every day to make sure that, uh, none of the numbers are wrong. And then if the numbers are wrong and something has been posted and it slipped through the cracks, now we've got an agent that can, like, that the controllers in the accounting office can ping people on the shop floor or managers.
Like, like, think about it, they were, they were having to manually type out emails, and there's like sentiment, and you want to make sure that the people on the shop floor don't resent people in the back office because they're nagging them. And then the people in the back office want to make sure that they're not like disrupting operations and they get frustrated when operators are not like putting in the numbers right.
But it's kind of like a, you know, everybody thinks they're contributing more to the pie than maybe they are like as a collective. And so there's like human parts of that that can be automated, which is like, oh, you could just have an AI agent automatically through Slack. That's why we switched to Slack. Stuff like this, can we automate the poking basically of the general manager like, hey, you posted a ticket with the wrong number, you need to unpost that and you need to fix that so that we can reconcile on time.
And then it just automatically sends them that thing every day so that it's a thing that's offloaded from Sadie or somebody in our accounting department. So we're just getting started. It's 2026. We're almost done with the podcast, but I want to hear your I wanna hear your clickbait, doomer, or euphoric, like, are you a utopia guy? Like 2030, like 5 years from now plus, like where do you think, like what's the clickbait?
Like what is like your, what do you think's happening, man? Where are we going? Are we just gonna automate computers away? Am I not gonna need a computer? Like what's gonna happen? Gosh, it's such a hard, I mean, people talk about this stuff all day and I just, I don't know, our business is so interesting and there's so much to do that I try to like not think too much about like what is life going to be like in 10 years and are we going to have universal basic income and all this stuff.
I generally am like a positive thinker and optimist. And so I hope that it kind of can democratize like it's already kind of democratized information. Like I think you're seeing it now with universities and You know, kind of being like, oh my gosh, we don't necessarily sell the same value proposition we do today that we did, you know, 20 years ago when you had to get a degree to understand the three financial statements.
And so I think democratizing information for the whole world is amazing. And I think hopefully we'll continue to kind of raise the floor on like what the average human's life looks like in terms of, you know, are we going to automate all jobs? I think The argument for it is— the argument against that is basically that every time we've automated something in history, the Industrial Revolution, you know, we used to have all the factory workers and a lot of those factories are now fully machines like textiles.
And, you know, that actually works right now at, you know, 2% unemployment. And the average human's life is much better than it was working in those factories. And so I think the hope would be we'll probably find more human connection, like things that humans value, services. Honestly, what our service advisors provide here, like we are kind of, people love this industry right now because it's very insulated from AI.
Because we provide a service to people who are scared to get their car fixed and get screwed over and have no clue why their car is like, you know, has like a bunch of sounds coming out of it and to be able to talk to a human who's like, it's going to be okay, we'll get that fixed for you. Like, there's a lot of value in those human-based services.
And so, you know, I, I honestly, I guess I would, if I had to pick a side, I would say we'll figure out more jobs to have. But yeah, we'll see. I think, I think more specific to our industry, I think this industry will look you know, somewhat similar from, you know, the side of it's still a human relationship. Like we talk a lot about with the Auto Hospitality Group is like the product we're selling is not fixing the car.
It is like the relationship and the peace of mind that, you know, your kids are safe driving back to college or something like that. And so I think that value proposition and that relationship will not change from AI, but ideally we'll be able to grow our business, be able to support more and more shops at a high level and have that data side so kind of locked in that, you know, so much of the business just becomes how can we have a better relationship with the customer?
And really, you know, the fixing the car is kind of table stakes. And so I think, I think this industry will, will look somewhat similar still, you know, if even if AI keeps exponentially getting better, I think we should just be able to provide a better service to our customers. And I think our goal is to continue to provide an even differentiated service on that.
Man, well, that's exciting. I think that's our time. But, you know, the last thing I'll say is you say it in your AI training, you know, when the iPhone came out in 2007, it was hard to imagine a world where you're using that technology to like call an Uber and get in a stranger's car or like rent a stranger's house. Yeah. From them and then fly across the country like, like you never would have like put that together just because you can put a screen on a phone, you know, and you don't need a keyboard, you know.
And the way I like to think about it is, you know, everybody in the back office, everybody in every position, mainly even technicians, like you come to work and you use a computer every day. Like that's just how it is. You use your phone every day and it would be insane to think about Macky, our CFO, or Sadie, our controller, using doing their job, like showing up to work with like a paper and pencil.
Yeah. You know, like no computer. And I think that that's where it's going. You know, it's like 5, 10, 20 years from now, it'll be like completely unreasonable to expect that like every single person's not just like totally, you know, has an army of agents that are helping them do work. And I think it'll just free us up to tackle more creative and interesting products, projects, and that, you know, at the end of the day, the car can't fix itself.
I don't think, maybe robots will, You know, maybe robots will come and fix the car, but I think we got a while for that for shop owners. And as Todd says, we're going to be the first ones in, you know, if robots start fixing the cars. So with that being said, I think we got to wrap things up. This has been episode— I think we're on like 28 or something.
MasterTech to Millionaire. We've got an amazing weekend ahead. We're talking about accounting. We're doing key to key courtside. But next month we've got in July on the Friday before training, we've got our AIX. Autoshop Answers training. We've got a whole 8-hour program where we dive into, you know, Codex and Claude and how we're using tools that are off the shelf to automate these workflows that are more specific.
So we can't wait to see you there. Please sign up. And then, yeah, we'll see you next time. This has been Master Tech to Millionaire. That's the pod. For more information, reach out to Todd Westerland at 925-980-8012 or visit autoshopanswers.com. You can get more information about key-to-key to callbacks, uh, courtside. We have a VIP Rack Attack Day where you spend an entire day in the trenches with our team learning this perfected business model.
We offer leadership classes, we have an AI Academy, and also get more information about auto shop callbacks. We have auto tech training. We are literally your one-stop shop. Once again, that number for Todd Westerland is 925-980-8012.
