Grease The Wheels Podcast

Send us Fan Mail On this week’s episode of Grease the Wheels, Uncle Jimmy goes a bit deeper on the way that the Slate Electric Truck company is setting up shop. We get deeper into the idea that different levels of shop certification mean different types of work getting funneled to those shops. We also get into some of the broader market ramifications as well as how AI thinks this is going to go. T...

Send us Fan Mail On this episode of Grease The Wheels, we address the 800 LB gorilla in the room with the arrival of a sub $25,000 old school Mini-Truck style EV called Slate. This is one of the coolest things out there, and not only because it comes in Uncle Jimmy’s preferred cab layout, having the correct amount of doors for a pickup truck. As a product, it is deeply interesting, and we would lo...

Send us Fan Mail On this episode of Grease the Wheels, Uncle Jimmy does a deep dive on the WrenchWay 2026 Voice of the Technician Survey — and man, does it should like a synopsis of Grease the Wheels! This time though, none of the numbers are made up, although admittedly Uncle Jimmy was a lot closer to the mark than we really want to admit. There are deep, structural issues within the automotive i...

Send us Fan Mail On this week’s episode of Grease the Wheels, Uncle Jimmy gets in depth with all of the things that tech schools DO NOT teach their students. There is a real disconnect between what techs know when they finish a program and when they enter the workforce. There really isn’t any type of instruction that can adequately prepare a student for the chaos of a modern auto shop. We also get...

Send us Fan Mail On this week’s episode of Grease the Wheels, we use AI to be introspective and ask it what it thinks of the podcast. Overall, it mirrors many of the opinions of our listeners, which is kinda spooky. It also goes into some of our ongoing projects, which is even spookier! Moving to a multimedia format would be difficult with the way that the content is produced, but we do have some...

Send us Fan Mail On this weeks episode of Grease The Wheels, we ask Gemini why customers are the way they are. There is a good portion of the customer base who knows that their cars are going to break, knows that they can’t fix them, and trusts you to make the right call when it comes to diagnosing and fixing the problems that they have to get back on the road. There is another segment of the cust...

Send us Fan Mail On this weeks episode of Grease the Wheels, Uncle Jimmy goes into some of the deepest professional fantasies of ownership, management, and everything in between. Ownership wants a business that essentially runs itself, but to do that they have to empower their management to make the right decisions and give the dealership a level of autonomy. This is something that many owners hav...

Send us Fan Mail On this weeks episode of Grease the Wheels, Uncle Jimmy goes hard in the paint when it comes to finding a new place to work — or if you are a new guy, a first place to work. There are a lot of questions that need to be asked when doing this, some of which are simple and extremely specific to who you are as a person, and the rest are a bit more hands on when it comes to site visits...

Send us Fan Mail On this week’s episode of Grease the Wheels, Uncle Jimmy goes over some ways that you could *theoretically* sabotage the shop, and some of the ways to fix it. The conclusion that he comes to however, is one of the coldest lines in this entire series of podcasts - mainly that most shops are sabotaging themselves! From poor management to ineffective service advisors, when times get...

Send us Fan Mail On this week’s episode of Grease the Wheels, Uncle Jimmy goes down the AI Rabbit hole with some of the most pressing causes of the technician shortage. Weirdly, Gemini has apparently been an avid listener of grease the wheels, because the last few episodes were often referenced! However, where it completely excels is in the numbers, specifically looking at the aging population of...

Send us Fan Mail On this week’s episode of Grease the Wheels, Uncle jimmy concludes his symposium on the technician shortage with the simple fact that the job is dangerous, and it will hurt you at some point. There are a million and a half ways to get hurt at work, from the cars to the equipment, to not properly using either. There are also a millions ways that the job can kill you, such as trying...

Send us Fan Mail On this weeks episode of Grease The Wheels, Uncle Jimmy expands on the concept of “The Bullsh*t Factor” Quite simply put, this is anything that makes your job as a technician more difficult. This can from the environment, such as shops that are not properly climate controlled for the climate that they are in. It can also come from management and other support staff, being either t...

