The future of repairing cars

Dec. 30, 2014
OEMs and aftermarket alike have been coming to terms with connected cars as well as the potential issues that can come from blending smart cars, smart phones and mostly smart drivers.

In 1993 there was a movie called “Demolition Man” that starred Sylvester Stallone and Sandra Bullock. The movie took place several years in the future – the 21st century and was fairly accurate about what would happen in the future, although Arnold Schwarzenegger became governor and not president. In the movie many future cars were featured that had what we would now call telematics. The future is here – almost.

Over the last year there has been a lot of activity on the topic of connected cars. OEMs and aftermarket alike have been coming to terms with the terms as well as the potential issues that can come from blending smart cars, smart phones and mostly smart drivers. I now have a dozen or so telematics meetings and events under my belt for this year. To avoid getting very long, I am going to try to get you up to speed by briefly explaining the issues and technologies. You can search them online and get a mountain of facts, opinion and data to satisfy your curiosity.

During the Equipment and Tool Institute (ETI) conference earlier this year two topics were at the forefront of discussion. The first is called ITS, or intelligent transportation system.

The panacea of this idea is that everything involved in transportation from the road infrastructure to the individual item or person being transported would have its own unique ID so that vehicles, traffic lights and other things could interact and make decisions about those interactions. For example I am drinking my Starbucks with my feet up on the dash of my autonomous car while it drives me to work. As I come to an intersection the stoplight tells my car that it will be turning green in 36 seconds. To save energy (fuel or electricity) my vehicle slows down to sync with the light, as do all the other auto vehicles around me. Just then a kid with his smart phone in his pocket jumps out into the road. My vehicle now makes a decision because it knows that the smart phone must be a human and it applies brakes and avoids the kid. Everybody is happy and goes on even though I have now got my Starbucks more on my clothes than in the cup.

The truth is we are not going to see this kind of interaction in my lifetime. Lets face it: We can’t keep the streets paved how are we going to fund lo-jacking every traffic light and intersection in the world? There are examples of this going on however.

When you take home a box of Lucky Charms that little white three-dimensional sticker contains a radio-frequency identification (RFID) chip that has helped to track the progress of the box of cereal. The primary goal is to manage the transportation and shelving of items but it is not a great stretch to imagine that this could be used to track the box cradle to grave. Vehicles in this scheme are part of a V2I – vehicle to infrastructure.

What if we were to decide that in the immediate future it would be more practical to do a micro instead of macro version of this? What if vehicles talked to one another and used GPS to determine where they are and lines on roads to advise the driver when they wander out of the lines? This is known as vehicle to vehicle (V2V) and by most of the technophiles estimation this is the most logical way to make the connected car fit into our world in the U.S.

If you have concerns about repairing these vehicles, let’s look at what we need to actually make that come off. We need some way of sensing the distance to an object – check. Current technologies are doing that and you know them as parking aid sensors, lane departure systems, parallel parking systems and adaptive cruise control. Be sure you understand how they operate and you will have a leg up on the competition.

We are also going to need a way to know where we are and where the roads go. Check again, navigation systems have been around for quite a while and get more accurate all the time although my phone still does a better job than my car. Most of the repairs to these systems involve programming. You are already doing that right?

We are going to need to apply the brakes in an emergency. Anti-lock brakes and electronic stability control (ESC) are going to be the players in that. We all are familiar with what their weaknesses are and what their service and maintenance needs are.

We need to be able to adjust the steering if necessary. It seems almost like this is a plan, doesn’t it? We have electronic power steering that interacts with all of the vehicle positioning systems.

Last, we have to know if the driver is making bad decisions. We have, tied into the ESC/TCS system accelerometers and yaw rate sensors so that the processors can shift the vehicle so it is pointed in the direction of inertia for better control and braking.

So we know about all of these systems. We probably already are servicing many of them. Others will be in shops in coming years so as an industry we need to get our techs up to speed and do our best to predict failures so parts are available.

The last piece of this puzzle is the communication functions of these vehicles. This is the area that causes the most concern for everyone. The OEMs recognize this and have made efforts to define the telematics communication portion of the connected car. They are not without their own set of issues though.

Many OEMs are only beginning to bring telematic technologies into their vehicles while others could arguably do an autonomous vehicle now. This gulf makes for a large disparity when the OEMs meet and try to come up with answers to ward off legislative efforts, which they believe are too early and will hamper their creativity.

Opponents are concerned that if measures are not taken now, vehicle owner privacy will be an issue and access to the diagnostically useful information and the potential marketing opportunities that the center stack may bring later on will be much more difficult to get back later. It is difficult to argue with any of the positions once you get your head around all of the details. So how do two groups who have had challenges working together sometimes find the sweet spot? Communication is the key and the only way to avoid another decade or longer battle like we had with Right to Repair.

Many in the aftermarket suggest that a secure vehicle gateway (SVG) would allow certain repair related data to be accessed while protecting critical functions that could be exploited by bad guys. Some OEMs are far enough along that this would be a major redesign and others are not there yet. The facts are that these cars will be able to do software updates like your computers and phones do, but don’t throw away your reprogramming tools just yet because we know that patches will be necessary and that some customers simply will not drive in a way that the conditions will be met to allow a reprogram. We also know that these vehicles will be generating massive amounts of diagnostically useful data that could also be used in a negative way, so some kind of controls will need to be in place.

I think that expanding the locksmith ID (LSID) program with NASTF might be a way to demonstrate diagnostic technicians’ good intentions. Currently the promise is that the aftermarket will have access to everything that can come through the scan tool. It seems that there may be more that is needed as we go along, so for the last part of this article let’s look at what the OEMs have recently defined as the key privacy issues they see.

Geolocation, driver behavior and biometric information

In a recent poll, 37 percent of those asked said they would not own a connected car for fear of having their privacy invaded. The three topics that the OEMs have defined as their key concerns for customer privacy are geolocation, driver behavior and biometric information. Certainly looking at these it is not a big leap to feel a little bit like you have a passenger even when you think you are singing along with Katy Perry in the privacy of your own vehicle.

I have not come up with a valid diagnostic use for biometric information at this point, but back to “Demolition Man.” I can see where it could be handy for first responders in an accident. Being human we all can think of the bad things and certainly that is the stuff we have to protect, but let’s look at the good things having some of this information could do in a repair situation.

Everyday a customer brings in a vehicle with a vague description of a problem they are having and even the best service advisor leaves out some key piece of data that did not seem relevant to them. Rather than driving the vehicle for days and returning it because it does not fail, what if we could ask the customer, “May I have permission to access the datalogs on your vehicle to determine where you were and what kind of things were going on with the vehicle when this problem occurred? My diagnostic technicians are certified to protect your privacy, but this would certainly make it faster for us to determine what is making your car misbehave.” You sign an agreement with the customer similar to the NASTF key form and get to work. Does it find all of the problems faster? Probably not, but think of the possibilities. I can now see how my customer drives and duplicate that behavior. I can see what the conditions were when the problem happened. Think of it as freeze frame on steroids.

We have to continue to work with the OEMs on this and define the place for the aftermarket in the communications that the vehicle will generate that could interfere with the customer good will that we have worked so hard on over the years, but I like the future of repairing cars.

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