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Episode Transcript: Kent Bullard: Hello everybody, and I am excited to welcome you back to our technical webinar series for you technical, uh, gearheads out there. Very excited to cover some great content today. Today we're gonna be talking about lubricants, the services there, uh, a lot of great stuff. What I'd love to do is just invite some fantastic trainers, Nick and Jim, on stage with us. They've got some fantastic content for you, uh, talking about oil lubricants plus the service recommendations. It's not just about oil. Nick, Jim, welcome to the stage. Nick Pope: Glad to be here. Thank you, Ken. Glad to be here. Kent Bullard: Hello everybody. Uh, just so that we can get some ground rules laid down, uh, our goal with this series really is to, to provide some of the technical skills plus the critical thinking skills that'll help you be better at your job. There's a few things that we wanna keep in mind as we go forward into this. The first is that we're gonna be asking some questions, and we would love your participation. Those of you out there, let me know that your chat is working, 'cause this is how we'll do the polls later on, by giving me a one, two, or a three in the comments section. As we put these polls on screen, they're gonna have some answers to different questions, and the best way for us to see those is to just answer one, two, or three in the chat. Are you guys excited for some of the content you're covering today? Nick Pope: Absolutely. Jim Cokonis: Absolutely. Kent Bullard: Wonderful. Anybody out there in the, in the comments? Michael, I saw you, uh, jump in there. Let us know you guys are here. Hi, everyone. Um, as we get into it, I wanna make sure that we are, uh... We got a comment that said, "Sound stop," by the way. Uh, just to make sure that we keep things positive and constructive, there's a lot of things we're gonna cover today. Make sure that you guys are, uh, taking notes, taking key takeaways here, but most importantly, we wanna have a lot of fun with this. Tyler, I see you in the chat there. Michael. Awesome. With that said, I'm gonna give the time over to the, to the real experts here, to Nick and Jim Jim Cokonis: I just put a, uh, comment out there that says please ask questions, and we'll get to them as time allows. Because Nick, I think you'd agree, we would much rather speak with everyone than at them for- Nick Pope: I, I do agree. I, I think that we should make this conversational, have some good takeaways at the end of it, but by all means, everybody, please chime in with any questions, experiences, stories. We would love to hear about them. Kent Bullard: As we go into this, I'll be your guys' voice, uh, for the audience. I'm gonna be monitoring the comments for the most part as these guys go into this content. Uh, just we're here to help Jim Cokonis: So that being said, disclaimers. Um, I don't get into... In this short of a format, we're not gonna get into the difference between cenostoke and cenopoise and, and all those, um, terms of the tribologist. There you go. There's a piece of homework if you don't know what a, what a tribologist is- Tribologist ... you can go look that one up. Had the opportunity to speak to a couple of them. They're fascinating people, uh, and they're full of good information. But what we wanna do is, one of the things that I have enjoyed in my career, Nick, I don't know about you, is, is busting myths. Um, sometimes we hear things and information gets passed along by rote, and then we go look up information and look up data, and we go, "Well, that doesn't work the way I thought it did." And so we're not trying to call anybody out, tell you what oil to use, or anything else. Um, this is us calling ourselves, and hopefully everyone else, up to, you know, increase the level of professionalism and fact-driven decision-making as we take care of the motoring public. So you got anything to add to that, Nick? I mean... Nick Pope: I do. You know, we're just talking about oil right now, however, this is universally applicable to all fluids, right? Jim, I remember way back when Ford came out with Mercon V and, you know, they superseded it where you could use it to, uh, any product that used Mercon. And, you know, this is a really good informational s- you know, uh, part of our series where we're gonna really talk about concepts that are going to apply to other fluids, and there will be a lot of takeaways. You know, for me personally, I'll show some vulnerability. I've been in positions where I thought something and I was completely wrong. And, um, you know, for me, the takeaway was I, I learned that I was wrong, and I was aware more moving forward where I needed to keep up with things to keep on that cutting edge. Jim Cokonis: I have a, I have a good friend of mine says, "You know, I was about 10 years into the business and I was getting to the point where I was getting pretty confident and I was learning a lot of things, and I thought it all... I had everything figured out." And he said, "The longer I go, the more I realize I don't know." So that's that perpetual student. Um, l- so now that we've gone through that disclaimer, let's get back over into some of the things that we're going to talk about. Um- We're gonna talk about oil life because it's a big topic out in the field, and, you know, what manufacturers recommend, and I hear the chatter all the time. Um, but can oil last 10,000 miles? Do the maintenance systems work? How do they work? Are there any differences between them? You know, is the maintenance minder on a Mercedes the same as it is on a Toyota? Here, preview. No. Um, oil is oil. Just put that stuff in it. If it says 530 on the cap, put some 530 bottles in it and you're good to go. Is that true? Um, what are the facts? How, how important is the weight of the oil compared to the specifications that the oil meets? And then what does the car know? A lot of modern cars know a lot of things, and some of these sy-systems are quite sophisticated. But there's also things in service information that give us the details behind those recommendations, and we're gonna share some of those, uh, with you as well. So I'm just curious, I don't know if you have a poll for this one, Kent, but have you all ever had a conversation like this in your shop? Yes? No? Um, oil doesn't last that long. The manufacturers aren't building cars to last. They wanna sell you a new car, so they don't care if it, you know, if the oil doesn't last that long and the engine life isn't there. Um, cars will run low on oil before the service interval is reached. Can that be true? Yeah. Could it be because of the oil we put in it? There's a question, and I'm letting that sit out there for a minute. Um, I talked to a tribologist one time because one of the oils that I have been using for years personally, I'm not gonna even tell you what it is, but I'm like, it's a product and the base stock of it is what is used to lubricate jet turbines And then it has additive in it, and one of the additives that it has is ZDDP. Well, if you know anything about what's going on with oil additives and the formulations, you know that ZDDP is something that we have to add to motor oils