The “Green” Automotive Service & Repair Center For Your Audi, Volkswagen & Porsche

An article we’ve wanted to write for some time now is one about our efforts to recycle, minimize waste, and conserve our natural resources.  With Earth Day 2009 upon us now is as good a time as any for this blog.  Futrell Autowerks has always been active in recycling waste fluids, cardboard and other reusable materials in our workplace but when we expanded our operations back in 2007 to the entire Western side of our building we also implemented many “green” choices during construction.

For Starters over 50% of all of our lighting is low consumption fluorescent and compact fluorescent fixtures, in the future we’ll be changing out remaining non-efficient fixtures to energy efficient fixtures. We also insulated our offices, waiting room and showroom to conserve energy and heating and cooling . Our glass was tinted and unused windows were covered with an opaque film to further minimize heating/cooling.  Digital seven day thermostats were used throughout the entire premises with cooling shut off completely on the weekends and heating reduced dramatically during non-business hours. New weather strip was used on all external doors, door insulation was applied to all overheard doors as well.  Our computers are shut off or set to hibernate during non-business hours, an entire audit was performed for “vampire” electronic consumption and major (non-essential) offenders were disconnected.

In our shop all waste fluids such as motor oil, power steering fluid, brake fluid, anti-freeze, fuel, & freon are recovered and sent off to various recycling agencies that specialize in waste fluids. We minimize the use of wasteful aerosol cleaners and solvents and use biodegradable detergents as often as possible (including car washes). Our shops is clean and well lit which aids to minimize spills or unnecessary lighting. We have a cross breeze door configuration which allows us to cool our shop naturally and incorporate a water draft recovery fan set-up for those really hot days.  All shipping packing is recycled with a great deal of packing material reused for our own outgoing shipping.

By the end of 2009 we will have completely converted the rest of our lighting to energy efficient solutions and installed well placed fans in the showroom and shop to aid in circulation.  Moving forward we’ll continue to look for new solutions to lower our energy consumption and help make our industry just a little more “Green”.

Welcome To Our Blog

Thank you for visiting our new blog.  The purpose of this Blog will be to keep customers, friends, and anyone curious about Futrell Autowerks updated on what we’re doing, specials we’re running and other news and interests we share from time to time.

Let’s get started with a little background information first.  Futrell Autowerks Inc. was founded in May of 2001 by company frontman and CEO; Dean Futrell.  The original company goal was to provide our local area with a service no one else readily offered – Engine Conversions, an example would be a MK2 VR6 swap.  Initially that was all we really did, motor swap, after motor swap, it was fun for awhile but we were limited to how many cars we could work on and the thing was when you build a car with used parts, you still have a old car with used parts, things can and will go wrong (and they did). We pretty much ended up with this core group of cars we constantly worked on, in 2003 the opportunity arose to join APR’s distributor network.  We jumped on this opportunity and instantly began tuning and upgrading late model Audis and Volkswagens.  These customer’s needed a place to also have their regular service work performed at and we decided to expand into full service by 2004.  We quickly outgrew our original location on Nicholas Ct. in Hillsboro and moved into the shop side of our current facility in October of 2005.  Our customer base continued to grow and an opportunity we could not pass up arose to take over the entire Western wing of our building in summer of 2007.  We now have over 12,000 sq. feet of service shop, waiting area, showroom and office space, one of the largest non-dealership owned independent service centers of our kind.