I dropped into Connie & Dick’s Service Center last week and had the pleasure of bringing Grace Lim with me, Earthling’s new Customer Service Specialist. Scott Brown was kind enough to meet us after a busy day, sharing the latest happenings at one of LA’s greatest repair shops.
A Friend of Earthling
Scott and Cindy Brown, the shop’s owners, are longtime friends of mine and longtime partners of Earthling. Scott and I go back to our past lives building tools for the industry — me at Shop-Ware, Scott at iATN and now Diagnostic Network.
We’ve spent years collaborating on technical training, shop management best practices, Tesla insights, and industry partnerships. When something new lands in the EV world, Scott is one of the first calls I make.
Lately, Scott has been one of the sharpest independent minds anywhere on Tesla service — particularly the Cybertruck, which he’s been studying at the component level. More on that below.
If you’re in need of auto service in the San Gabriel Valley — or you have a tough diagnostic case anywhere in the LA basin — give Connie & Dick’s a shout at 909-626-5653 or connieanddicks.com and tell them Earthling sent you!
The History: Two Diagnostic Savants
Well before Scott and Cindy took over the business, Connie and Dick’s was way ahead of the technical curve. Opening in 1960, the original partners — Conrad (“Connie”) and Richard (“Dick”) — started in a small Mobil gas station in downtown Claremont near Bonita and Yale, expanded through several service stations around town, and eventually settled into the shop’s current 13,000-square-foot facility on Olive Street.
What most people don’t know is that Connie and Dick weren’t just gas station operators. They were both technicians — diagnostic savants of their day. A black-and-white photo of the two of them with their Sun “Infra-Red Engine Performance Tester” hangs proudly in the shop waiting area.
A Word About That Sun Machine
Sun Electric’s engine analyzers were the most advanced diagnostic equipment a shop could buy in the mid-20th century — rolling consoles with oscilloscopes, dwell meters, vacuum gauges, and cylinder balance testers. They were also seriously expensive: in 1961, a Sun scope console ran over a thousand dollars, a meaningful fraction of the price of a new car. Sun ran dozens of training centers around the country because most mechanics didn’t know how to use one, and plenty never bothered to learn.
Reading an oscilloscope pattern in 1965 was not so different, culturally, from scoping a CAN bus today: a minority of technicians embraced it, and those technicians could find problems everyone else missed. Connie and Dick were in that minority. Sixty years later, the shop still runs the same way: new technology comes along, and they’re among the first to master it.
Scott Brown: The Quietest Legend in Automotive Diagnostics
Scott started at Connie & Dick’s as an employee and bought the shop from Connie and Dick in the early 1990s. He and Cindy have run it ever since — and if you asked Scott about his résumé, he’d probably shrug and change the subject to whatever waveform he captured that morning. So I’ll brag for him.
Scott is an ASE Master Certified technician with L1, L3, and L4 credentials and roughly four decades in the industry. In 1995, he co-founded the International Automotive Technicians Network (iATN) — the first large-scale online community where professional technicians shared diagnostic knowledge, back when “online” meant dial-up. He served as iATN’s president for over two decades. In 2018, he founded Diagnostic Network, the modern successor: a platform where the best diagnosticians in the world work through the hardest cases together. He’s served on the NASTF Board of Directors, written for textbook publisher Goodheart-Wilcox, teaches ADAS calibration, and hosts an industry podcast.
Put plainly: a significant share of the diagnostic knowledge-sharing infrastructure that professional technicians rely on today exists because of Scott.
And you’d never hear any of this walking into his shop. Connie & Dick’s presents itself as a friendly neighborhood business with a 3-year/36,000-mile warranty and ASE Master Certified technicians — humility that’s another form of their service excellence. The best shops don’t need to tell you they’re the best. Their work, and 65 years of Claremont customers, do the talking.
Teslas, Cybertrucks, and the Notorious PCS Board
The occasion for our visit was a peek into the shop’s latest Tesla work, and Scott did not disappoint. He walked us through his new Tesla trainer (a Model 3 electrical system, removed from the vehicle body and mounted to a wooden frame, for sake of student labs and demystification) and then pulled out a novel piece: the Cybertruck Power Conversion System (PCS) board.
If you follow Cybertruck owner communities, you know why this board is notorious. The PCS integrates the onboard charger and DC-DC converter into a single unit — in the Cybertruck’s case, straddling 120v AC, 800v DC, and 48v DC. The board is wildly convoluted, doing the work of both charging the HV pack and also generating power from the pack to off-board circuits (vehicle-to-grid or what Tesla calls “PowerShare”), in addition to stepping down DC from 800v to 48v for auxiliary power and systems traditionally on 12v.
More on this ambitious component from Munro Live here: Moving On Up: Exploring the Cybertruck’s Power Conversion System & 48V Architecture
Owner forums and trade press have documented a widely reported failure pattern: AC charging speeds throttle down, then an “AC Charging Unavailable” warning appears, and home charging is gone. The unit sits buried beneath the bed floor, so replacement is a substantial job. As of this writing, Tesla has been replacing units case by case rather than issuing a recall, and has pushed a software update letting affected trucks Supercharge in the meantime.
Nonetheless, mechanics love a pattern failure and we’ll be watching this one closely; Scott is one of the few independents studying this component at the board level. Conversations like the one we had in Claremont are critical to our preparation for our future customers. As Cybertrucks age out of warranty, owners are going to need independent shops that understand them, and Scott’s already there.
Meet Grace (Yes, She’s a Real Person!)
The other reason for the trip: a face-to-face! Grace is Earthling’s new Customer Service Specialist, who joined us full time in April of this year. She works remotely and lives in LA. When your team is split between San Francisco and Southern California, you take opportunities to work side by side — and there was no better rendezvous point than Connie & Dick’s.
If you’ve called or texted Earthling recently, you’ve surely talked to Grace. We are thrilled to have her on the team; her capable management of inbounds, concerns, scheduling logistics, and general shop accessibility has been a priority of ours since we migrated from Luscious. With Grace aboard in this new role, we are able to meet our customers’ needs promptly and professionally.
The one downside? She’s so polite, so responsive, and so capable that customers regularly assume she’s an AI bot. (Facepalm!) You heard it here, officially: Grace is a real human being, a bona fide Earthling, and an awesome one. And now we have photographic evidence: Grace with me, Grace with Scott, Grace with a Cybertruck, Grace holding a PCS board. AI can’t do that. (Yet.)
Consider this the pilot episode of Earthling’s “The Real World” — an occasional series where you meet the actual humans behind the shop. Stay tuned for the next episode!
Need a Shop in the San Gabriel Valley?
Connie & Dick’s Service Center, 150 Olive St., Claremont, CA 91711. Call 909-626-5653 or visit connieanddicks.com. For routine service, tough diagnostics, hybrids, Teslas, or ADAS calibration anywhere in the LA basin — they’re the best of the best, even if they’d never say so themselves. Tell them Earthling sent you.
And if you’re in San Francisco with a hybrid or EV that needs a shop that speaks its language, partner with Earthling Automotive: call or text (415) 875-9030, or book online at earthlingauto.com. We’re at 615 Bayshore Blvd, open Monday–Friday, 8am–5pm.
