Ángel Gaitán, mechanic: “As customers of a garage, you have to know what's on the floor.”

Many people walk into a garage and leave their car with no idea what they're going to do or what kind of equipment is used. They expect the mechanic to check, repair, and deliver the vehicle ready, but rarely are they given detailed explanations about how the tools used to detect problems work.

This lack of knowledge means many customers are unaware of the actual condition of their brakes, suspension, or steering, even though these are essential systems for safe driving.

Mechanic Ángel Gaitán emphasized this point in a video posted on Instagram, where he emphasized that "as customers of a garage, you have to know what this thing on the ground is." He showed it alongside Rafa, the manager of a garage in Guernica, who explained that it's a brake pad tester that, when the car passes over it, provides data on braking, suspension, and even alignment.

As Rafa explained, "What it measures, as you mentioned, is when you come into the workshop, you brake on it, and it gives us all the results of the braking status, its distribution, its efficiency, its power, the condition of the suspension. It also has a wheel alignment machine on site to check the directional deviation." The entire system is manufactured in Spain and already has a national patent, pending a European one.

The demonstration was conducted on an employee's Fiat Stilo, which was experiencing premature tire wear. When the brake tester ran the brake, the machine detected a 43% failure in the rear brakes, in addition to a very unbalanced brake distribution. Gaitán summed it up with a straightforward comment: "It makes sense to me because Carlitos spins a lot."

The analysis also showed that the suspension was out of range and that the discs were warping on one of the front wheels. The graphs on the screen reflected the uneven rebound from one side to the other, confirming the difference in performance. Rafa explained it clearly: "The front wheels are outside their normal operating range, soft, and there's already a difference between them."

The test concluded with the alignment, which yielded an extreme deviation. The result clearly showed that the car was suffering from excessive tire wear, and the machine allowed it to be checked immediately, simply by driving over it. A simple way to understand that in a workshop, not everything depends on the mechanic's eye, but also on systems like this that reveal what lies beneath the car.