CCAR attended the Mobile Air Conditioning Society (MACS) conference in early February and while we were there we met up with a friend and respected business colleague – Bob Miller of Train Them Now LLC. We asked Bob to be our guest blogger on the subject of refrigerant contamination, and here’s what he offered up;Here i ...

Way back in the early 80s I was hired by Gould battery to be one of their mobile technicians, where I was dispatched across the Chicagoland area with a van stocked with a carousel of lead acid batteries and some basic charging system diagnostic equipment and tools. As a result, I still have a soft spot in my heart for the b ...

In this photo released by Toyota Motor Corp., Toyota President Akio Toyoda, left, shakes hands with BMW AG chief executive Norbert Reithofer during a signing ceremony to jointly develop next-generation batteries for green vehicles in Nagoya, central Japan, Thursday, Jan. 24, 2013. Toyota and BMW are working together on nex ...

LEE'S SUMMIT, Mo. – Charles Ayers, president of the Coordinating Committee for Automotive Repair (CCAR), has announced a suite of new HazMatU courses offered by CCAR and its affiliate ShipMate Inc.“Of special interest to original equipment manufacturers, automotive dealers and groups is the fact that th ...

Automotive Black Box Data Recovery SystemsBy Don GilmanIntroductionFor years, airplane crash investigators have had the benefit of retrieving data from the flight-data recorder, or "black box." This data has proven invaluable for helping to determine what happened in the seconds before a crash. Now, in orde ...

OSHA Aligns with United Nations for Globally Harmonized System of Safety Data Sheets via Hazardous Communication Standard.The U.S. OSHA has agreed to the United Nation’s standard for Globally Harmonized System (GHS) of Classification and Labeling of Chemicals. This simply means that the material safety data sheet (MSDS) f ...

Toyota recently released their 2012 North American Environmental Report. Within the report, you will find information about Toyota's environmental activities in the United States, Canada and Mexico.Information, data and stories cover all aspects of the vehicle life cycle—research and development, manufacturing, logistics ...

Investigations by OSHA and the U.S. Chemical Safety Board (CSB) have documented a history of fires and explosions at workplaces (oilfields, refineries, chemical plants, and other facilities) where an internal combustion engine was identified as or suspected to be the source of ignition. Internal combustion engines present a ...

The National Highway Traffic Safety Administration (NHTSA) has issued survey results on the effectiveness of tire pressure monitoring systems (TPMS). The technical report analyzes a sampling of data collected from tires mounted on model-year ’04–’07 vehicles. The survey found that 23.1% of the vehicles without a TPMS ...

Earlier this month Rod Enlow (CCAR’s VP of Industry Relations) and I were thrilled to be part of the National Institute for Automotive Service Excellence (ASE) annual meeting and Technician awards ceremony in San Antonio, TX.  This was our first time at this event -- and I am certain that it won’t be our last – as we ...