these days if we're running an old flat tappet cam, like on an old small block or an old Ford. And one of the reasons we've taken the zinc products out of oil is because it can poison catalysts and poison O2 sensors, make them inoperative. So of course we're gonna get check engine lights. It can also, uh, you know, shorten the life of a cat. And so I asked this tribologist, I said, "How can you recommend this oil for a emission-controlled vehicle when it has an admittedly high level of ZDDP?" And here was the answer I got. Nick, tell me what you think about this if you, if you were to listen to this guy. He said, "Look at the flash point-" Yeah ... which is where the oil starts to smoke. If any of you guys are into cooking, you know that certain oils can take higher heat before they start to smoke and burn. Same thing with motor oils. Okay. What the motor oil is made out of and how well it's refined have an impact on what's called flash point. And he says, "If the oil doesn't flash off, the zinc doesn't escape." And that was the answer he gave me. What do you think about that? Nick Pope: I think that makes a lot of sense, and I would love to meet this guy. I'm sure you had some really other key takeaways from him. Do you have any more that stand out aside from that? Jim Cokonis: I had another conversation with another tribologist who built a different product. I won't get into all that. But he was explaining that certain people use products designed for hydrodynamic lubrication, which means, like, y- you know, in a, on a crankshaft, we want hydrodynamic lubrication. We wanna float the parts on a thin film of oil to maintain separation. If the pressures and the intensity ever go beyond that, then we have a situation where we need boundary layer lubrication, and the additives and the formulation of the lubricant are different depending on what we're trying to do. He says, "So if you use a product designed for hydrodynamic lubrication, like motor oil, in an area where the product doesn't have an oil pump and the ability to flow the oil in to maintain that layer, then you don't have the boundary layer lubrication to prevent wear." And since I was using that on some pretty specialized pieces of equipment, that was an education, too. And helped me understand why some people were erroneously using and recommending products because they weren't right for the application. There's another one. Um- Nick Pope: That, that's a good one. And have you ever ran across anything where somebody unconsciously used the wrong type of oil with, uh, having any type of long-term mechanical- That's a- ramifications? Jim Cokonis: That, that's a good one. Um, years ago I was doing a series of maintenance classes for a large organization, and the management team at this particular region, they shared with me that they had a relatively new European vehicle that they were doing all the service work on. Had a r- you know, consistent customer, they trusted them. They did all the work, and they were doing the oil changes on this vehicle, and with relatively low mileage, it developed an engine noise. They took it to the dealership And the dealership said, "We need to see all your service records." Kent Bullard: Mm. Jim Cokonis: And when they looked at the service records, and they looked at the oil that was on all the oil change intervals, the oil was changed within the intervals. It did not meet the specifications for that engine, and the manufacturer voided the warranty on the entire vehicle. Kent Bullard: Wow. Jim Cokonis: Yeah, yeah. Say that backwards. Wow. Wow. Okay. Um, so when you have a situation like that, and they want to take care of their client, of course, they're like, "What do we need to do?" And basically, the manufacturer and the dealer came back and said, "We have to install a new factory engine, and it has to be done at the dealership." And they paid for it, and it was a $15,000 lesson 15 years ago. Kent Bullard: So it's, it's essentially like you just installed the wrong part. Jim Cokonis: Yes. You're allowed to use things that meet the specification that aren't purchased from the dealer, but they have to meet the specification. And the oil that they were using did not. Um, other conversations came up about, you know, transmission fluid, and a lot of places like to use universal transmission fluid. And when you really dig into it and you look at it, and the- you'll see for this transmission, it's okay for top off, but you can't service the whole thing because something will happen with... You know, the additive package isn't right for that transmission. Or you'll also see things like, um, approved for use in this particular application once it's out of warranty. Think about that. Nick Pope: Mm-hmm. Jim Cokonis: So what are they saying? Well, they haven't had the- They're saying they haven't had the, they haven't had the independent testing done to prove, they're confident that it'll work, but they haven't had the independent testing done. Now, if I'm running a shop and I wanna take care of a client's car and I don't wanna get into a contest about who's right and who's wrong, I'm gonna go, "Okay, let me go find something that actually has the approval for that particular product." Make sense? Nick Pope: Yeah, it makes sense. You know, they're, again, kinda circling back to a comment that we alluded to on our first webinar, there's the difference between thinking and knowing, right? I think this is the right oil, but do I know it? And now, you know, uh, as things continue to evolve in our industry, right, that puts us in a position where we need to kind of run along that and, you know, continue to grow ourselves as technicians to keep on that cutting edge. I think about, uh... Go ahead, Kent. Kent Bullard: Oh, I was just gonna ask a, a question. Do you think that depending on the types of vehicles they're working on, they might make the assumption that taking this degree of, of due diligence or looking at these specialty, you know, lubricants and oils, that it is only meant for, like, performance vehicles? Mm-mm. No? Jim Cokonis: No. Um, there, there are non-performance vehicles and we, we've got a slide coming up here very shortly, um, that will get into some of that. And so when we talk about lubricants and fluids for vehicles, everything's got to align. Okay? The type of oil that's being used, its viscosity and performance is going to be different for the way the manufacturers designed that particular motor. And if we look at new engines, they don't have the passage sides and the, the same tolerances and clearances as some of the older products. And so if we try and run some of the older lubricant technologies in those engines, they are not gonna be able to get there. A lot of the wear happens on startup, and if the oil that you're running doesn't have the viscosity to get this thing lubricated fast enough, um, you're, you're gonna cause excessive wear on startup. And so, you know, everybody likes to say these oils are too thin. Well, one of the things we need to do in our minds is realize that the weight of the oil has a whole lot less to do with how well it lubricates than the actual makeup of the components and the type of machine work and everything else. So think