welcome to the garage network podcast join us and the occasional special guest as we discuss everything automotive from fixing cars as a technician owning an automotive workshop or business overall work-life balance and even the occasional laugh in this episode of tgn talks we were lucky enough to be joined by scott brown scott is the owner of connie and dick's auto service center in california and also the creator of the diagnostic network he's also an industry pioneer in not only automotive technologies but he also spends a lot of time educating fellow technicians and also our customers so really hope that you enjoy it yeah g'day guys welcome to the garage network we're doing an interview today with uh scott brown from california he's got a workshop with uh connie and dix and uh and also is the the founder of diag.net um over to you scott you might want to tell some of the guys a bit about yourself for those that don't know you sure thanks for having me guys uh this is pretty cool to be able to do this long distance talk and presentation uh so my name is scott brown and i am a technician by trade when i left uh high school i went to a trade school to learn about auto auto mechanics and that was in the very early 80s at that time computers were just now being introduced to the vehicles and when i got into the field i saw that most technicians didn't want it anything to do with these computers so i saw that as an opportunity and i also realized i didn't know hardly anything about cars compared to what was in the fleet so i was on a mission to learn everything i possibly could and uh get on top of it and uh it's been an awesome awesome ride and in the uh early 90s i was approached by uh the two gentlemen that founded connie and dick's service center a gentleman named conrad nelson and the other one was richard bixel they asked me if i i wanted to if i was interested in coming to work for them and then buying their business and i'll tell you i just thought that they wanted me to come to work for them and i kind of like shined them off and i didn't even didn't even return their calls but somebody was persistent enough to keep pushing me and i finally set up a lunch with them and and uh the rest is history i i was able to buy the business buy the building uh modernize the company and uh continue to chase the technology and boy the technology has really uh taken off and it's uh in the last oh five or six years it's really uh picked up and uh that's what we're going to talk about tonight uh is the 8as stuff the advanced driver assistance i've been studying this uh pretty heavily over the last few years and in fact i'm doing a lot of hands-on instruction here in my workshop i'm partnered with aes wave these guys are out in california i've known them for about 30 years and we have uh we're on boarding their customers that buy equipment and getting them trained uh with some curriculum and then some hands-on uh actual doing so uh this is that that picture you see in my my shop that's part of that uh that's the middle of my shop uh but that's some of the workshop stuff we've got a nice big screen that drops out and we can actually get the scan tool data up there we can have roughly 20 students in the class so everybody can see what's going on people are operating the tools and doing the calibration and all that good stuff so um so i'm happy to happy to be here guys and uh uh anything else we're happy to have you nothing good just fantastic yeah so we had a call last week and uh so we talked about hey what are we what are we going to talk about and i said well hey i've got this i've got a short presentation on some eight ass stuff this is the same or similar presentation to what i gave to the folks at sema and that is the specialty equipment uh market association these are the guys that make all the aftermarket stuff they're concerned about the 8s uh features that are being put on the vehicles of what's going to happen to them when they lift them they put bigger tires on them they modify the vehicles and so i was asked to give a presentation and so um we'll we'll walk through this presentation it's pretty well rounded uh it doesn't go in depth but it'll talk about some of the things some of the questions that came up in your garage network uh one of them was about tooling oem versus aftermarket and i've got a couple of slides here that that hit right on that um and so let's let's go ahead and get started here so if you want to get into this uh business uh of doing the 8a stuff you're going to have to know have some knowledge of what kind of software you need you're going to need software actually from both the oem side and aftermarket i have experienced both cases where late model vehicle the aftermarket software couldn't do a job but the after the oem could and the same thing has happened with an oem tool could not communicate i could grab the aftermarket tool and it gets in and communicates with the vehicle and gets the job done so we're dealing with software and when you have high levels of software lots of software you're going to have strange anomalies and you're going to have to have workarounds to get things triggered or in operation talking about tooling that's going to be driven by the types of vehicles that you work on i'm not totally familiar with the marketplace you know i know you guys have a ton more models than we do different manufacturers uh coming into the marketplace but what we find here in the states is that a lot of the systems uh or the components say a radar sensor or a camera they're provided by a a small group of uh suppliers so they're basically using the same tools they're just being implemented a little bit differently uh the calibration requirements may change uh even though it's the same sensor that the manufacturer may have uh dictated a different way to calibrate so these are the things you have to be aware of and so you need to look at your fleet what is the what are the requirements read through the service information and uh figure out what tools are needed and we'll have a couple screens here that show you some of the uh tools that you may be able to just pick up at the hardware store um it's pretty interesting uh service information now i know that you guys are this has been a very tough thing for you uh to gain access to but um without the service information it's going to be very very difficult uh you know especially when you have a a challenge right when something isn't working you need a wiring diagram uh you need to know who communicates with what what network the the devices are on and so on um you're also going to possibly have to have special facility space some of these cars have surround view so they have like a 360 view when you replace cameras