2025 ASEE Annual Conference & Exposition

Over the last decade, several federal- and state-level initiatives have been passed in the United States encouraging the adoption of electric vehicles (EV). These initiatives generally focus on increasing compatible infrastructure (charging stations), manufacturing, and community and consumer education. However, these efforts do not attend to a longstanding and worsening deficiency in the EV ecosystem—an adequate workforce of trained and skilled automotive technicians to repair and maintain these new fleets of EVs. This paper aims to fill a gap in the existing literature by exploring how the rapid pace of EV and other emerging automotive technologies pose a significant obstacle to established automotive mechanic training programs. First, we lay out the history of repair labor and training as one of persistent shortages and under-resourcing. We then detail the present-day range of career and technical education institutions available to current and incoming mechanics, as well as the funding sources available to those institutions for updating training curricula. We conclude by discussing the obstacles that public education specifically faces in making use of those sources and keeping up with rapidly emerging EV technologies, as well as future challenges that those institutions can anticipate. This paper puts forward a much-needed deep dive into the historical roots of and contemporary difficulties that public career and technical training for automotive repair and maintenance face; we specifically aim to provide a foundation for future ethnographic or sociological work examining the on-the-ground challenges that these programs face in updating their curricula and securing the necessary funding to invest in those updates.