When I owned a new Ford, I had a generally positive experience with dealer servicing. Any maintenance I needed was taken care of the same day, and I usually just chilled in the dealer’s (admittedly pretty bare) waiting room. That room even had a window into the service area, where I could peek into the bays to watch my car get worked on.
I haven’t been back to a Ford dealer in at least a decade, but it sounds like things have changed drastically. According to CEO Jim Farley, the company has a massive shortage of mechanics and technicians, leaving service bays open and customers waiting weeks for repairs.
In an interview published with Yahoo Finance earlier this week, Farley laid out the problem by the numbers:
This morning, when I woke up, there were 6,000 bays in our dealerships with no technicians.
[Yahoo Finance:] So can’t get my car fixed?
No. Two weeks. Average wait is two weeks. Not because we don’t have the parts, we don’t have the mechanics.
Two weeks is far worse than the national average, at least going by this extract of J.D. Power’s Customer Service Index (CSI) study from 2024, which analyzed customer satisfaction at dealerships when it comes to stuff like maintenance and repairs. According to that data, the average wait for an appointment for mass-market brands, like Ford, was just 5.2 days.
J.D. Power hasn’t released that statistic from its 2025 data to the public, but overall, Ford ranked 11th out of 18 mass-market brands this year for customer satisfaction when it comes to vehicle service this year, just below average, and far behind leaders like Subaru, Mini, and Honda.
That begs the obvious question: Why is there a worker shortage at Ford? When asked, Farley didn’t exactly give the most direct answer:
Well, it’s a complicated problem, but there is, let’s put it that way. There are literally a million openings right now. At Ford, we have probably 400,000 repair technician shortages. Across the economy, I think it’s a couple of things. First of all, the productivity has not caught up with the white collar [positions], in fact, it’s gone down over the last 20 years. Number two, the jobs aren’t as glamorous as a white-collar job from college, and I think the permitting and all the regulations has really stunted the growth of these kind of jobs.
By now, you’re probably screaming at your computer, telling Ford they should just offer adequate wages, and the workers will come rushing in. The commenters under Yahoo Finance’s post on Instagram are doing as much. But that might be more of an industry-wide problem than just a Ford problem, at least going by data gathered by job board Indeed. According to the job posting website, the average base salary for an automotive mechanic is $28.40 per hour, just a few cents lower than the average salary for a Ford dealership mechanic. By these numbers, Ford is about on par with the rest of the industry, salary-wise.
If you want to make a great wage at a dealership fixing cars these days, you have to become a technician, differentiating yourself with certifications and brand-specific technical training. And that costs money. Even if you graduate from a trade school, you usually still need extra training to learn how to work on the latest and greatest vehicles. That’s basically what Tom Butman, general manager of Gene Butman Ford in Ypsilanti, Michigan, told the Detroit Free Press earlier this year:
“Technology has exploded with complexity. That’s one of the things that a lot people don’t think about when they think ‘Why do we have a technician shortage?’ ” Butman said. “It’s because technology has complicated the repair process to the point where it’s much more difficult to repair cars.”
Even with a degree from a trade program, Butman said, much of the higher level technical training falls to dealers and automakers. He said some of his best technicians never went to college; rather the dealership invested in training them and getting them certified.
To its credit, Ford has invested in making this process easier. Since 2023, the company has funded the Auto Tech Scholarship program, which, as of 2025, awards $4 million a year to people studying to become service technicians. According to another Free Press article published earlier this week, Farley has even established a task force “to come up with ways to foster the development of more skilled trades people to address the shortage” after meeting with dealers earlier this year.
Whether either of these initiatives will result in shorter wait times and higher customer satisfaction is unclear. In any case, they are steps in the right direction.
Top photo: Ford
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The post Ford Has A Huge Mechanic Shortage. Here’s How Long You’ll Have To Wait To Get Your Car Fixed appeared first on The Autopian.