sometimes you have to do a calibration operation and it requires you to lay these target or mats around the vehicle and you need to have a lot of space in order to to allow for that so a lot of small garages a lot of small workshops may not be able to handle that kind of work and may have to actually sublet sublet that out and then the knowledge and skills of course are going to come with your experience and training and so on uh so i want to talk a little bit about a couple of challenges that we've had in the shop here just to kind of lay out some of the real world uh things that that have happened uh as i mentioned i'm doing training here in the shop and so whenever we have cards that come in uh that need this kind of work i'm really focused on looking at what are the failure modes what's what's happening with the vehicle what are the difficulties this particular vehicle came from a collision center we were working with and it had just some minor cosmetic repairs done on the vehicle but i made an observation on this car when i looked at the forward-facing camera that was up in the windshield and i thought wow there there might be something going on here so we really weren't tasked with doing any calibration operations on this vehicle but i i told the body shop hey i'm gonna work with this car because i think i i see an issue i took the car out and drove it and the car drove fine everything worked just fine but i went through and i wanted to do a calibration operation on this vehicle and it requires you to set up a few targets you can see that the targeting mechanism that's sitting up out in front of the vehicle uh you do some measurements you set up that targeting you go into the scan tool and you say uh calibrate well this vehicle actually failed um and when it when i went into calibrate mode it instantly you know it said oh it's unable to calibrate at that moment in time it cleared out the old calibration and basically has now rendered the system inoperable until it gets a new calibration um and of course it says visit your dealer so um the observation that i made um is that the windshield you know you're supposed to make sure that the windshield's clean which is a logical step but i noticed on the inside of the windshield it appeared to be fogged up and i thought wow how is that going to impair uh the operation of this system and here it is it failed during calibration mode however when i drove the vehicle out on the road and performance tested everything that vehicle behaved properly it picked up the lane lines it did all the normal it did everything that it was designed to do it didn't really impair it so we pulled the camera down took a look you can see this heavy oily film uh on the on the glass so we clean it all off put it back together we hit the button on the scan tool to just retry it and then instantly calibrate it and it says everything's fine and this is what we end up with we always want to take a value you can go into your scan tool and usually do an initial measurement after you put your targets up take an initial measurement just to see where is the calibration currently in in the vehicle and then you want to do when you do your calibration then you're going to go back and take that measurement again and record it you want to make sure that you didn't drift too far because something you could have induced a problem but it's always a good uh practice to take a snapshot of what the vehicle had in it before and then what it has in it after you're done uh with the with the service um talking about the tooling so in that particular case you know we're using an aftermarket device and if you look um this is a service information from a 2020 uh nissan and in the instructions in the service manual they basically give you a pdf and it has these black and white little targets you they expect you to print these things out put them on a piece of paper glue them on this board and put them all up in this dimension here so a lot of people ask about aftermarket versus oem well this is the oem method the after market is looking at these these targeting systems and saying hey wait a minute we can do a better job uh secondary to that is that the placement of these targets because you're having to put them in a specific location out in front of the vehicle i got a bug uh flying at me here um you have to put it in a specific location out this this guy is killing me here um yeah i'm talking to these australian guys and they're going to kick your butt if you don't uh don't let up uh so anyways these um these targets you know they've got to be positioned in what we call z space right z space out in front of the vehicle at specific coordinates uh specific height it's got to be level it's got to be out in front of the vehicle measured in reference to the center line of the vehicle and when you look at the oem uh procedure to do that you're out there with plumb bombs and a lot of strings and you're measuring and the aftermarket says wow you know look at the time that it takes to actually set all this up can we come up with a better way to put these targets in place saving the technician tons of time and i can tell you that in the last three years of doing this calibration and using the oem tools and aftermarket tools the aftermarket tools have evolved tremendously and i can take a practice that would take roughly 35 to 40 minutes to set up a camera and a targeting system down to maybe 10 minutes because the systems are now using some advanced measurements measuring tools to help you assist in getting that target placed in front of the vehicle properly so it's pretty cool to see what's going on with uh with the uh aftermarket companies because they're saying hey this is this is a a productivity problem right it's it's not something you want to have your technician spend three hours trying to put this target system in place and then only do it once a month or once every two months because when you come back to it you're gonna have the same challenges you're not gonna be able to be very proficient well these aftermarket tools will help you get them in in position the downside to some of the aftermarket tools is that so in some cases they may be actually trying to skirt or change the the metrics so if you look at the the data they'll usually give you the measurements of what that square is how big the square is you need to just cross check that when you're looking at your service information and you're using the aftermarket tool just kind of cross check those two too to make sure that you're using the same uh dimensions um that's very very beneficial but if an aftermarket is saying hey you're going to use a smaller square but you're going to move it closer to the car to offset for the size that i don't