about this. You can have a rotary pump, you can have a rotary pump with a clearance of two microns, which is thinner than a human hair, lubricated by diesel fuel. Diesel fuel is not thick. But it lubricates that component spinning at, you know, whatever relative to engine speed Now, if the diesel fuel doesn't have the right lubricity in it or we have a filtration system that isn't keeping it clean enough, then we'll have a situation where we'll end up getting wear and damage. So, you know, the viscosity is not necessarily what drives the lubrication. If you have water on the road, water is not thick. But if there's enough water standing, you can hit that with a 8,000-pound vehicle and hydroplane. You think there's hydrodynamic lubrication? You bet there is. So when we look at this, it's gotta be the material. It's gotta be design and tolerance. It's gotta be the filtration. The lubrication system may have some special things that are done, um, to it to help it handle the changes in loads. Um, what's the structure of the oil? How well refined is it? Um, one of the things I have said for a long, long time is that many of the oils that we sell in the United States as fully synthetic oils can't be sold other places in the country as fully synthetic because-- Or other places in the world. Other places in the world, fully synthetic means that it's gotta be Group IV or Group V base stock, which means it's fully formulated from chemical reactions. It's not made from dead dinosaurs. Um, so one of the interesting things that I learned in doing my research is that Group IV PAO oils are extremely durable. But the trick is, some of the additives that we use won't mix with PAO oil. So many fully synthetic oils are a blend of Group IV and Group V because the ester oils, the Group V fully synthetic oils, they will pick up the things that are used as additives to mix it in and make sure it's distributed throughout the motor. And so that brings us to that last piece of additives, and the additives are the key to success. And here's another interesting thing that I have heard from tribologists, and I'm, and I mean from multiple different companies Not all additives are, um, compatible. And you can add, quote, "an additive package" to a, an oil that's appropriate for the vehicle, and it can nullify the benefits of what that formulation met. Mm. And so I've always been personally hesitant to use, um, motor oil additives, personally. Now, I'm not telling anybody what to do, and you've gotta have your own conversations with your own suppliers, um, and make sure that what you're using is compatible with... The whole system's gotta work together. Does that make sense? Did I say that right, Nick? Nick Pope: It, it does make sense. And, you know, the, the tricky part to this is whether we use the right oil or not, there's not going to be an instant sign of failure in most cases, right? And when we think about the long-term picture, you know, um, d- I like to look at it this way. You know, we think about how we may have a certain water source that we drink on a regular basis, and over the series of time, we may start to not feel as good as we did once, you know, ever since we started drinking from this water source. And, you know, when we think about it with oil, it's, it's, it's the same thing, right? Over th- a series of time, the engine may be impacted in a negative way if we put the wrong engine oil in it. And- Circling back to why we do this, we do this to serve our customers, right? We hold ourselves to a high quality to, to be the professionals in our industry, right? That's, that's an honor and a privilege every single day. So we have to look at the long-term picture as well, and I think that's why this is really important that we're having these conversations. And, and Jim, you know, that, that engine story that you shared really, uh, stood out to me, right? Um, you know, the fact that it voided a warranty. Gosh, could you imagine if you had a vehicle that you were taken to a, a, a repair shop or, you know, a quick lube and they were putting the wrong oil in over and over again, and you had an engine issue, thought it was under warranty, and then bam, got hit on the head with a $15,000 bill? Oof. I, I would lose it, man. Jim Cokonis: Yeah. Oof, oof indeed. Kent Bullard: And at this, at the same time, who should be on the hook for that? Nick Pope: Right. Jim Cokonis: Yep. Well, I've always looked at it like this. We're the professional. Exactly. Absolutely. It's our job to know. It's our job to know. Um, so I actually went and just took some pictures of bottles because I find them fascinating, and so... Nick Pope: What kind of bottles, Jim? Jim Cokonis: Ha. Oil bottles. Oil bottles. Got Nick Pope: it. Jim Cokonis: Um, so this is one. This is Mobil 1 Extended Performance, and I love it says, "Protects for 20,000 miles guaranteed," with a little asterisk. Well, guaranteed how and what? And I'm not gonna get into all that, but this particular bottle carries the dexos1 Gen 3 approval. Okay? And then also on the, on the right side over here in this section, hopefully that shows up a little bit better, um- It talks about meets or exceeds the requirements of ILSAC GF-6A, API SP, SN-plus, SN and SM. Okay? So then it says it, it, it meets or exceeds the requirements of Chrysler, couple different Chrysler specs, and a Ford spec. And then recommended by ExxonMobil for use in applications requiring this other Ford spec, two of them there. And then it says, "Has the following builder approvals," the, the Dexos 1 Gen 3, and the Honda Acura HTO06. And so if I'm looking for things, I'm definitely gonna use this in anything that has these, these, these upper spe- specs with the Chrysler, um, 6395 and 13340 and the Ford, uh, M2C961. Um, but the 946, I'm relying on ExxonMobil for that. Now, I'm not telling you you shouldn't use it, because they may just not have gotten the individual approval on that yet. But if I'm trying to be sure on something that's under warranty, um, I may look for something that actually holds that approval. And then that's a bottle of 5-30, right? And so it has an API service of SP. Well, let's take a look at another bottle of 5-30. This is from Pennzoil, and it says it's full synthetic, 20,000-mile protection guarantee. But if we look at this one, it holds GF-7A, API SQ. It holds some, some Chrysler and Ford, um, formulated to meet or exceed But it doesn't carry the GM dexos spec. Okay? Now, maybe they've chosen not to pay for the m- the, the logo and the certification from General Motors on this one. What does that really mean to us? And so when we look at that, you know, these two side by side, when we look at them, we can determine, well, what, what will this work well in? What's the, uh, you know, what's, what's the best application for what I'm working on? So then I'm gonna show you guys a website that I use to visually do some of this. Now, there's kind of a disclaimer on this website, and it says it's designed to really compare performance within a specific standard and not necessarily to compare across standard systems. But I think there is a lot of things that we can learn from looking at some of these performance specifications. And Mike Kortaba, k- how