College of the Redwoods Automotive Program receives third donation from Harper Motors

The Automotive Program at College of the Redwoods received donations of a 2003 Ford Explorer, 2004 Mercury Marquis, and a 2005 Kia Rio from Harper Motors of Eureka. Trevor Harper, General Manager and Robert Barrera, Service Manager of Harper Motors have helped the CR Automotive Program immensely by donating these and other vehicles for students to learn diagnosing and repairing.

The vehicles have concerns that resulted in making it cost ineffective to repair and consequently were abandoned at the dealership. Instructor Mike Richards says “these vehicles have been a great asset to our program and having real world problems actually makes them better for teaching diagnostics.”  Harper and Barrera are very satisfied with CR’s Automotive Program graduates, many of whom they have hired, and look forward to further developing this “school to work” relationship. 

Barrera said he and Harper garnered high praise at a recent meeting where Ford was encouraging dealers to build relationships with local auto programs to develop tomorrow’s technicians. “We told them about our history of working with CR’s Automotive Program and what we’re doing here with the lien sale vehicles and they were very excited to hear about that” said Barrera.

“This is great for our program, the students can learn a lot from the technical systems in these vehicles.  We’re very fortunate to have this level of support locally” said Richards. “I would love to see more dealers get involved in donating their lien sale vehicles for training purposes.” 

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