feel is a good uh a good practice to follow um it's better to follow the same dimensions that the that the oem is uh dictating um and again this is another this is a hyundai kia type target here it's also used by tesla uses this this target they give you all the dimensions you could actually make this target up yourself and and have it take those dimensions and go to a printer and have the have the printer put it up on a board but the oem they give you this tripod here and then they there's also some other measurements um for the for the pitching and yaw and the aftermarket stuff it basically it's rock solid it just has you square it up with a vehicle so there's no question that you you don't have it pitched or odd and here you've got a challenge with possibly having that easily pitched um on its single post um here's another case this is a vehicle that was actually in our shop and uh came in for a wheel alignment uh the customer had uh just installed new uh coilover special coilover shocks on it it's kind of an off-road deal this is a ford raptor and i'm guessing this truck probably cost about 60 to 70 thousand dollars new this is a 2018 model year truck and it has a camera on the on the windshield and it also has a radar sensor up in the front to grill and i'm we're working hard with my front office to make sure that when we get a car that comes in for any type of procedure we're looking at the inventory on that vehicle to determine if there's any other operations we need to do following a procedure and alignments are one that typically dictates some type of operation the problem here was that we ran the vehicle through our normal service information and we went to the went to the uh instructions for doing a wheel alignment and there was nothing in there saying hey aim the camera however in our wheel alignment program um fortunately it gave us a a big warning when we were into the when we first fired it up and it said hey this camera alignment's going to need to be done whenever these things are done if you look at the second bullets their change in tire size or a suspension repair or wheel alignment so here you've got to do the camera aiming on this vehicle it's also very important that you pay attention to the fine print there are sub notes uh attached all over the place and it's very very critical that the technician take the time to read it i have been guilty myself of you know just going real quick and just blowing through the service information and missing the fine print and if you look at this here it says the alignment completion is indicated on the diagnostic scan tool if the alignment is unsuccessful check the interior mirror for proper installation and then the second note it says the front camera malfunction service required message in the instrument panel cluster disappears as soon as the system is aligned okay and that's the message you're going to see when you put it into this mode it isn't a it isn't very hard to do you just have this have to have the scan tool you're going to go into the menu system you're going to make sure that the car is sitting on a level surface the the tire pressures are correct you've completed the alignment and you're going to go in and push a button to say hey we're going to relearn the camera system and then you take the car out and drive it drive it in the environment and it's going to basically learn and and so we were able to complete that process pretty quickly but the other thing here is that i like to always exercise any other systems that are on the car especially the adaptive cruise control and on this particular car i knew right away by looking at the controls it has this setup that's on the on the right side here and you see the little the two arrows opposing arrows close together further apart those are the selector for selecting your distance or your following distance in the cruise control mode so that told me that it has adaptive cruise control however in order to turn it on even though there's an on off button right there you have to dig into the instrument panel or the uh they call it the human machine interface and i had to go through multiple menus and i found where it was actually turned off so i had to turn it on and then take the car out and drive it and exercise everything and you it's always good practice to to go through that and make sure everything works well i did that everything worked just fine we gave the car back to the customer and when he was checking out i explained to him i said hey by the way i turned on the adaptive cruise control for you i noticed it was off and he replied he says wow i didn't even know it had that system on the car so one one of my points here is that consumer education is is a big opportunity and i think our i feel that if the service delivery folks out there in the aftermarket are highly attuned into this advanced driver assistance technology and they can begin to transfer that knowledge into the customer into the client and now they can basically show themselves as a proved trusted individual or entity um you're gonna help move people into the next generation of technology in my opinion so i'm working on creating some curriculum here in my shop because i wanna basically host some classes uh some technology classes just for uh drivers out there and i'm hoping to get some marketing around that so that uh it possibly can bring some recognition to the business as well and uh perhaps i can collect some some new clients my wife and i bought a brand new car a few months ago as a toyota and it has everything on it has all the you know adaptive crews and lane departure warning and collision avoidance and we when we were out taking it for a drive uh the sales person was in the back seat and uh she was going on and on about how the ada how these adas systems work where everything she was telling me was completely wrong i mean the way she was describing how they work and what they do uh it's unfortunate but these folks are not this is such complicated technology they are not trained and i believe that you'll be far ahead if you get on in front of this technology and uh and learn it because people are gonna gravitate to this stuff and and how they like technology um this is what i'm observing here is that people this is what's selling cars uh this technology so it's uh it's pretty cool um so here's another challenge this is a couple years later a couple year model year later vehicle 2020 uh vehicle and uh it's a 2020 ford ranger and again it's got adaptive cruise control with the radar sensor it's got a camera in the front uh same setup if you want to do your camera you're going to go into the scan tool you're going to exercise the exercise the scan tool to tell it to go into that mode this