Two bays on Leary Ave
Small on purpose. The person who diagnoses your car is the person who fixes it.
Owner
Nils Bergstrom
Owner & lead technician
Eleven years at the Bellevue BMW dealership, most of them good ones. He learned the cars there — the training, the tooling, the discipline of doing a job the way the factory wrote it down.
He left in 2011 because he was being told to sell services cars didn't need. There was a number on a board every morning, and the number didn't care whether the brake fluid was actually due.
Torque & Tally opened that year in a unit off Shilshole with one lift and a scan tool borrowed from a friend who owned a Volvo shop. The first month was three cars. The second was eleven, all of them people the first three sent.
“The dealer taught me the cars. It also taught me exactly what I didn't want to do to people.”
The rest of the shop
Three more people, and you'll meet all of them.
Wren Castellanos
Technician
Audi and VW specialist, nine years in. Does most of the DSG and timing work. Races a hand-built Mk2 Golf on weekends, which explains a lot about how she torques a bolt.
Tobias Amari
Technician
Porsche, plus the electrical gremlins nobody else wants. Came up through the Navy as an aviation electrician, so a wiring diagram doesn't frighten him.
Joyce Lam
Service manager
The one who actually calls you back. Ran a parts department for fifteen years and knows what's in stock in the region before she quotes you a date.
How we got here
Fourteen years, five things worth marking.
One lift, one tech
A unit off Shilshole, a borrowed scan tool, and three cars the first month.
The Leary Ave building
Moved in and added the second bay. Two cars at a time instead of one changed everything about scheduling.
PIWIS, and Porsche
Bought the licence and started taking 911s and Caymans properly instead of turning them away.
The rack and the loaners
Added the alignment rack and the loaner fleet — three cars, all high-mileage, all ours.
Master certification
Wren and Tobias both hit factory master certification in the same year.
The place itself
Six pictures of a two-bay shop.
