BY AVERY GOODSTINE for WEEKLY VOLCANO | 11/13/26
Who here has been personally victimized as a female walking into a car shop? I know I have.
From my junior year of high school to a year after I graduated college, I was driving a Toyota Camry that was older than me, so you can imagine that finding a trustworthy car place in my college town was important to me.
I never had any major concerns with my car and only needed one big repair the whole time I had it, but as a generally anxious person, I was always mentally prepared to hear that my car was undrivable.
So I took my car to a place near my school to make sure she was good to drive the three hours back home for a weekend. And that’s when I was given news that seemed like the scariest thing: all of my brakes were grinding metal on metal, and they needed to be replaced.
Luckily for me, my grandfather and then boyfriend (now husband) are kind of hobby mechanics and overall very knowledgeable about that corner of the world. So, I called them up and told them the situation. Being fairly familiar with my car at this point, both of them confidently said there was no way my brakes were that bad, and I was OK to drive home.
The boyfriend took no time at all to inspect my brakes, and guess what he found? Four perfectly fine, good-working brakes. Were they brand new? No. But were they metal on metal? Definitely not.
That’s the last time I ever took my car to that place.
So imagine my excitement when I came across a reel on Facebook from Tveten’s Auto Clinic, promoting themselves as woman-friendly.
Daniel Weatherford has owned the Lakewood location of Tveten’s since 2020, but he has been in the industry since 2005. He started out working for his dad as an oil technician, then worked at the counter before becoming a shop manager. He eventually ended up in an ownership share at their Tillicum location, and then decided it was time to take over the Lakewood location as well.
Now, it’s a family affair. Both of Weatherford’s parents are still involved, and his wife is also a partner. Some of the employees have been there for 20 or 30 years.
The video advertising it as a woman-friendly shop went up a little less than a year ago, and it now has 5,000 interactions, almost 400 shares, and over 400 comments.
The video features team member Janie sitting on a chair in a car bay.
“Ladies, there’s nothing worse than walking into an auto shop and instantly wondering, ‘Am I about to get played?’” she said in the video.
Weatherford said he takes “a pretty big stance on female-friendly” because he wants to help educate people who don’t know much about cars, and fight the stigma that just because you’re a woman means you don’t know anything
“I’ve met literally the best machinist in Pierce County is a woman, and I trust her over almost anything,” he said. “And you know, my mom is someone that could tear apart a carburetor and rebuild it back in a day and would work on things.”
Even if someone gets work done at another shop, Weatherford said he’s happy to talk through things with them and answer any questions they might still have.
Weatherford said the reality is that many women expect to get taken advantage of or talked down to in a car shop, but he wants to change that at Tveten’s. He wants women to know it’s OK to come in knowing nothing and ask for a mechanic to explain something to them, or show them what they are talking about.
“My daughter … she wants an early 2000s old Toyota beetle, and I told her, I said, if we’re going to do that, that’s fine,” he said. “But you’re going to come in, you’re going to work with me, and you’re going to learn to work on it, and you know, do things yourself, and you know, at very minimum, get some mechanical understanding.”
He said it’s also important to him that he shows his daughter that if she wants to be a mechanic, she can be. And his son can be whatever he wants as well.
Since the video was made about a year ago, Weatherford said there has been an increase in customers. A majority of their customers were already female, he added, because they might care more about their cars and making sure maintenance is up to date.
While the video has received a lot of positive feedback, it’s also gotten some negative comments.
“There’s a few people on those that are like, ‘I’m never taking my car there,’ and I’m like, you know, honestly, at that point, those aren’t the 10 people I want, anyway,” he said.
Unfortunately, Weatherford said they still deal with sexism toward the females who work in the shop.
“People will call up and Hannah will answer the phone, and then she gives them an answer, and then they’ll go, ‘Well, can I talk to a mechanic?’ That’s code for ‘Can I talk to a man?’” he said.
While Weatherford said he absolutely agrees with the messaging in the video, he feels it’s important to have that same attitude toward every customer who walks in.
“Whoever walks through that door, doesn’t matter who they are,” he said. “It doesn’t matter their story. It doesn’t matter what economic standpoint they’re from. Doesn’t matter whether they’re male, female. Doesn’t matter their ethnicity. None of that. They’re still a person. There’s still a car.”