particular vehicle this is one that i was prepping for a class on we could not get the factory tool to initiate that camera process part of the or the part of the first step was basically to measure the wheel arc height and the on the front wheels and so you take a measurement on each wheel and you input that into the scan tool and as i inputted those numbers they wouldn't take it just i'd go to the next screen and it would just it would just stall out it wouldn't go any further i grabbed the aftermarket tool repeated the process put the numbers in executed the drive came back everything was fine it calibrated i went back in with the factory tool i saw the new numbers in there um that i had put in with the aftermarket tool i tried to put the old numbers back in right thinking that maybe there was some some something goofy there it wouldn't take those numbers either so this again is software um this is a software bug uh this this act this ford here is actually using a brand new platform a new technology platform so it requires a different scan tool than what's been traditionally used in in in the past which is the uh ids setup but here's the other challenge here this car to do your radar calibration uh one your special tool you need you see that you can probably get one of those at the hardware store it's just a matter of putting the vehicle on a level surface putting a level on the front of it and then adjusting a screw to get the uh get the unit level then you need to go into the scan tool and unfortunately on on this later model car this vehicle with this new architecture this radar system ford has decided that this is now in a um in an environment that it wants to authenticate the user into okay so this doesn't want anybody into that into that system and and clicking buttons so here in the states they want to um they they're using a trusted um secure partner somebody that has a trust factor with the aftermarket and that is the nasdaf group the national automotive service task force and if you've got a security credential with the national automotive service task force you can log into this vehicle but you're creating a record of doing this they know who when and where and what processes are being performed on the vehicle so the reason they're doing this is because you know these systems have control over the latitudinal and longitudinal um aspects of the vehicle and the cyber security is a huge uh a huge thing um so this this is something to be aware of because this is probably going to be coming your way as well but it is fortunate because now the aftermarket has a gateway into an oem level operation through a trust factor which is which is pretty awesome and this is basically what the tool looks like it basically pops up you log right in now you're creating your your access and then you go in and and do your do your job pretty cool so if we look at uh this is looking at european vehicle on audi i was at the la auto show in los angeles here and i'm i'm just about 35 miles east of los angeles so to give you some uh geo perspective uh i went down to the la auto show this is 2019 so this is you know just before coving and the world totally changed on us and i saw this car and i thought well man i'm going to take a picture of this thing look at look at all the technology this thing has laser lidar infrared radar a round view camera here it's got ultrasonic sensors but look at these sensors and i don't know if you guys have seen this but i have i have one of these sensors right here okay this is one of those lidar sensors that's sitting up here in the grill that you see um and it's it's pretty incredible um i'm gonna show you what this actually looks like so this thing has a lens on the front of it and i basically removed the lens it's got a heater grid that's on it and there's not much you can see if i put the uh that over it's hard to even see through it um it looks blue when i look through it but this thing is a super delicate device it shoots a laser out of this uh this is where the laser comes out and it's going to hit this mirror this mirror is basically spinning and it's it scatters that laser out of the top here and then it's going to reflect back or pick get picked back up by the mirror and it's going to shoot it back into this crazy looking lens right there and what is happening here is that the the system is creating a three-dimensional point cloud out in front of the vehicle to give it uh some perception of what what it has to deal with you know whether there's a planter a brick or a curb or something there so um the reason i'm bringing this up is because these things are being mounted onto the front of a vehicle in a very harsh environment and you know that car gets in a wreck there's no way this thing's going to survive uh a collision um there's just too many precision moving parts in there and they're just gonna they're gonna end up dying um but it's it's pretty critical um that we learn what these different systems are because when you are doing service work and so you look at the front of that car and sometimes when you're doing like a timing chain or timing belt service you have to pull all that off and when you put it back on if you look in the service information usually they will tell you hey if you've removed this sensor you need to calibrate it recalibrate it to make sure that it's working properly and then you need to take that car out and road test to make sure that those systems are still behaving the way that they were originally designed to to operate so this uh this has got a video that i'm gonna play here in a second and it's kind of an interesting case study we had a customer that brought us a vehicle that um she just bought uh bought used car only has about four 000 miles on it and it's a pretty high featured vehicle it has uh adaptive cruise control it has lane keeping so it'll keep it in the center of the lane um she brought it to us because she was having difficulty with all the light the warning lights were on it said uh auto emergency braking lane keeping um just repeated errors coming up on the on the screen but her primary concern was that when she's driving the car down the road it will just randomly just change lanes so it's got electric power steering and it basically is is executing a a turn to the left and so she really just wanted to get that fixed she knew that the car she bought it was actually in a total incident where it got it got wrecked and it got totaled out so the insurance company said hey this is a total they paid out the owner and they scrapped the car well somebody picked the car back up and then they basically reassembled it and then put it into the marketplace so um in california here whenever you have what's called a salvaged