Kam Thandi and Khaled Ramzi, Director of Field Operations at ServiceUp, spend this episode of The BrakeDown on the shop side of the business: labor shortages, the equipment shops now have to buy, and what EVs (electric vehicles) are doing to the way a bay gets scheduled.

Khaled covers how he got into the automotive world and what his role at ServiceUp involves, and makes the case that transparency and repair quality decide which shops keep getting work. The conversation also gets into the shifting relationship between shops and insurance companies, where AI is actually being used, and how shops stay competitive while all of that moves at once.

The capacity problem behind most long repairs

When a repair takes six days instead of two, the extra four days are usually not wrench time. They are queue time, and queue time comes from capacity that is harder to buy than it used to be.

Technicians are the first constraint. Experienced ones retire, the apprenticeship pipeline is thinner than the hiring plans assume, and a shop with four lifts and two qualified techs runs at half its bay count no matter how the schedule looks on paper.

Equipment is the second. ADAS (advanced driver assistance systems) calibration needs a target rig, floor space, and a controlled lighting setup. High voltage work on EVs needs certified technicians, insulated tooling, and a bay that can hold a vehicle safely while a pack is isolated. Plenty of good shops have neither, so they sublet, and a sublet appointment is a date on somebody else's queue.

That is where the van that sits three days waiting on a calibration slot nobody told you about comes from. The shop is not stalling. It is waiting, and the waiting never showed up in the original estimate.

Takeaways from the episode

• Labor shortages and the cost of new equipment are the two pressures shaping shop capacity right now.
• Electric vehicles change what a shop needs before it can accept the work at all.
• Transparency and repair quality are what separate shops that hold fleet volume from shops that lose it.
• The relationship between repair shops and insurance companies keeps shifting, and shops feel it in cycle time.
• AI is finding real uses in the shop rather than staying a slide in a conference deck.
• Staying competitive now means investing ahead of the work instead of after it.

Questions to ask a shop before you send it volume

Most fleets evaluate shops on labor rate and location. Those two facts predict very little about how long your vehicles will actually sit. These seven do better, and every one of them can be answered on a phone call.

• How many technicians do you have, and how many are certified for high voltage EV work?
• Do you calibrate ADAS in house or sublet it, and what does subletting add to the schedule?
• What is your current backlog in days, and who tells me when it changes?
• When the ECD (estimated completion date) moves, who contacts me and how quickly?
• Do supplements come to me before the extra work happens or after?
• What is your comeback rate, and how do you handle a vehicle that returns for the same fault?
• Which of my systems can you send status into, and what does that update actually contain?

Ask the same seven of three shops in the same market and the differences are usually stark. Keep the answers. They are the baseline you measure against when a repair runs long.

What this means for your operation

Shop capacity is not something you can fix from the fleet side, but it is something you can plan around. Know which of your shops sublet calibration before you need one on a Friday. Know which can take an EV and which will politely hold it in a corner for a week. Route around the constraint instead of discovering it mid repair.

ServiceUp is the agentic repair platform for modern fleets. The shop network is not a static directory: it syncs with your fleet profile and shop preferences, so you bring your own shops, use ours, or both, and routing adjusts as performance data comes in. More at serviceup.com/shops.