do I... I need to figure out how to say your name, my friend. Um, Michael Kotarba? Did I do it right that time? Give me a thumbs up. Michael Kent Bullard: K. Jim Cokonis: Mike K. There we go. He says, you know, take a look, and we had this one oil that said it was SN or SN Plus. And if we look at API's standards, this is a graphic that looks at, um, eight specific sections of Oil performance. These are some standards, and I actually have all this information in the presentation. Excuse me. And so I'm just gonna pick, um, let's pick SN Plus. And if we look at how this oil is formulated, it's designed, and this is way better than some of the old oils. L- l- look at this performance standard for API SJ. It's like it puts a little splat in the middle, and the farther out you go from a zero to a 10, it's how, how well it performs those tasks under testing. That's what this is supposed to represent, okay? But if we look at this one and we say, "Okay, um, let's compare that to GM Dexos 1 Gen 3." Hmm Which one of those am I more focused on making sure the oil meets? I think when I look at this for fuel economy and oxidative thickening and the ability to control deposits and sludge, I would think that, that, that particular, um, certification would be important for the engine that I'm working with. Okay? Then we can look at some of the others too. Um, I think Mike said look at some of the ACEA ratings, right? And we can look at some of the newer ones from 2023. Hmm Okay? Do we see where some of these European standards may focus more on the durability and the oil life from a standpoint of conserving resources? And then we can look at Some of the Ford specifications. Now, I don't have all the Ford specifications here, but Ford runs an extended oil life monitor on several things, and let's look at some of those. Oh, look at that. That particular oil, I can tell you by looking at it, that's probably one of the diesel specification oils. And the reason I say that is because this is a oil that doesn't really go after, um, low-speed pre-ignition, and we'll talk about what that is. But it does weigh in pretty heavily on ac- uh, aftertreatment capability, which is typically something that's gonna happen on diesels. And then we can look at this particular oil, and obviously this would probably be one of the ones that Ford uses, and I don't have all these memorized off the top of my head, but that's a different performance standard, and Ford is probably using that on some of their boosted applications because they're targeting low-speed pre-ignition, which can cause almost instantaneous damage to an engine. What do you guys think of this? Is this kind of fascinating? If you've never looked at these... Let's take a look at some of the Mercedes ones. Mercedes is one that's known for running some pretty extended oil change intervals, and look at how far out on the charts they're targeting for performance with wear and so forth, but they're not really pushing their low-speed pre-ignition. Is Mercedes running a lot of boosted applications, or are they running a lot of naturally aspirated stuff? And that's the type of things that we need to look for, okay? Nick, does that bring up any questions for you? Nick Pope: Yeah, absolutely. I have one question. And, you know, looking at the Lubrizol website, what happens if we have a manufacturer who, you know, just we'll say has a specific oil for a 2009 model year and, you know, a newer model, you know, 10 years later has c- a wider band of coverage, right? Um, where it'll cover that span but then have some additional areas that it covers as well. Are we able to use that oil on the newer model, uh, vehicle? Jim Cokonis: Can you, can you run that by me one more time? Absolutely. I was read- I was read- I was reading a comment. I'm sorry, Kent. Uh, I see these comments- No, I was, I was just- ... popping up and I'm like, this is, this is some f- Yeah ... and I know a couple of these guys, so th- these are definitely kind of conversations that, that we get into. Um. Nick Pope: So, so- Jim Cokonis: Run that question by me one more time, Nick ... Nick Pope: so if we have a, an older model vehicle, right? And, um, we'll just pick on Mercedes. Now, looking ahead, you know, on this Lubrizol website, you were showing the coverage, you know, in the specific areas that, you know, the oil has its, you know, key purpose in. If we're gonna use, consider using, um, a newer oil that maybe has a wider span of coverage, can we use that on an older vehicle if it hits the mark on the initial requirements, but then in addition to- So Jim Cokonis: that's a, that's a great question ... covers wider areas? That's a great question. I got a specific one that I'm somewhat aware of, even though I'm not a, a European specialist. Um, so BMW. BMW, a long time ago, and I'm gonna, I'm gonna get rid of... Let's see, I'm gonna get rid of this API one, and I think I had Then I have a Ford or I think I had GM up here I'm just gonna clean the chart up. Okay? And a long time ago, ago, BMW Long Life 01, right? Um, and these were the years that they were put out. So if you go back to 1998, this was the performance standard. If you come to '01, this is the performance standard. If you come to Lo- Long Life '04, this is the performance standard. Can you see where as they got newer, they're covering what they used to require and then more in performance? Nick Pope: Yes. Jim Cokonis: And so a lot of folks will say, when you look at the BMW, they will tell you that their newest standard is backwards compatible to all the others So if you have a vehicle that calls for, you know, the 22FE++ from 2022, it covers the performance standards of all the previous ones. The only real interesting factor though is that when you look at these older, um, oils, and I would need to do some, some double-checking here, I would, you can see that the older oils were more in the high temperature, high shear category because they're above 3-5. Whereas the newest standard is only just above 2 because look, it goes out and goes after fuel economy more, so it's less, um, less of a high shear oil because they went more after flowability to reduce the pumping losses, uh, from, from driving a pump to run that heavier oil. Make sense? So yeah, there's, there's definitely some research to do in this, and the beauty about it is a lot of us have repeat clients. So with repeat clients, we, you know, we have all these great, um, we have all this great service information systems and we can put in the specs on what car takes what these days, and it's pretty easy to do. So once we look it up once, the next time that car comes in, we can have the standard written right into our service information for what that car has. Just be sure to check, um, service information every once in a while because they change things. So let's talk about changing things. Kent Bullard: Um- Well, before we get into that, I- Yeah have two things. One, uh, Nick, I think you had a poll for everybody out there, and then I wanna get to Jacob's comment. Nick Pope: Yeah. So, uh, let's try to get some engagement here, everybody. I, uh, we're curious, how often do you check the manufacturer's exact oil spec prior to adding oil to the vehicle? Kent