vehicle you have to do what's called a break and light inspection and this break and light inspection is kind of a a a legacy requirement uh meaning all you're doing is checking the brake lining you're making sure that the brake lights work and making sure that the headlights are aimed properly and that's pretty much it nothing to do with any of these advanced driver assistance systems so it received that brake and light inspection it was then sold to the customer the customer then put back into service with this behavior she took it back to this dealer multiple times and they finally told her that they couldn't fix it they just gave up on it and she was looking for a solution so she found us and i i saw this as a pretty cool opportunity and uh it turned into a pretty cool little story so let me play this video here for you all right well we recently were tasked with solving a complaint on this 2019 honda that had a salvaged title which in the state of california means that it had to have a mandated break and light inspection well the complaint on this was that the vehicle randomly would uh jerk to the left and actually make a lane change uh if you weren't paying attention and also all of the 8s related warning lights are on the acc lkas aeb and so on and so we did our walk around to take a look at the vehicle uh confirmed that all the lights were on took a look to confirm that it had factory glass in it which was good and so now we wanted to take it out for a road test to see if we could verify the complaint and we did so now i got the steering wheel cranked this way i'm going to lift on the throttle boom see that so after that experience we brought the vehicle in for an inspection and found that the left lower control arm pivot bolt was backed out so we performed an alignment of all the adjustable angles got them in and then performed a complete vehicle scan which we came up with a b2a60-54 static camera aiming incomplete p 2583-50 millimeter wave radar aiming and complete and a p 2583-76 temporary stop of the integrated driver support system misalignment of the millimeter wave radar looked like it had a new radar sensor on it so we performed all the calibrations on the vehicle all right so yeah we we got that thing dialed in and everything worked just fine uh pretty cool uh pretty cool set up there um the lady was ecstatic that she got her car back because she she had already uh given up on the fact that she was gonna have to deal with some morning lights and all kinds of weird stuff but uh we got that car back together but this is a classic case where i believe what happened why it kept going back to these shops and didn't get a complete or successful repair is because they were looking at all the technology and assuming the technology was causing the problem and the main problem was that that lower control arm bolt being out it was causing enough movement on the power steering where the torque sensor the torque sensor is the main input to tell you to hey i want to i want assistance going to the right or to the left and so that's what was giving it the tug it was giving it enough input on that torque sensor to make a left change and i'll tell you when i was driving the car and it did that if there was a car to the left of me i probably would have hit them and that that's pretty scary that this lady was given that car and put it back into service so uh pretty cool so here's uh kind of we're sort of at the end here so what's coming um i have been driving a tesla model three for the last three years and uh awesome car and recently uh you know i've been trying to study everything to do with the 8-house stuff and it's really difficult to get much information on these vehicles you can't get really any scan data on these cars you can't get any tooling unless you're a tesla certified body shop a collision shop in the aftermarket and at that point you're only limited on certain things that you can get access to and i i've never seen the inside of the scan tool um so it's uh it's a little frustrating but um recently i've been really trying to push the envelope and there are there are multiple can buses on this vehicle and there are guys out there that are figuring out how to communicate with the can bus how to interpret the data and i recently acquired a couple of pieces of hardware that allow me to install a device that ties into two different can buses on the vehicle and it also then becomes a server it's a wi-fi server it also is a data logger and i'm using a little app here so this is a little video of an app that runs on your phone and it is actually showing up here in the top left it's showing an overlay of data so this is actually the steering angle this is uh gotta look closely here that's actually the speed okay this down in the lower left um is the actual width of the lane uh in meters and then this pit here is uh the left lane line marker whether that lane line marker is there and it's able to use it it'll say fused when it's uh able to see it this data now these four pids these are you can control these you can tell it whichever pids you want uh on the screen but uh the reason i'm bringing this up is that there are a lot of folks out there right now looking at the service cycle of doing an adas calibration and then taking the car out and driving it and making sure that everything is working properly uh making sure that the lane keeping is working adaptive cruise is working and it's hard to validate that so there are some folks out there that are making an app where you put an adapter on the windshield it's recording your drive and you're kind of narrating but it's not able to actually see the data that's taking place on the car so imagine if you had this and i we're getting close here i i would love to see this across applied to other vehicles but uh we'll play this little video here and i'm actually this is me driving to work i'm in what's called navigate by autopilot so i have a destination i'm driving on the highway and it's going to exit automatically and the exit i get off on it it's pretty complicated it has a pretty pretty cool curve and i'm just going to let this thing actually drive itself off the uh off the freeway and um an exit so watch watch this behavior and look at the uh so what do you think about that pretty cool huh it's amazing oh anyways that is that's my little presentation today i i hope i was able to bring uh something of interest uh to to anybody watching uh and uh if you've got any questions you've got my contact information right there on the screen um email me um you can contact me through the the garage network uh folks um so i'll hand it back to you guys uh do you have any questions for me costa yeah yeah look we did have one question actually and we're