Lawyers who care to debate the finer points of automotive engineering with U.S. District Judge Frank Montalvo of El Paso probably are not going to get much past him. In a former life, Montalvo was an engineer in Detroit who worked for Chrysler and later General Motors and who specialized in automotive crash test safety.
That job turned into a hobby. “I love tinkering on cars. Up until eight or nine years ago, I did my own oil changes and brake jobs and tune-ups. But I don’t do that anymore,” Montalvo says. As the demands of his present job increased, Montalvo left the amateur auto mechanics behind.
