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Women Take Control with Girls Auto Clinic

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As a woman, you head into any car dealership or repair shop expecting the worse. Employees automatically assume that you know nothing about your car, and will either dumb down information for you in a condescending way or try to use technical terms to get you to pay for something you don’t need. One Pennsylvania woman is hoping to change all that with information sessions and her own female-run auto repair shop.


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Patrice Banks refers to herself as a recovering “auto airhead,” because she used to know absolutely nothing about her vehicle. To fix that, she worked for an Automotive Technology Diploma (in addition to her previous Bachelors of Science in Materials Engineering) and then made it her life’s work to help women stop getting cheated by auto repair shops. That desire lead to the foundation of the Girls Auto Clinic, which provides car care workshops to women and workplaces. Women are given handy flip guides and shown the parts on their car that need maintenance and at what intervals. The goal is to give women the resources to know if something really does need replaced, or if they are being taken for a ride.

Ms. Banks and her group are currently working on opening the first Girls Auto Clinic Repair Center in Upper Darby, where women will be comfortable taking their car to be repaired. For the true girly-girls out there, there will also be a beauty bar attached for while customers wait for their vehicles.


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This whole program and shop is truly a great idea, because a more educated customer will be more likely to make good choices when spending money on car repairs. Hopefully this starts a trend as one of many small steps forward to women being treated like real people in the automotive world.

News Souce: Girls Auto Clinic