Uninformed Ford Technicians
Tuesday, December 27, 2011
I just don’t know why this seems like a national-wide plague in automotive service centers, but it seems that everyone that is working there doesn’t seem to know what they’re doing. Back when I’m still using the Avanza, when I needed a new synchronizer ring replacement, the Auto 2000 spare parts officer doesn’t seem to know what a synchronizer ring is, and in fact, he asked me, “Itu di bagian mananya ya, Pak?” Awesome.
Today, my friend Taja and I met the same situation in Ford Jaksel with our Fiestas. The story goes like this, Taja’s Fiesta cannot connect to the iPhone and have songs playing in the car without connecting it with this cable:
It has to be connected to the car via USB and the AUX port at the same time, while mine works perfectly with a normal iPod USB cable. Coincidentally, I was there to claim a broken windshield seal rubber, and he was there to make them fix this annoying USB cable problem. On his first attempt, the tech said that every single Fiesta is like that, and people need to purchase this cable from them for 500k. Although it’s a fact that many of the first Fiestas in the country are experiencing this problem, this is just simply bull crap.
We then went comparing our cars side by side, and proved that the normal iPod USB cable connection worked flawlessly in my car. A truly on-your-face moment for the tech, and Mr. Schmuck seems to feel that he’s not the smartest guy anymore, beaten by a couple of customers, and proving that his “cable solution” is in fact, a dumb solution. He then went to ask me on what software did I install in my car. Software? It’s been like that since day one, and it is funny since Taja’s Fiesta is newer than mine, there’s no reason why it has an older firmware. However, even after “diagnosing” my car for “special settings”, the tech can’t seem to answer this.
After a few more minutes without answers from the tech, I decided to leave and told Taja to fix the car himself. I then told the tech to go to this site, download the firmware update, and then he can probably help other customers in the future. Basically a polite version of “You’re an idiot, you should know this. You’re the goddamned tech.” The Ford Mobile Connectivity website has been circulating around in various local and foreign forums and it fixes exactly that problem. The tech even tried applying the settings file he copied from my car to Taja’s. As predicted, it wasn’t really a spectacular result.
The fix is actually easy, and Taja can do this by himself for probably less than an hour (which he did at home and succeeded), but that is not the point. Authorized technicians should know better about the cars they sell, no? This proves that service providers in this country has very little knowledge in the products they sell. This is stupid. Imagine the cost that uninformed customers have to pay just to fix a minuscule problem like this, 500k for a stupid cable that doesn’t fix the actual problem? We can now conclude that if you want to have something fixed, then try fixing it yourself. It actually works better most of the time.