The students gathered in a circle outside Reynolds Community College‘s new automotive technology building to swap stories about airbag malfunctions. They wrapped up with a quick word from auto program director Tonia Haney, who reminded them that stamping hard on the brake doesn’t make an airbag go off.

Instead, she explained to the 14 second-year students in college’s new T-TEN program for Toyota automobile technicians that it’s the complicated sensor-triggered electronics that recognize a sudden deceleration — “you know, like when you’re about to hit a brick wall,” as she explained later — that they’ll have to understand and fix.

It’s very hands-on, just like Reynolds’ general auto tech program. At the other end of the new auto tech building, instructor Chris Verdicchio had set his class the challenge of figuring out why the check engine light on a car he’d monkeyed with was on.

They figured it out: two bum intake valves.

Then, Verdicchio had them plunging deep into the engine, working with gauges, screwdrivers and wrenches to readjust the erring valves — and to check and adjust the other 12 intake and 12 exhaust valves, since that’s the usual practice at most.

“They’re sharp,” Verdicchio said. “I’ll have them working on different faults, pulling engines out, fixing and rebuilding them.”

‘Let the car talk to you’

There’s a lot more to know than when he went through the auto technician program at Reynolds 18 years ago: keyless locks and ignitions, navigation systems, the cameras and sensors that replaced craning your neck around to check what’s behind you when backing up.

At the other end of the auto tech building, meanwhile the T-TEN students are deep into a lot of that.

They’re working through the one five-week unit in the two-year program that they tend to like least: advanced electrical systems.

“It’s the most complicated, especially the communications,” said Andrew Makar, connecting a rolling charger to the battery of a black Camry that he, Matt Mohr and Gage Nuhn had run down as they reviewed their lab work diagnosing faults in airbag systems.

Communications, Mohr explained, means figuring out why minicomputers in a car might not be sending data and control signals to the engine, electrical, mechanical and other systems that make a car go.

“You’ve got to let the car talk to you,” said Coleman Blom as he and Luis Aguilar worked on the lab for communications, tracking down faults and writing up “R.O.”s — repair orders — for problems they found on the Toyota Tacoma pickup they were assigned.

That means thinking about the many ways a car’s sensors and minicomputers and larger internal processors can fail to talk to one another, or to the computer diagnostic tools that Blom and Aguilar were using to try to find the cause for a series of flashing dashboard fault lights, now narrowed down to just the check-engine light.

Not that it was all that narrowed down.

When automakers began adding check engine lights to dashboards in the 1970s, they signaled when one of five things was a problem, Haney said. Now, that light could mean one of 400 different problems.

For Blom and Aguilar, the first step to finding a communications problem is to get a readout on their laptops of which circuit or circuits aren’t working. They tap into a second database to find where in the guts of the car the circuit runs. Then, they’ll haul out the yellow hand-held multimeter to check current flows and voltage along the circuit to further narrow down the problems.

“It’s like a science experiment,” Blom said. “You have hypotheses, and you test them. Most are wrong, but when you get the one that’s right, that feels amazing.”

For Vaclav Larew, pausing for a moment as he worked through a lab on a Camry’s entertainment system — he was trying to figure out why a speaker wasn’t working — the course is building confidence that he can tackle any of the problems a driver might be seeing.

“When I started, I was afraid I’d break something all the time,” he said. “Now, I’m more sure of myself.”

Michael Zaky, working with him trying to figure out what was wrong with the speaker, said he felt much the same — even though he was used to working on older cars helping his dad with his business.

“These come in fancier wrapping,” he said of the new Camry. “But I feel I know what to do now.”

Reynolds announced a revamping and expansion of its auto technical program in 2021, when Toyota signed it up as the 39th community college to offer its T-TEN master technician program, a demanding two-year work-study program. The first cohort graduated earlier this year.

Hands-on work for three days

The students spend three days a week at Reynolds — a 7 a.m. to 4 p.m. stint, most of it in hands-on work. They spend another three days at sponsoring dealerships, since to be eligible for the program they need to have an internship with a dealership.

That revamp came after an outreach effort by the college to learn what the region’s auto businesses felt they needed, and it also expanded the college’s general automotive program to include several manufacturer-based certifications.

The key thing that Taney tries to teach is how to think about a problem.

“Maybe I’ll give them a hint, but I try not to tell them the answer,” she said.

After all, there’s a lot to know about cars.

“I love cars,” Azriel Williams said. “I knew how to change spark plugs, modify exhaust systems for custom cars … but now I’m learning about so many things …

“This is the career I wanted.”