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I had a customer come in recently who told me he’d been trying to find a shop for almost two months. Not because there was no availability anywhere but because he couldn’t find a place he felt good about. That’s not something I would have heard as often ten or fifteen years ago.

There aren’t enough qualified mechanics right now. I see it from the hiring side too. When I’ve had openings at the shop the pool of applicants has been smaller than I’d like and finding someone with real experience takes longer than it should. Fewer people are going into the trade coming out of high school and that gap is showing up now in a real way.

For customers this means longer waits and shops that are busier than they want to be. It also means that when you find a mechanic you trust it’s worth hanging onto them.

For shop owners the challenge is that the job keeps getting more technically demanding at the same time as it’s getting harder to find people who can do it. Modern cars have a lot of electronics and software in them. Diagnostics require a different set of skills than they used to. You need someone who can do the traditional mechanical work and also understand what a scan tool is telling them. That’s a harder person to find than it used to be.

I got into this because I liked working with my hands and that’s still the part of the job I like best. But the business of running a shop has gotten more complicated and keeping up with how vehicles have changed takes real effort. You have to keep learning or you fall behind.

It’s not something I spend a lot of time complaining about. It’s just the reality of where the industry is right now.

I’ll be honest, I’ve been putting off dealing with electric vehicles for a while now. I’m a guy who works on old BMWs in his spare time. I like combustion engines, I like the way mechanical things work, and EVs just weren’t something I was in any rush to get into.

But they’re starting to show up at the shop. Not a ton of them, but enough that I can’t keep ignoring it.

The problem with EVs isn’t that they’re hard to understand. It’s that they require a completely different set of knowledge than what most mechanics my age grew up learning. High voltage battery systems, regenerative braking, different cooling setups. It’s basically a separate trade. You can’t just hand the job to someone who’s been doing conventional mechanical work their whole life and expect it to go smoothly.

What I’ve been doing is taking some courses and trying to learn as I go. I’ve also been honest with customers about what I can and can’t handle right now. If something comes in that’s outside what I’m comfortable with, I say so and send it somewhere better equipped. There’s no point pretending otherwise.

The diagnostic side of it isn’t completely foreign. Reading codes, working through a problem step by step, that part carries over from what I already know. It’s the high voltage physical work where you really need proper training. That stuff is genuinely dangerous if you don’t know what you’re doing.

I don’t think combustion engines are going away anytime soon. There’s going to be plenty of regular mechanical work for a long time, especially with older vehicles. But I’d be dumb to just wait and see. Things are changing and shops that don’t change with them are going to have a harder time down the road.

So I’m learning. It’s not my favorite thing but that’s how it goes sometimes.

So this happened a few weeks ago and I figured I’d write it up since it was a pretty frustrating afternoon.

I was heading to Tysons Corner Mall on a Saturday. Nothing special, just needed to pick up a few things. I don’t go to the mall that often but my wife had asked me to grab something from one of the stores out there so I figured I’d make the trip. I took the E36 M3 because it was a nice day and I hadn’t driven it much lately.

I should have known something was off before I even left the house. The temperature gauge was sitting a little higher than I like but I told myself it was probably fine. That was a mistake. About two miles from the mall the gauge started climbing and I pulled into a parking lot off Route 7 before it got any worse. Good thing I did because by the time I got the car stopped there was steam coming from under the hood. Water pump had given out.

Now here’s the embarrassing part. I’m a mechanic. I work on cars for a living and I work on BMWs specifically in my spare time. I know that the cooling system on the E36 is something you have to stay on top of. Water pumps, thermostats, hoses, all of it has a lifespan and all of it will let you down eventually if you ignore it long enough. I had been meaning to do a full cooling system refresh on that car for a while and I kept putting it off. That caught up with me on a Saturday afternoon in a parking lot near Tysons Corner.

I wasn’t going to try to drive it anywhere. Running an overheated BMW even a short distance can damage the head gasket and that turns a few hundred dollar repair into a much more expensive one. So I called a tow.

I ended up using Tysons Towing and honestly they were fine. The driver showed up in a reasonable amount of time, maybe thirty or forty minutes, which isn’t bad for a Saturday when a lot of people are out. He was straightforward, loaded the car up without any issues, and got it back to my shop without any problems. Nothing fancy, just a tow, which is all I needed.

Got the car in the shop the next morning and replaced the water pump, thermostat, and a couple of hoses that were looking worn while I was in there. It wasn’t a complicated job, just one I should have done months ago before it became an emergency on the side of the road.

The E36 is running fine now. Cooling system is fresh and the temperature gauge is sitting right where it should be.

Anyway. Don’t ignore your cooling system. I know better and I still let it go too long. Learn from that if you can.

People at the shop ask me sometimes why I spend my weekends on old BMWs when I already work on cars all week. It’s a fair question and I don’t have a complicated answer.

I just like them. The older ones, E30s and E36s especially, were built in a way that made sense to me. The engineering was straightforward enough that you could actually understand what was going on. The steering felt connected. The car communicated with you when you were driving it. A lot of newer vehicles don’t really do that. They’re comfortable and they’re reliable but there’s a layer of electronics between you and what the car is actually doing.

From a mechanical standpoint they’re satisfying to work on too. Not because they’re simple, they’re not, but because things are where you’d expect them to be. You can get your hands in there without having to remove half the car first. That’s not always the case with newer stuff.

The most common thing I deal with on older BMWs is oil leaks. Valve cover gaskets, oil pan gaskets, oil filter housing gaskets, the seals get old and start going. It’s not complicated work but it needs to get done. Cooling systems are the other thing that comes up a lot. Water pumps and thermostats on these engines need to be kept up with because if you let the cooling system go and the engine overheats you’re looking at a much bigger repair.

I’ve got a couple of them in my garage at home right now in various stages of getting sorted out. No deadlines, no customer waiting, just something to do on a Saturday. That’s really what it comes down to for me. It’s a hobby as much as it’s an extension of the job.

They’re not perfect cars. They have their problems like anything else. But I know them well enough at this point that I don’t mind dealing with it.