Bullard: Remember, you can answer with a one, a two, or a three in the comment section. Number one is every time, number two is occasionally, and number three is rarely As you guys are answering that, I think it's really poignant to what Jacob was asking, right? So we can even, as, as you guys are answering this, this, uh, poll, I'd love to highlight this. Jacob said, "In fact, it's an overwhelming, uh, proposition. You can't fathom the amount of time it would take to cross-reference and catalog oil needs for every car that comes through our small independent repair facility." Nick, what do you think about that? Nick Pope: I think that's fair. I, you know, it is a lot, right? Um, and like anything though, once we go through the motions and set the stage, then it's just gonna be fine-tuning, right? We're gonna maintain it as things change. We're gonna make adjustments. So again, you know, when we look at the big picture in the grand scheme of things, we are, you know, here to serve our customers as professionals, and we have to put in the work to, to meet that mark Kent Bullard: We have one answer here already saying every single time. Uh, Gary, I'd love to know how much time does it actually take you to do this and, and do you find that it is a, uh, time sink for you? I mean, I think as you're running a, an independent small shop, e- every second counts when you're trying to be productive, right? Jim Cokonis: Mm-hmm. And, and for Jacob and everybody else, um, even if you're on Facebook, um, the comments do come through into StreamYard because it's a pretty, pretty sophisticated piece of software. It bring, it brings it through. Um- Kent Bullard: Yeah, Jim Cokonis: even Mike said that we're always looking every time Look it up and turn to the information. Yep. Kent Bullard: Yep. And it goes back to that comment you were saying earlier, Jim, about we are the professional. So what does it really mean to be the professional? If I were going to the doctor and the doctor wasn't checking the type of medication that they were trying to put in me, and it's like, "Oh, we're just gonna use the standard one," but didn't know that I might be diabetic or something, I mean, that would be a cause for concern, right? No. I'm trusting that doctor to make the best recommendation for me to keep this thing ticking, right? Jim Cokonis: Yep. So this is, this is an example, and you can see how easy it is to go for an extended period of time on this type of a topic. Um, but you know, we used to have issues with when GM first went to Dex-Cool and some of the problems that we had with Dex-Cool, and some of it was cooling system design, but it wasn't the chemistry of the coolant. It was the misunderstanding of the chemistry of the coolant that caused the issues, because hybrid organic acid technologies were used in European vehicles for many years prior to that, and they didn't have that issue. Um, part of it is, "I ain't got any orange, put some green in it." Well, you just ruined it. Um, so you know, that's just, that's just the way it goes. And this one is one that's near and dear to my heart, um, because we've seen changes, we've seen changes in technologies now, and this one isn't new, right? In the US, the, the, the federal motor vehicle safety standards talk about DOT 3, DOT 4, and DOT 5, and DOT 5.1. But what we don't talk about are the international standards organizations or ISO class, like DOT 6 type of thing. And so this is an example, and I know some of you folks have seen these conversations, but I'm just gonna point out one spec. Max kinematic viscosity at cold temperature Um, but you'll notice that, and, and this has a lot to do with, with the, the, the specifications for oil too. So look at this. Kinematic viscosity of DOT 3 cold is 1,500. DOT 4 is 1,800, and DOT 4 has a higher boiling point. ISO class 6 or like the Ford low viscosity DOT 4 are 750 When they're cold. Okay? But look at them. They all hit the same minimum when they're hot. The magic of chemistry. So look at it this way. Look at it this way. How many of you have seen the arguments on the interwebs about calibration and what tool you're using and, you know, what target you're using and all that stuff about whether or not that ADAS system and that automatic emergency braking are gonna work? And then we don't look up the fluid specifications for the brake fluid, and when the vehicle's cold, the brake fluid is thicker than what the system is programmed to use. Do you think the brakes can apply and release as fast with DOT 3 or DOT 4 in it as it would with ISO Class 6? Probably ain't gonna happen. Okay? And so we worry about all these things, but then we're not putting in the right fluids to actually make the system work, and those are the types of things that have always been wake-up calls to me, like, "Whoa, I didn't realize there was this much of a difference." So- I- Let's, let... Go ahead. Kent Bullard: I wanna, I wanna just, uh, highlight Gary, uh, Gary's comment here, uh, just the end part of it, 'cause he was talking about how he manages it in his, in his small shop. But he says, uh, you know, they have the service advisor check, and then he can verify. But I love this: "The time to verify is less than a new engine or a lawsuit." Jim Cokonis: I- that is a beautiful comment. Kent Bullard: Yeah. Jim Cokonis: It's wonderful. That's a beautiful comment. Thank you, Gary. Yeah. We, we, we, I think we should, uh, I think we should put that one up as a- Kent Bullard: We should re- ... as a post over top of a video ... retitle, retitle this training that right there. Jim Cokonis: Well, G- Gary, you'll probably get a kick out of this. I have said for decades, "Why is there never time to do it right, but there's always time to do it over?" I have never understood that. Let's, let's do it right the first time, and then we don't have to do it again, and again, and again. Um- Yeah ... so Kent, did we have a poll question on, uh- We did ... what would you do with an oil filter? Put that one up. Kent Bullard: All right, everybody. I wanna see some engagement here. We've tried this. We've tested it. Those of you out there, we've got one more question for you, one more poll for you, and we'd love to know: When installing a filter on a late-model Ford, which option may be true? You can answer one, no lubrication, tighten to spec; number two, lubricate the filter with anti-seize; or number three, lubricate the filter with grease. Let us know with a one, two, or three in the comment section. Jim Cokonis: And now I am going to share with you That this is a question that is on the Today's Class platform about lubrication services on vehicles. And there was a learner that called this out and said, "Absolutely not. You lubricate every filter every time." Um, and they actually selected to lubricate the filter with anti-seize. Um, I don't know if you realize it, but anti-seize has finely ground metal, and I'm not gonna put that anywhere near my oil system if I can avoid it. Um, but We were doing research, and this was something we learned within the last year. There are certain Ford, and I'm, I'm giving the answer away, and I'm sorry, Kent, but- Nick Pope: No, that's Jim Cokonis: fine. I Nick Pope: love it. Um- Jim, you're