Send us Fan Mail On this week’s episode of Grease the Wheels, Uncle Jimmy comes down hard on one of the major contributing factors of the technician shortage - the money. From warranty times that keep getting slashed to an abysmally low starting average pay, there is no wonder why the attrition rate is so high amongst young technicians. Throughout the industry, keeping talent is a problem - for so...

Send us Fan Mail On this week’s episode of Grease The Wheels, Uncle jimmy starts in on a series that is addressing the technician shortage. Throughout the history of media that has included cars, mechanics (and their modern iteration of technicians) have been unduly vilified as grifters, cheats, and scumbags. While there are some bad actors in the field, the same can be said for literally other oc...

Send us Fan Mail On this week’s episode of Grease the Wheels, Uncle Jimmy takes a common problem and solves it in the most insane way that he possibly can! We have all seen manuals, repair instructions, and bulletins that seem to be written by someone who has never turned a wrench in anger, but sometimes they are egregious enough to actually be a problem. Such as the one that attempted to have Unc...

Send us Fan Mail On this week’s episode of Grease the Wheels, Uncle Jimmy outlines the service advisor boot camp that will break your service advisors of all of their bad habits, and build them back up with all of the right ones. All it will take is sheer psychological torture for a few days, weeks, or months! The real idea here though is to make Service Advisors do the job the way that everyone w...

Send us Fan Mail On this week’s episode of Grease the Wheels, we delve into the world of statistics, and come up with some genuinely novel applications of baseball numbers and terminology to help your shop run better. RBI for service advisors, Errors also mostly for service advisors, and techs having to bat 1.000. There area already hundreds of datapoint for shops to utilize to make better decisio...

Send us Fan Mail On this week’s episode of Grease the Wheels, we go over some of the highlights and lowlights of automotive management. One of the main things that we have noticed is that in the rise of the corporate owned, multi-location dealership group era, there are a lot less nepo-hires in management. It still happens, especially at smaller family owned dealerships, but on a whole the quality...

Send us Fan Mail On this weeks episode of Grease the Wheels, we answer a question that absolutely no one asked: what if the safety systems in your car could be funny? To do this, we use the framework of our personal favorite retired New York State Trooper, Jimmy’s brother Bob! This is a natural fit because Bob did the nitty gritty work of crash scene reconstructions and even taught it at the Troop...

Send us Fan Mail On this week’s episode of Grease the Wheels, we close out our anthology on the Video MultiPoint Inspection, DVI, vMPI, etc -- with the most important part of the equation: the customers. Taking a step back, part of the reason why our customers are so unreasonable at times when it comes to our recommendations when it comes to facing or maintaining their cars is the immense amount o...

Send us Fan Mail  On this weeks episode of Grease the Wheels, Uncle Jimmy loosely defines the roles of the management staff when it comes to doing Video MultiPoint Inspections. The main part of the management role in video MPI adoption is to properly incentivize their technicians on doing them, setting them up for success, and getting the right training into the shop to make it effective - insert...

Send us Fan Mail On this week’s episode of Grease the Wheels, Uncle Jimmy follows up part one about Video being a tool for mechanics with part 2 about Service Advisors. When a Service Advisor has technicians doing the video, or in some rare instances is doing the video themselves, they have an undeniable advantage over a fixed ops department where there are no video MPI’s performed. This is why it...

Send us Fan Mail On this episode of Grease the Wheels, Uncle Jimmy goes over some of the finer points of the Video Multi-Point Inspection; more specifically all of the very valid reasons that technicians do not want to do them! From being camera shy to not being the “loquacious type” and tons of background noise and poor lighting, there are a myriad of reasons for technicians to want to shirk this...

Send us Fan Mail On this weeks episode of Grease the Wheels, Uncle Jimmy makes a comprehensive wish list of things that we would like to see in the automotive industry. This list doesn’t leave anyone out either, with special focus on customers to start it off, and special callouts for management and ownership that does it right. We also get into the wishlists for our fellow technicians, and our wi...

Send us Fan Mail On this episode of Grease the Wheels, Uncle Jimmy goes over some very interesting survey results from inside the automotive industry from WrenchWay. They asked a lot of the right questions when it comes to things like job satisfaction, training opportunities, and how well their facilities are kept — but there are a handful of things that we feel like might be actually 100% in agre...