A Ford F-150 runs on more than 100 million lines of code, more than a Boeing 787 or an F-35 fighter jet. That comparison, offered by Ricart Automotive CEO Jared Ricart, isn't really about which machine is better engineered. It's about what a modern service technician is now actually being asked to do.
Why Build Instead of Hire?
The problem: vehicles have gotten sophisticated enough that finding trained technicians on the open market is no longer a reliable plan.
Ricart's answer, in his own words: "We can't just rely on somebody else to develop it for us."
How long has this been running? Ten to fifteen years, well before the current technician shortage became an industry-wide talking point.
What's the actual result? Roughly 75% of Ricart's Ford technicians, developed entirely in-house, through a partnership with ASE and Columbus State Community College.
What does the infrastructure look like? A 113,000-square-foot Ford Pro Elite facility with 64 bays, plus seven mobile service vans that go straight to a fleet customer's worksite instead of requiring a tow.
Why build the people before the building? Ricart put it this way: "Before you ever build a building, you need to find the people that are gonna be working out of it, and that's the automotive technician."
🎙️ Full breakdown on Monday's Automotive State of the Union episode.
The Retention Math Nobody's Measuring
Here's the angle worth sitting with longer than the facility tour: what happens to technician retention when three out of every four people on your floor came up through a program you personally built and paid for? That's not a team casually browsing job boards. That's a team with a real stake in staying.
There's also a whole new hiring pool sitting untapped here. The shift toward EVs means fewer fluids, more software, and a shop environment that increasingly rewards people who like working with their hands and with code. That's a persona the industry hasn't traditionally recruited for, and it's exactly the kind of person a "development from within" program is built to find and grow.
Consider this today: if your technician pipeline still depends on finding fully trained hires from somewhere else, that's a plan built on a labor pool that's shrinking. A homegrown program takes years to pay off, which is exactly why the dealers starting one today will be the ones with a real advantage in five.