going around training for the um and processes on on the um you discussed a little bit already in your um your slides but training for um for adas is quite similar to a dealership compared to aftermarket beyond the tooling for the for the training um the training that's being offered um you know i've taken a lot of dealer training uh basically virtual type training um and it's pretty good but it it does not go very deep um a lot of the training that i've been doing is trying to bring the the perspective of what are these cameras actually looking at how do they process or what what are they actually tasked with how does the radar signal look um what are you doing when you're calibrating and so i've got a number of instruments that i use here in the shop or in the class that visualize a lot of this and um i don't know if you guys have seen the the video that i have um it's it's on youtube and it uh it talks about the convolutional neural networks and it shows the camera and it's identifying uh vehicles and objects and i'm riding a bike around in inside the inside my shop and you can actually see a radar signal well we use we use those tools to show the technicians what what it is that these cameras are are looking at this is not the stuff that they're teaching at the dealer in fact i had a guy from toyota reach out to me and said hey i came across your video i want to know how you're getting these how are you doing all this because we want to put that in our training program in the dealer or in the in the oem uh manufacturer training so um so yeah i mean there's good foundational uh training but uh honestly there's not uh they don't go deep enough uh for me and i i think that to get that information to the technician so the technician has a good visual on how the the behavior of these systems work and how the the different sensors can can interact with each other and how the vehicle is making decisions i think the aftermarket again is uh is going to be on top of that uh bringing also forth the the challenges right because the dealer typically they see the new car and then they see they see it for the first three three maybe four years and then they they leave a customer after it's out of warranty they're out in the in the aftermarket and so they're not seeing the some of the crazy challenges out there especially when the car gets in a collision and then they put it back together and then things don't work um usually it's going to the aftermarket folks to figure that stuff out so i think the aftermarket is a little stronger in the training and and you know they're they're on that edge um looking to to solve these uh challenges is that uh does that answer your question i think it does now on the back of that one because you didn't mention a few things in that so with the customers and so we're gonna start seeing these customers um what do you think is a way that us as you know independent workshop owners or even technicians can sort of help in educating that customer well one um i i'm a firm believer that we need to have the higher level of knowledge about the vehicle systems than the client but some of these clients uh especially when you get into the electrified vehicles they some of these clients are very sharp and they study a lot of this stuff so they may have higher knowledge but here's the deal if you're not um if you're not fluent in this stuff and you do a service operation on a car and you're not really affecting any of those systems but you give the car back to the customer and they for some reason turn something off accidentally or whatever and they notice it's not working and they come back to you and say hey ever since you touched my car and this has happened to us ever since you touched my car now this is not working so how does that look to the shop that isn't familiar with the systems and able to mitigate that you know that that particular event um so i i strongly feel that you know you need to have your front staff uh fluent with what's going on with the car especially when they go out to check the customer in there they should be doing a visual inventory saying how wow i see the camera it's got a camera and the windshield um you know a lot of times you can see there's a there's some sort of indicator to let you know that there's a radar sensor up front so if that car is coming in for a major service you need to make sure that you're accounting for any uh operations that need to take place there we've had customers come up the drive and say oh my gosh these two light these warning lights are on on my dash i don't know what this is all about well they're just two little two lights you know it says uh acc and lkas and i had my service advisor this this happened a while back my service advisor came and got me and said hey what what are these two lights what does that mean and i said well we should know that we should know what that is right away and you should be able to then look either at the dash or at the steering wheel or whatever well there was one button that the guy pushed and it turned those systems on and so you know i i again i strongly feel that we need to have the higher level of knowledge the upper hand on these technologies so when you're dealing with the customer you're able to transfer some of that knowledge and give them the assurance that hey you are the expert um and you are the trusted individual that that they're going to continue to return your vehicle their vehicle to you for service does that make sense absolutely and i think um you are actually very right because i know i've spoken to a few guys over the last few years and some of them mean the idea that oh you know i'm just going to ignore those systems and not work on them but then when you talk about something as basic as a lower control arm causing such a drastic effect down the chain where it's changing its own lanes i think there's no way around not trying to understand the tech like we're going to have to if you want to stay in the game we're going to have to well i think i think the the big thing with that is customer confidence they don't have the con the perception and your customers having the confidence in you to be able to repair their car i think it's really important that we know all of these systems and that's a a really interesting fact that you go it's why we need to be going to those sorts of car shows if they are around or having a look at what the new technology is and familiarizing ourselves with them in in within our customers cars i think you're right scott you know and also yeah from a training perspective i totally understand where you come from as mechanics traditionally um we need to understand we want to understand once you can understand the inner workings of a device