just really excited about this. Jim Cokonis: I can feel it. Th- th- this one, this one just tickles me to no end because, uh, I actually posted this on our platform and, and got a ton of engagement on it. A lot of people say, "And that's Ford being Ford, and they're wrong. You lubricate every filter every time." And then had a user that actually had some factory training, and here's what they said. "When we lubricate threads and surfaces, the mechanical advantage allows us, with the same force, to put a larger clamping load on." Well, some of these engines are running adapters that are made out of aluminum because we're all trying to save weight. And what they found was when people lubricate them and tighten them down farther than they should because they don't stop at the three-quarter, half to three-quarters of a turn, they actually tighten it down hard enough to pull on that housing, distort it, and create a leak which causes a, um, Jacob says, "I'm a fan of Gotcha Moment." But it causes it to warp the housing and create a leak, and it's not every Ford vehi- vehicle. And so the lesson for me out of this, Nick, is if I'm working on a vehicle that I don't know, I don't apply the knowledge that I had from the vehicles I did know to this new thing. I'm going to service information. Nick Pope: Yeah, and that's a really good point that you just made at the end, Jim, and, and it's one of the nuances to Just the daily changes in our industry. There's so many new changes, there's new, new variables, and as things continue to evolve and, uh, innovation excels at such a rapid rate. It- I love how you put it, though. You know, if it's something you haven't done, you're gonna do your research on it because odds are there could be a similarity with that amongst other things in a way you've been doing things for your whole career, or there could be something new that you're gonna be able to take away and usually in those moments, those things tend to stick with me the most. How about you? Right? Jim Cokonis: Yeah, the, uh... Well, we, we, we have a whole class we teach on it called, We Didn't Know And How To Find Out. Um, and it's all based around looking at service information because, you know, we, Nick Pope: we, Jim Cokonis: there's some stuff I didn't know. And I was taught this by a guy named Matt Ragsdale on, um, IATN decades ago, and this guy had one of these memories where somebody would post about how an EGR system works and he would d- he would respond, yeah, um, he would respond, "Not on that vehicle." And everybody thought he was a jerk because he was very precise and said just not on that vehicle. Well, what did he mean? And then they would push him on it and be like, "Well, that's doesn't help at all." And he'd like, "Look, get more training. That vehicle in month six they had a design and production change and it now behaves this way. It doesn't behave like they did for the last eight years." And he knew that stuff because he'd looked it up, it, it rocked his world, he locked it in, and he would now look at production dates before he decided which system he had. And I see this all the time with technicians. You know, "What do you think could be going on with this EVAP system?" And I'd be like, "What type of system does it have on it?" Yeah. And that's gonna determine how I'm going to test it and what it's gonna behave like. And so all of these things are a key. And then we look at things like 0-16 and 0-8 oil, and we go, "There's no way that's gonna work, and this engine is not gonna last." Well, I got news for you. The Japanese standards oils, the, the JASO system I think is what it is, they've been working directly with the manufacturer. The, the, the, the tribologists from ENEOS have been working directly with the tribologists in Japan for over a decade on formulating these oils. And these are not class four and five. They are a high grade of class three, highly refined- And then the additive package does everything to get the performance standards out of it. Okay? So this is not just something like, "Oh, we're gonna put thin stuff in it to get better gas mileage, and we don't care if it blows up in 10,000 miles." They actually have the data to show it. Okay? And so these engines- And you just don't- Ken, I know, I know we're kinda going long here. Um, Nick Pope: and I'm- Ken, you just opened up a door, man. Jim Cokonis: Oh, I opened up a huge door. Nick Pope: This doesn't even just pertain to oil. I mean, literally look at... You started to dive into it a little bit talking about EVAP systems. But again, you know, an EVAP system is an EVAP system. However, when we start to dive into different, you know, manufacturers, and then we dive into, you know, different makes and models under that umbrella, th- not, they're not always going to be the same. Kent Bullard: Yep. I think, I think this is an important thing to say, you know, 'cause I even, uh, all of us do this as we fall into certain habits and rhythms where, you know, you've got the work of the day, you've got things coming on, you know, on your plate, and it's a lot easier to just assume it's gonna be similar to the previous work that you've done, instead of taking a moment and pausing and saying, "Hey, I, I think I need to just look this up or, or just verify." Uh, again, back to what you had said in the previous, you know, series where we said, you know, the difference between. So I, I think that's also what distinguishes us as professionals, is that we do take the extra time to make sure, to verify, to ask the right questions Jim Cokonis: So this engine came out in the Toyota Camry in, like, '17, and this thing's completely different. And, you know, this engine can switch between Atkinson and Otto cycle, and it can do it during startup conditions. And instead of waiting for oil to warm up and all those things to make the VVT work on the intake cam efficiently, um, they use electric phasing. And so they can actually phase the intake cam where they want for premium operation before everything's fully up to temperature. Um, this, this thing has a two-stage oil pump system, so when they don't need it, they don't have a heavy load demand on it, um, they can run the oil pump at a lower output, and then when the, the loads get really high, they can step up the oil volume and deliver that lubrication and make that 0-16 or 0-8 work in that engine. Kent Bullard: Hmm. Jim Cokonis: Okay? So, um, we're probably gonna put this out as a, as a video, aren't we, Kent? Kent Bullard: Oh, yeah. Jim Cokonis: So this, this will be available. Um, and there's a bunch of terms. If you actually go onto the Lubrizol website, they will explain all their terms for the difference between soot thickening and oxidative thickening and what they do for fuel economy and aftertreatment, and, um, protection against low-speed pre-ignition, and that has to do a lot with additives and so forth that can trigger that sudden explosion, which is not combustion. It's an actual explosion. So all those terms are out there. But what I wanted to get to and make sure we covered, um, I've already covered that not all additives are compatible. Kent Bullard: Mm-hmm. Jim Cokonis: But all of these, uh, terms will be available, and maybe