About Us


Our Beginning


The automotive industry has been plagued with many negative stereotypes and a common conception that all repair facilities are dishonest. I myself, the current owner and founder of Minneapolis Inspections, can agree on a personal level with those statements.

I began my career at one of the nation's leading automotive tech schools in the great state of Wyoming. Shortly after, I got my chance at stardom to excel in the automotive repair industry as an honest, hard working technician that was driven by quality and delivering the best possible customer care.

I started out in one of the nation's largest repair facilities. It was not long after that I began to second guess the kind of treatment our valued customers were receiving. I often found myself arguing with my service managers about what was honest and the right thing to do. It was difficult to sit in my service bay knowing that the very customer I was trying to help was actually being taken advantage of or either yet, straight out lied to. I did not stay long.

I started working at a small independent automotive repair facility a month later. Being that it was small, it was not dragged down by corporate regulations and policies. Customer service was the name of the game. For the first year I had felt at home. I was directly involved with selecting the kinds of parts that would go into our customer's vehicles and making sure what was being estimated by me was what was being sold. I would push on until I reached my breaking point.

In late 2007, a customer named Luc brought his work van into our repair shop. He was complaining that his van was hesitating on acceleration. Our shop had immediately diagnosed it as needing a full tune-up. A day later, Luc was back with the same symptoms. Another diagnosis was made that the vehicle had a faulty main fuel injector that was causing misfiring on multiple cylinders. This new fuel injector sadly did not fix the problem. Now the owner of our shop was put in a position to hurry up and correctly diagnose and fix the van before Luc could find out that we had installed a part totaling about $1,300 dollars that did nothing to fix the problem. I had found that the distributor itself was actually worn out and causing the misfire. We had put a new distributor in for our cost of $160. This had actually solved the problem, however our owner had never told Luc that he had a brand new distributor installed. Two weeks later, Luc was back and his vehicle was hesitating on acceleration again, just like before. I looked at the van again and had come to the conclusion that the distributor I had installed was defective. I had installed another one and warranted the defective one out. However, in discussing this with my service manager, both of us agreed that it would be the decent thing to refund Luc’s money for the fuel injector and have him pay for the new distributor. Our shop owner however was not willing to budge and told me directly, “Sometimes you have to lie to customers in order to get your way.” Because of this, Luc ended up paying for a new distributor.

In the end what should have been only $400 worth of repairs actually cost Luc $2300. Shortly there after, I had put in my resignation.

In January of 2007, Minneapolis Inspections was founded as a way to help the general public. We are an advocate for change. We're set out to make sure every one of our clients is treated fairly and above all with respect. I could not be more grateful for the feeling I get when I know I have personally helped someone with their automotive problems.

We are now almost in our third year of operation and this in now, Our Beginning!


Matthew R. Crawley
Founder of Minneapolis Inspections