- Staffing shortages and a high volume of recalls means that Ford service centers are incredibly busy.
- Ford is now offering to complete small jobs at a customer’s home or workplace. For larger jobs, it will even pickup a vehicle and drop it back off after the work is complete.
- In March alone, Ford completed 375,000 jobs using these remote service teams.
For the last three years, Ford has led all automakers for recalls in the U.S., which has resulted in a lot of work for its service centers. Faced with a shortage of space at dealerships to fix vehicles, Ford is sending the garage to its customers—literally.
A growing number of drivers whose vehicles need minor repairs are no longer going to the dealership, and instead taking advantage of mobile services. That includes two main tasks: either a technician can go to a customer’s home and repair the vehicle there or, for bigger jobs, they can pick up a vehicle, drive it to the dealership, complete the job, and return it to the customer.
Read: Ford Crowned Recall Champion In The U.S. For Third Year Straight
Between 2022 and 2023, the number of Ford and Lincoln customers using these remote services quadrupled. In all, that amounted to 2.4 million mobile service jobs last year. Last month alone, around 375,000 customers took advantage of the product.
And it’s not hard to see why. For a customer, it means not having to take time out of their day to drive to a dealership, and no more sitting around in a boring dealer waiting room. And since technicians can come to an owner’s home or workplace, they hardly have to change their plans at all.
Dealers like it, too. In addition to making customers happy, the service can even lead to conquests for them. Ford dealers say that mobile services are particularly attractive to fleet customers, who appreciate not having to lose a vehicle and an employee for the day every time a vehicle needs a repair.
“You blow the customers away, it’s so convenient,” Jeff King, the general manager of Ford Lincoln in St. Augustine, Florida, told Freep. “Oil changes, light service, recalls. Why stick a car in a bay where I can do a transmission repair when I can go to your house, download a computer program and just address that check engine light?”
Ford’s nationwide mobile service fleet is now twice as large as Tesla’s. However, while remote services solve the problem of space in dealership service centers, they don’t solve the labor shortage. King says he is using less than half of the 46 vans his dealership owns because of a shortage of mechanics.
Since there is a shortage of new workers coming into the trades, they can be choosy, and industries that pay more, like the elevator industry for example, can be more attractive to mechanics. That’s not all the dealerships’ fault, though.
For an automaker like Ford, especially, the volume of recall work with relatively lower pay rates can make retention difficult. But dealers are trying to address the problem by investing in bringing up a new generation of mechanics by working with high schools and community colleges.