we'll even link a, a document to it that you guys can grab. Kent Bullard: But Jim Cokonis: some- Kent Bullard: I think that's a fantastic idea Jim Cokonis: some of the, um, some of the specifications for oils, like when we look at these, specifically these diesel oils, here's, uh, Motorcraft's oil. Look at the protection level that they put on the oil that, like, goes in the new six seven. Okay? And this has both, um- It also carries not only the Ford protection, but it shows Cummins, Volvo, um, and I forget, I think, let's see. Yeah, the Volvo and Mack, um, and the Cummins specification on it. When you look at these, they are definitely going after deposits and thickening and after-treatment capability and bore protection with these oils. Okay? It... But if you look at them, every one of them is a very heavy oil, and that is why when you look at them, they are not built for fuel economy. Because that's not what the diesel needs to live. Okay? So then we get into, well, how do these systems actually work? And this is really what I wanted to cover. Um, Ford starts with a baseline of 10,000 miles and a one-year timeline. So their system is smart. It's not just a dumb countdown timer. And talking to people who actually have these trucks and drive them in a certain area of the country, and even when they do similar things, they will notice vastly different flags for oil service based on how they're using the truck, what the temperature is, how much idling they do. So in cold weather, they'll cut down on the amount of time that it says the oil's okay. Look, look at this one I highlighted, flex fuel. If you run flex fuel in a Toyota that has a 10,000-mile service interval, they tell you to cut it down to five, because there's something about flex fuel and what it does to the structure of the oil, it degrades the oil a lot faster. So you're burning more fuel because it's at more alcohol and you're degrading your oil faster. Even though it may be a little bit less expensive, are you really saving any money? But, um, oil dilution, torque, right, load. One of the, one of the things about GM that I read a long time ago, they start with a 7,500 mile limit, and they look at engine temperature, ambient temperature, load. Some of them even looked at the n- amount of grams of airflow consumed to determine how fast the oil is degrading. Okay? So dusty conditions, right? And then some of them that had a oil level sensor in them, if it was low and you added a quart, if you went in and looked at the data, it would actually add some life back in because it saw another quart of oil added to it. Okay? When it's low, it gr- it degrades faster, and the variations can be huge. Under one... You know, the same vehicle driven in one climate by the same driver would go 6,500 miles. That same driver goes to a different climate, higher temperatures, driving, you know, pulling a load or whatever, and it drops and flags an oil change at 3,800. Mm. So it is, it is not a dumb system Mercedes, they're doing the same thing. Driving conditions, RPM, temperature, cold starts, idle time. They also add a sensor like BMW does. Okay? They can also detect added oil and adjust the algorithm. Something like Toyota is a simple mileage tracker, right? But look at this, if you're towing, you should reduce the service interval on the ones with the... And this is specifically to the ones with the 10,000-mile range on them. If you are driving with a rooftop carrier. So do you notice that kind of stuff when a client comes in? How often do you put your kayaks on top of your car? You shouldn't go that long on your oil service, right? Repeated short trips. So this is where we have to talk with a client and see what's going on. So this, this is what this really breaks it down to. What does the car not know? The car doesn't know what we poured in the crankcase, and so it's up to us to put the right stuff in the vehicle for its requirements. Kent Bullard: Mm. Jim Cokonis: Is that, is that... Any of you guys have any, anything to add to that in the comments? I mean, that's, that's what our job is. Figure out what's supposed to be there. And yes, I used AI to generate this nice young lady going around and looking at the bottles to pick the right thing, so. Nick Pope: Well, in, in, in summing it up, I think for me one of the biggest takeaways above and beyond the, the technical aspect of everything, Jim, and you did a phenomenal job by the way. I can tell that you, uh, you were really... I'm gonna put this as nice as I can. You were really riding that oil wave. You really were. You were, you were dialed in. Jim Cokonis: I was trying- And- ... to prevent that boundary breakdown. Nick Pope: Yeah. Yeah. Well, oil gives you a lot of purpose, and I admire that about you. Jim Cokonis: It's slick. Nick Pope: Our, but our, our, our experience as, you know, technicians and really just people in this industry, right, it, it should increase our confidence over time. However, it, it should never reduce our curiosity, right? So I, I want everyone to think about that for a moment, because, you know, the moment we lose our curiosity is, is a slippery slope, because that leads us down a path of a point where we may lose, um, our, our edge, right? We may become to a point where we might just be comfortable with where we are, and, and curiosity is what engages us to want to pick up on these little things. And, you know, if we take things off in, in smaller bites, right, those small chunks that we bite off over the series of a month, a year, whatever the case may be, that's gonna stack up into a lot of additional knowledge in the over, you know, all grand scheme of things. Jim Cokonis: Beautifully put. Kent Bullard: I'd love to, to wrap this up. I actually wanna answer... Well, I don't have to answer 'cause Jacob did, but Michael said, "Why did the manufacturers remove transmission and engine dipsticks, those types of things?" And Jacob said, "Beautifully put, because we should no longer depend on the consumers to maintain their vehicles due to the current complexity of the systems." Exactly right. You guys are the professionals. And I do wanna give a big thank you to today's class for working with us on this series. We've got one more in the tank. We're really happy, uh, for those who came and, and wanna come back. I wanna talk, take just a second to talk about today's class, 'cause we have thousands of technicians who are continuing to improve, uh, their skills. They are, uh, mastering today's technologies. There's a lot of incredible dynamic learning that you can do on that platform in small daily bites so that you can maintain your edge as you go forward, uh, and tackle oil, which I had no idea how complex and how valuable these systems are. So thank you Jim and, and Nick for sharing a lot of this with us. Um, if those of you are out there and wanna learn more about today's class or about oil, I think it's, uh, prudent of us to put together a PDF and share some of this recorded out for you guys, and if you want any more from us, uh, let us know at... In fact, just email me directly, kent@wearetheinstitute.com. Thank you guys all for being here, and we'll hope to see you on the next one. Jim Cokonis: Have a great afternoon everyone.