like that the way that that lidar operates you get an you get a a better understanding of how to calibrate it how it can go wrong and and the fact that literally like you said there's no way that this could withstand any form of impact you know for us in australia even if that's an animal impact being a kangaroo a bird uh you know something something coming out in the middle of the road you know that they wouldn't it wouldn't it just wouldn't survive yeah exactly and and one of the other things that i recommend to these shop owners business owners is that hey you know if your staff is not driving cars with these features on them um you know one they should be driving their clients cars to make sure that they understand them get the owner's manuals a lot of the owner's manuals you can download uh off the internet right and look and start looking at the them but renting a car renting these cars with these high features and having them for a day or so in the shop getting all the technicians uh to drive the cars and under get seat time with how the behavior of the system is and what it's doing it will increase your probability of of having a successful uh engagement with these systems versus somebody that doesn't know anything about these systems yeah right excellent id that's a really good idea that is excellent yeah they would have thought about that's a really good idea yeah and that's why i love driving the tesla every day it's uh it's the car has got a lot of tech on it and um it's it's amazing in my opinion i feel it's a decade ahead of the other cars that are out there i mean i'm driving my wife's car and when we first got it we're driving it down the road we engage the cruise control and the lane keeping and it's going down the highway and you can just feel it it's like it's ping-ponging in the lanes it's it's finding the the center of my wife goes she goes uh you can fix that right and i said no i'm pretty sure that this is the best that they could do um and she goes well that's not how your car behaves and i said well that's that's because i'm driving to tesla tesla hasn't figured out yeah yeah because it's tesla is basically on rails i mean it is uh it's it's absolutely amazing the behavior um it's pretty cool yeah i haven't really had a customers one i could drive around the block but i wasn't going to try any sort of hands-free driving i was like no i'm not doing that in someone else's car yeah yeah it's tough and even um you know we've we've got i don't know five or six clients with different teslas uh model threes model s's and um you know the model s is a little bit different on the controls for the crew the adaptive crews and so i get in the car and i'm thinking i'm going to engage it by doing the same thing that i i do in the model 3. well that wasn't the case there's another lever you have to use um yeah so uh yeah familiarity with the vehicle uh again if you're gonna road test the car with the customer you're gonna have to instill confidence in them that you know how the vehicle operates and uh and so on because customers basically they they're they're feeling you out right there they're going hey do it does this guy really know what he's doing absolutely uh guy or gal so you know this is this is my my push right now is the industry needs to really step up and become highly familiar with this these technologies absolutely i do have a question for you scott what do you think the challenges are going to be for the independent automotive what do you as a business owner what do you think the uh the biggest challenges of the uh for you and your business moving forward in 2021 yeah um i i think well right now um used cars are it's hard to find to use cars people are finding out now that it's worth it to keep their car going invest money and to keep their their car rolling we are busier than ever right now in our in our service business um you know last year was kind of a lull um i think the the bigger challenge you know as people can start buying new cars say the next couple of years um those cars are coming with a lot more newer technology and these eight ass systems are getting better and better so you're gonna have you're gonna have these older legacy cars that have some eight ass systems on them that just don't work all that well and now you're gonna have newer technology um it's the biggest challenge is staying ahead of the curve on the on the vehicle technology uh so that we can uh continue to you know bring the service you know here in the states we in the aftermarket we service 70 of the vehicle fleet out there so the dealership the oem dealership they don't have the bandwidth for this uh kind of kind of stuff that's huge i don't know i don't know what else i don't know what that's 70 percent of our food is massive it's huge impressive it is massive and um so the the the manufacturers actually rely on the aftermarket and this is why we see toyota gm ford some of the other manufacturers they're they're pretty friendly to the aftermarket they want to make sure that we have access to service information we can you know we can buy that service information so we can deliver a competent service uh experience for their clients and keep those clients in those cars the average year age of a vehicle is 12 years roughly and here where we're at the climate is so good that it's it's easy to see 20 year old cars in our shop all the time and they're in good shape and we keep them keep them rolling that 20 year old car if it went to the dealer they wouldn't have anybody there that even knew anything about it um that's that's just the way it is they they have a lot of turnover so um i you know they they do appreciate the aftermarket but um you know it's a it's a pretty tall order to stay on top of multi brands and stay competent and and i think you're going to have to continue to market yourself to that client and let them know that you are the trusted partner and this is why it's a good decision for them to come to you uh to your facility rather than go to the oem dealership i don't know if you've been following scott but we've been lucky enough to get the ledges the right to repair legislation finally got passed so the the manufacturers have 12 months well july next year so by roughly this time next year we have to have access to that service information so uh so it's been really we've had a win uh but again we're going to be what we wish for we're going to get access yeah i have been staying in touch with that uh so that's that's great great news um i i really hope that the oems uh uh step up to the plate and and fulfill the requirements um and uh yeah i've uh i know you guys have been been really battling for that for some time and uh finally i've crossed that uh that threshold