South Dakota High School Students

Compete for Scholarships and Prizes at the

Ford/AAA Student Auto Skills Competition April 17, 2008

The Winning Team Will Compete in the National Finals in Michigan in June

NEWS from AAA South Dakota, April 14 – AAA and Ford are giving high school students the keys to start their careers in the automotive repair industry as they team up to test the students’ automotive knowledge and technical skills.

On April 17, 18 juniors and seniors from 9 high schools across South Dakota will meet in Sioux Falls, South Dakota, to face off in the annual Ford/AAA Student Auto Skills Competition.

Each two-student team will race the clock to correctly identify and fix intentionally installed “bugs” on identical Ford vehicles. After diagnosing and repairing their vehicle, the winning team must drive their assigned vehicle across the finish line, where their car will be inspected. Whichever team most accurately fixes their car in the quickest time wins.

The winning team not only receives scholarships and valuable prizes, they’ll also represent South Dakota at the National Finals at Ford Headquarters in Dearborn, Michigan, on June 24.

To qualify for the state competition, each student was required to complete an online exam administered in February. This marked the second year the qualifying exam was conducted online, enabling 8,076 students nationwide to compete for a spot in their states’ auto skills competition.

The new format follows the professional technical certification and training programs of Automotive Service Excellence (ASE) and automotive manufacturers, who are using Internet-based distance learning and assessment programs as alternatives to off-site training.

South Dakota’s first place team will compete against students from 49 other states in a written exam and the finals hands-on competition at the national contest.

“The competition is valuable because it energizes young people about the great potential in the automotive technician profession and encourages them to get the best training possible,” said Mark Madeja, spokesman for AAA South Dakota. “As vehicular technology becomes increasingly complex, we need assurance that the technicians working on our cars and trucks know what they are doing. The Ford/AAA Student Auto Skills competition gives motivated students a chance to obtain the latest technical training plus the opportunities to pay for it.”

The competition enables many of its participants to embark on promising careers in the automotive repair industry with scholarships provided to the nation’s top technical schools. The U.S. Department of Labor expects the need for qualified technicians to grow 14 percent through the year 2016, accounting for 110,000 new jobs.

Both the national and the state-wide competitions are organized with the support of Ford personnel, local automotive instructors and AAA’s Approved Auto Repair program, a public service program AAA offers to identify quality repair facilities throughout the country.