A year after buying her first car, a Hyundai Elantra, Nikki Puckett Bosov faced a situation many people may be familiar with: A mechanic messing with her car and then trying to upsell her on a repair she didn’t need. In her case, it was new brakes.
“I realized that they just took the brake booster hose off,” Puckett Bosov told INDY. “I was like, ‘Wait, this is a brand new car. I didn’t come in like this.’”
After that experience, she decided “to learn everything about a vehicle, because I don’t want to get taken advantage of again.”
Two decades of experience and certifications later, Puckett Bossov and her business partner, Bear O’Brien, are opening up their own garage that will look unlike any other in Durham.
The pair is calling it a community garage, a place where customers can acquire the skills and knowledge to make empowered decisions. The space will be, as the garage’s GoFundMe says, “Durham’s first women-, queer-, and non-binary-led community auto repair shop.”
Located at 103 E. Rockway Street in Durham, Fluid Community Garage will offer regular mechanic services, as well as classroom lessons and a community space.
O’Brien, an ASE Certified Master Automobile Technician, previously ran Wrenchin Bear Auto out of their own backyard. Puckett Bosov, meanwhile, worked for AAA and the now-closed Massengill’s Auto in downtown Durham.
The duo is planning for a May 16 grand opening.
As we walked around the garage’s future site, on a recent sunny afternoon, the mechanics, wearing matching shop shirts that sport embroidered name patches, painted a vision of the thriving, welcoming community environment that they want to fill the garage with.
The currently charmless waiting room will become a lounge space, complete with works for sale by local artists. The somewhat ramshackle shed on the back of the lot will become a classroom, where anyone can stop by to learn how to change a tire or what to know when buying a new car. The ditch beyond the shed, currently full of leaves and beer bottles, is actually a small creek that just needs a little love before it will be a pleasant complement to a future children’s playset and a community garden.
Fluid’s owners will join a small group of female mechanics and garage owners in the Triangle. Per the Bureau of Labor Statistics, just 1.8% of automotive service technicians and mechanics are women (despite a long history of automotive inventions like the turn signal, the use of which some Durham drivers could stop by the garage to learn more about). As NBC reported in 2021, queer mechanics like those behind Fluid have been increasingly working to detoxify an industry known for its macho tilt.
The classroom component of the Fluid vision grew out of a stint at Night School Bar, a popular Durham sliding-scale priced collective where the mechanics first started teaching two years ago. The classes, said Puckett Bosov, are more casual than those you could take somewhere like Durham Technical Community College. “If you just want to pop in for a class to learn about how to change a tire or how to change your oil, it shouldn’t take a whole semester,” she says.
O’Brien ran Wrenchin Bear Auto for a year and a half. They told INDY that running a queer-owned business in such a male-dominated field was a very positive—but kind of overwhelming—experience, thanks to strong Durham community interest, which routinely left O’Brien with a three-week- long waitlist.
“I got super overwhelmed and bombarded by pretty much every queer in Durham,” they said with a laugh.
Part of the “community” aspect of Fluid is also being transparent about costs. The team is well aware that they can’t give everything away for free, but they want to be able to explain to customers exactly why their bill is what it is—Puckett Bosov rattles off disposal and shop fees as the kinds of items that customers should be aware of.
“The prices might be up because of the tariffs, but, like, at least we can educate people why,” she said. “We want to encourage people to ask questions to their mechanics, and not just be like, ‘That’s it, this here’s a $3,000 bill, that’s what you get.’”
Puckett Bosov says that anyone who wants to help execute the vision can come to the Community Day on April 18 (and be ready to help with odd jobs, from picking up trash to painting to moving equipment) or donate to the GoFundMe, which will help with the expensive overhead of auto machinery.
And everyone interested should be ready for the business’s May 16 grand opening.
“We’ll hopefully have live music or a DJ, we want to have a bounce house and some yard games, and a couple friends want to do a bikini car wash,” said Puckett Bosov. “We want the community to be part of this as much as they can.”
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