and uh and and brought some brought some relief right some some high high hopes there so i hope that that have you seen any impact yet have you seen any uh oems no there's nothing yeah another cost of that now there have been there's been a couple that are starting to ease into access because yeah right 10 million fine for them i believe that um i believe that we can now buy the not not not not cars that we service all the time but i believe you can now buy your peugeot credits um to get access to peugeot information something that you did mention before scott how many how many manufacturers do you think there are in america like in the states like what what's your car park you know you've got gm ford and most of the euros or what's yeah you've got a you've got a dozen manufacturers roughly yeah you have something like 80 i believe right yeah we've got a big we're going to beat carpark yeah big variants yeah so in order for a manufacturer to bring a car into the us uh they've got to need all kinds of uh strict uh regulations uh so there's a lot of a lot of loopholes to jump you know a lot of a lot of challenges so that's why you don't see an influx of all these uh all these you know different manufacturers pretty high threshold to bring that bring your car here into the into the states yeah i believe your emission standards are quite higher than ours as well so they can sort of sneak a few in australia a few years behind no missions yeah we don't have any emission standards we're looking i think we've copied we copied i think we're euro four or euros yeah we're still way behind we're way behind something else well you have obd right yes we just got introduced last year yeah yeah yeah okay cool all right all right i hope that i'll go one more i hope my presentation was uh beneficial for you for you and your uh your your followers out there um and uh that was excellent what about your your dog.net do you wanna maybe let listeners know about that
yeah um so diagnostic network you know it's it's primarily it's you know a lot of users in the states here but uh we've got folks from from all over the globe a lot of diagnostic discussion a lot of problem solving going on um there's some really interesting uh things that that pan out uh so we're in our third year since launching this uh this uh new platform uh which launched in 2018 and we just crossed uh 11 800 subscribers uh so we're on our way to 12 000 here and um you know things are things are moving along we're we're were developed you know this platform is uh it was fresh and clean and um and it's pretty easy to uh to find what you're looking for um you know so if you're interested in just certain certain types of discussions whether you want to look at questions that are that are being posted or you want to look at case studies or if you want to look at certain topics whether they're related to network communication diagnostics drivability emissions uh propulsion um and so on there's there's all sorts of stuff that you can actually filter and and set up your your uh your desires for uh your feeds and notifications highly recommend yeah there's also a you know we have a resource section there a lot of guys are asking hey where's the waveform library at well we have what's called a resource uh area and we got uh i i worked with a handful of uh top level diag techs out there um in the in the very beginning and uh they gave me access to their they sent me their libraries of content and i filtered through them and we started submitting them into what's called the resources area so if you log into the site and um and you just pull down up at the top it says all messages you pull down where it says resources you're gonna see um you're gonna see a feed of all the stuff that's being added there and then you can go and click search you can filter by manufacturers you can say hey all asian manufacturers all european or you can go down start drilling down into them but um the cool thing here is that we're working on some pretty cool search technology uh that will allow you to get right down to what it is that you're looking for so you know a lot of engines have specific uh product codes um you might have like a you know like an ls motor you might have a ls1 ls4 or lt lly well you can type that in and maybe type the type of signal you're looking for so crank sensor or the acronym the the obd or the sae acronym uh ckp so you type in those two little things it's gonna take you right to the the content that you're looking for so we're continuing to tweak our our search we're actually working on a brand new search search operation that's going to do some pretty crazy stuff um kind of like what google does but it's for the automotive uh people um i know you guys probably use google for doing research uh but this will be like something you wanna go to to search because it's gonna pull data uh curated data that's in other areas and help bring some of that content to you so we're working on on making diagnostic network a a true uh high valued asset for the modern diagnostician it's pretty cool yeah it's great nicole it's great i i joined when you were back was it 2019 you're in australia school that was actually 18 it was just before we were launching this so it was kind of a interesting uh interesting dilemma so when when i made arrangements for going down there i didn't know i was going to be doing this new uh this new platform uh but um but yeah it was such a privilege to come down uh to sydney i've never been been there before and uh and then be part of the the double a double a uh event and uh it was uh pretty amazing i i was blown away and you know i got to visit a bunch of shops and and gil gil shearer came up to me and he was gonna give him he goes hey you got to go to this guy's shop that's when he introduced you to you mike he goes you got to go to this guy's shop and i said okay i'm going to go to that guy's shop i sure i sure did and man i'm glad i did um i know you had the longest commute probably of of all the guys that need to work so so yeah the downside to living next door to your business is that it's hard to step away from it but two you don't get a lot of feet time in the car right to see how the vehicle behaves or maybe drive the car home that's got an intermittent problem right i've done that drive the car home uh so so mike you might have to get a second residence uh somewhere we'd like to say a huge thank you to scott brown if you'd like to know a little bit more about what he's doing jump over to his website diag.net also don't forget to subscribe to our youtube channel our podcasts or join our private automotive technician facebook group they are all called the garage network hope you guys enjoyed this episode of tgn talks
2021-08-26