Looking for a good auto technician? Try a Maui high school.

Four teams from three Maui schools swept the top places in the 2007 Ford/AAA Student Auto Skills State Competition, the state championship for auto technology students.

A team from Maui High School has taken home the state title nine of the past 10 years. Maui High teams, in 1995 and 2000, even won the national title by besting teams from each of the 50 states, the District of Columbia and Puerto Rico.

The one team to beat out Maui High as state champion during the past decade came from cross-island rival Lahainaluna High.

Even upstart King Kekaulike High got into the act this year, taking fourth place in its first year of competition behind two Maui High teams — that finished first and third— and a Lahainaluna team that finished second.

The winning team of Dustin Texeira and Brandon Sato, Maui High seniors coached by auto technician instructor Neill Nakamura, will move on to the national championship competition in Dearborn, Mich. next month.

The six teams gathered at the Automotive Shop at Leeward Community College for the championship yesterday spent a part of their morning under the hood of their respective 2007 Mercury Grand Marquis, trying to diagnose and repair nine malfunctions that were "bugged" in each of the vehicles. The teams are also judged on how well they did on a written test.

Jake Darakjian, a Leeward Community College automotive technology professor who serves as competition manager, said he is continually impressed by the speed and skill of the high school teams. "They fix them faster than we can bug 'em, and we have the instructions!" Darakjian said.

Ford and AAA offer $4,000 scholarships to each of the two members of the winning teams to attend Darakjian's two-year, automobile technician program at LCC. Members of the second-place team get $2,000, the third-place team $1,000 and the fourth place team $500. Several Mainland technical institutions also offer scholarships to winners who attend their schools, AAA Hawai'i administrator Diane Beirne said.

Sato, 17, paced nervously before the results were announced. His team was the third to finish yesterday's hands-on portion of the competition but the first to get a perfect score. Sato, a Kihei resident who wants to build custom cars "like the ones in the movies" for a living, said he believes he did well on the written test. "I only guessed on a couple of the questions," he said.

He and teammate Texeira, a Kahului senior eyeing a career as an auto technician, wound up taking home the top prize.

Nakamura, their teacher, credited fellow automotive instructor Dennis Ishii for putting together the formula for winning teams at Maui High. "They all train real hard, many hours," Nakamura said.

Darakjian and Ishii lamented the declining number of automotive technician offerings at local high schools. Darakjian counted no more than 10 public schools that offer automotive technician classes on O'ahu in addition to the three on Maui.

"It's dying," said Ishii, who has taught automotive classes for 34 years. "It's hard to find automotive instructors."

Not that there is a diminishing demand for automotive technicians, who earn a starting pay of between $9.50 and $17.50 an hour. Darakjian said one of his former students was making $117,000 a year before quitting to start his own business.

Darakjian said there's a key difference between an automotive mechanic and a technician. "A technician is one who can diagnose a part and tell why a part's wrong," he said. "A mechanic is one that essentially has someone else telling him to exchange a part."

In the old days of car mechanics, "you just fixed parts until it worked," Darakjian said. But with the sophisticated electronics used to manufacture today's vehicles, "you will not succeed without an education."

Reach Gordon Y.K. Pang at gpang@honoluluadvertiser.com.