No technicians, full books: how Olacar is crossing the Pyrenees to fix France’s workshop problem
Quentin Bruhier co-founded Olacar to solve a simple problem: French repair workshops have clients, equipment, and floor space. What they don’t have is enough technicians to do the work.
TLDR
France’s automotive workshops have full order books and working equipment. What they don’t have is enough technicians. Training centres can’t keep up, and the domestic supply has dried up.
Quentin Bruhier and Romain Charzat built Olacar to solve that gap by recruiting skilled technicians from Spain and placing them in French workshops and dealerships.
When Olacar dropped its housing subsidy in January 2026, Quentin expected to lose 30% of his technician pool. He lost none.
Three full-time staff do nothing but onboarding. Both the technician and the client have a direct line to Olacar throughout the placement, six months in or more.
Candidate-facing: fully human, by necessity. Internal ops: highly automated, also by necessity. Olacar learned the difference the hard way.
The problem is deceptively simple. A French repair workshop has clients. It has the tools. It has the floor space. At the end of the year, it still can’t close in the black. The reason, almost every time, is the same: not enough technicians to do the work.
“The clients are there, the equipment is there, the investment has been made. The only missing element is the workforce. The human.”
That observation led Quentin Bruhier and his co-founder Romain Charzat to build Olacar: a recruitment firm that sources skilled automotive technicians from Spain and places them in French workshops. According to Quentin, Romain spent ten years as a dealership director across independent groups and the Renault network before they started the business together. He understood the operational and financial logic of the workshops from the inside. That, Quentin says, is why the solution they built actually fits.
The French market ran dry
The original idea was simpler. Source domestically. Go to the training centres, find qualified technicians, match them with workshops that need them.
It didn’t work. “There aren’t any,” Quentin says. “Or there aren’t any anymore.” The centres can’t produce enough volume to meet demand, and the profiles with five to ten years of experience that workshops need are scarce. Clients want plug-and-play: someone who walks in on day one and knows what they’re doing.
So they looked south. Quentin had lived in Mexico. Romain had lived in Spain & Mexico. The cultural proximity was there, and the candidate pool was too. They posted ads, ran interviews, and started placing Spanish technicians in French workshops. It worked.
The language non-issue
The assumption was that language would be a barrier. It wasn’t.
“A skilled painter will paint a car in any language,” Quentin says. “As long as the workshop manager explains things properly, language isn’t the problem.” What matters is competence.
It also turns out that many French workshops are already managed by people of Spanish or Portuguese heritage: third-generation descendants of the immigration wave of the 1950s and 60s, who built their own garages and passed them down. Spanish is already spoken on a lot of French workshop floors.
The hotline no one else runs
What Olacar sells is not a CV. It is a relationship that doesn’t end at the point of placement.
Three of Olacar’s staff, out of a team of 16 according to Quentin, work exclusively on onboarding. When a technician starts at a client workshop, both sides have a direct line to Olacar. Six months into the placement, either party can still pick up the phone.
“We are the hotline for the technician and the hotline for the client. If there’s a problem — communication, anything — they call us.”
That level of follow-through is rare. Most competitors, Quentin says, are either small and unstructured or focused on short-term crew deployment. Olacar’s model is different: a temporary placement that can convert to a permanent contract, with Olacar staying in the picture throughout.
The decision that proved the model
At the end of 2025, Quentin and Romain made a call that worried them.
Since launch, Olacar had been subsidising accommodation for the technicians it placed: covering rent, managing the logistics, absorbing the cost. It was a drain on the P&L that consumed cash and time without, on reflection, adding much value. They decided to drop it from January 2026.
They expected to lose around 30% of their technician pool. They lost none.
“It passed like a letter through a letterbox,” Quentin says. Technicians who had relied on the housing support stayed. New recruits, told from the start that accommodation was their own responsibility, still came. “We were convinced it was bringing something. It wasn’t.”
The lesson was about the model itself. What keeps technicians with Olacar is not a subsidy. It is the support structure, the onboarding, the sense that someone is there if things go wrong in a foreign country. That cannot be replaced with a rent cheque.
Why they won’t automate
Olacar has watched the automation conversation move through the recruitment industry. Callbots, AI pre-qualification, automated outreach sequences. Quentin is not dismissive of those tools, he discussed them at a recent Talent Business Club dinner in Paris, and he tried them. In the early days, the candidate workflow was highly automated. Clean on paper, built for scale. It didn't survive contact with the candidate.
"At the beginning the workflow was ultra-automated and really perfect on paper, but it wasn't ready for the real battlefield." He had to strip it back, gather feedback from the first technicians who had gone through it, and figure out what could actually be automated and what couldn't. The answer came from the candidates themselves.
The lesson wasn't that automation is wrong. It's that it doesn't hold in this specific context: someone being asked to change countries, sign an unfamiliar contract, and trust an agency they've never met.
“If we start using robots, we’ve lost. For our target, a cross-border contact via a callbot smells like a scam.”
What builds that trust is human contact, testimonials from technicians who've already made the move, and visible proof that Olacar is a real company with real people behind it. "The fact that we're a firm with a street presence and actual humans matters enormously," he says.
What success looks like
Olacar’s measure of success is, by any commercial logic, a little odd.
“We consider it a success when a client no longer needs us,” Quentin says. “That we filled the gap, the technician is happy, the workshop is satisfied, and they don’t need us any more. That’s a real satisfaction.”
The business launched in spring 2023. As of late 2024, it had around 50 clients and had placed more than 200 technicians, with 70 still in post on second or third assignments. According to Quentin, the team of 16 spans Paris, Madrid, Lille, Porto, Morocco, Brazil, Mexico, and Wales.
Olacar already serves repair workshops, dealerships, and mechanical garages. In three years, Quentin wants the model to expand internationally and into new types of positions within the automotive sector. The ambition is plain: "If Olacar could cover all the recruitment needs of the automotive sector, that would be ideal."
The business he built to get there runs entirely on human contact. That is not a value statement. It is what works.
Quentin Bruhier is co-founder of Olacar, a specialist recruitment firm placing automotive technicians across France and Spain. He was interviewed by Francine Nyamba of Talent Business Club. Olacar is listed on Talent Business Partners.