Fixed Ops Journal - June 2017 - 36

FIXED OPS JOURNAL

WRENCHES TO LAPTOPS

 Student auto tech contest emphasizes electronics, not 'bull work'

JIM HENRY

foj@autonews.com

EW YORK - Judges of the National Automotive Technology Competition used to create a bug for
vocational high school contestants
to find by pinching a car's fuel line shut with a
wooden clothespin. But times have changed.
In the under-the-hood final event of the
two-day competition here in April, each
two-student team had three hours to find and
fix 20 to 25 problems on its assigned vehicle.
The problems, with small variations from
car to car, included a bad resistor, a horn that
needed replacing, a missing fuse and a missing jack handle.
Faulty electronics headed the list. The contestants spent most of the troubleshooting
session huddled over laptop computers and
other diagnostic tools, and not much time
turning wrenches.
Two high school seniors from New York's
Long Island, John DeLuca, 17, and Evan Wagner, 18, won this year's competition. Both say
they plan to pursue careers as dealership service technicians after college.
The change in the contest's focus reflects the
fact that service techs no longer are hired for
their ability to do "bull work" requiring great
physical strength, said Laurence Eiden, an industry consultant in Oakdale, Conn.
"Typical customer complaints are just as
likely to be that 'my Bluetooth won't sync,' "

John DeLuca, left,
and Evan Wagner won
the 2017 National
Automotive Technology
Competition. Below,
contestants had to
find and fix 20 to 25
"bugs" in assigned
vehicles.

Eiden said on the sidelines of the contest.
Eiden has spent more than 24 years working
with 18 state-funded technical high schools in
Connecticut. The schools graduate about 225
students each year who specialize in auto
technology, Eiden said.
The best of these students are often tops in
all academic subjects, not just automotive
ones, he added.

None of the vehicles in the competition would
run, so most teams tackled that matter first.
"Everything is controlled by the computer,
so if it doesn't start within a certain time
frame, the system knows there's something
wrong," said Vincent Luppino, senior service
training specialist for the New York regional
office of Toyota Motor Sales U.S.A. Inc.
Luppino is a member of the contest's "bug
committee," which determines which problems to put in the vehicles. He said the committee can direct automakers to disable a circuit to extinguish a single light bulb.
Ed Gazzillo, vice president of education and
training for the Greater New York Automobile
Dealers Association, said this year's contest
required students to undergo a mock job interview and solve written problems. Students
also were evaluated on how they wrote up repair orders.
A separate troubleshooting exercise for contestants involved systems such as safety
equipment, which are removed from the vehicle because they would be impractical to work
on during the under-the-hood session.
see CONTEST, Page 37

PAGE 36

JUNE 2017

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