You Can Be Anything › All careers › Trades & Skilled Labor
Automotive Mechanic
Diagnoses and repairs cars, trucks, and other motor vehicles.
Did you know?
By 2009 a premium car already ran on about 100 million lines of code, far more than the 5.7 million planned for the F-35 fighter jet, so mechanics now need computer skills.
How subjects help
- Physics: Understand how brakes use friction and how an engine turns fuel into motion to track down faults.
- Mathematics: Tighten bolts to the exact force and measure worn parts against their safe limits.
- Computer Science: Plug a scanner into a car's computer to read fault codes and test its sensors.
A famous name
Soichiro Honda: Worked six years as a car mechanic from age 15, opened his own repair garage, then founded Honda in 1948.
Try it yourself: Take apart a click pen
- Click the pen a few times and guess what is happening inside. Draw your guess.
- Twist the pen apart slowly over a table so no small parts roll away. Lay every piece out in order. (Keep the little spring away from young children.)
- Draw each part and label what you think it does: spring, ink tube, clicker.
- Put it back together, but leave one part out. Does it still work? Try each part in turn to find which ones really matter.
Engineers and mechanics take machines apart ("reverse engineering") to learn how the parts work together, find what failed and design simpler versions.
Adapted from TeachEngineering (University of Colorado Boulder): Disassemble a Click Pen.
Also try: Design a box that keeps ice frozen.
Known for it in
Germany, Japan, USA, Australia, UK