In-house ADAS calibrations mean safety, efficiency, and profitability for collision shops. Control the process and reap the benefits.
This year, more than 60% of registered vehicles in the U.S. will be equipped with Advanced Driver Assistance Systems (ADAS), according to the Insurance Institute for Highway Safety estimates. That's 180 million vehicles.
Consumers and regulators alike cite safety as the primary reason for soaring adoption. Studies show that in the 30 years from 2021 through 2050, ADAS technologies currently available to U.S. consumers could prevent approximately 37 million crashes, 14 million injuries, and nearly 250,000 deaths -- that's 22% of deaths that would otherwise occur on U.S. roads without these technologies.
Always on the frontline of servicing vehicles with the latest technologies, collision shops are aware of the growing popularity of ADAS-equipped vehicles. And though it might have been standard or even best practice to sublet ADAS work to dealers or mobile solutions when ADAS-equipped vehicles started to trickle into collision shops, more body shops are realizing that performing ADAS calibrations in-house optimizes their key-to-key cycle time limits liability concerns and can drastically increase profitability.
A recent AAA study found that ADAS repair and calibration account for 36.7% of collision repair. Given that percentage and the number of ADAS-equipped vehicles that collision shops repair today and will repair in the future, keeping those calibrations in-house is a significant financial opportunity.
There's a business adage that says success comes from fixing the process, not the problem. If any business' success or failure depends on its processes, collision repair is it.
Today, as vehicles evolve in complexity and sophistication with advancing networks of components and protocols, the challenge of creating a thorough diagnostics, repair, servicing, and calibration workflow may seem daunting.
Yet, since entering the ADAS calibration system market five years ago, Autel has created and continues to perfect a comprehensive collision repair process that assures collision shops and P&C insurers that a customer's vehicle is brought to pre-collision condition and that every needed repair, service, and calibration is to OE specifications.
By introducing new products, optimizing existing ones, and developing strategic partnerships, Autel believes it has developed the most efficient, thorough, and profitable process for collision repair shops.
The Autel MaxiSYS IA900 wheel alignment and ADAS calibration unit is at the heart of the Autel process. The industry's first all-in-one four-wheel alignment and ADAS calibration unit, the IA900, guides users from pre-scan, digital inspection, advanced diagnostics, coding and resets to alignment and multi-component calibration. The IA900 offers alignment coverage from the 1960s to today and ADAS calibration coverage of cameras, radar, lidar, and night vision for U.S., Asian and European vehicles. The unit features six high-resolution positioning and tracking cameras in the frame to monitor vehicle height on the shop lift automatically. The benefit of the optical positioning system cannot be overstated, as it enables frame and target-to-vehicle setup in as little as a minute, compared to the mechanical setup with plumb bob, lasers and reflectors that can take upwards of 45 minutes.
Autel released its North American-made ADAS Bay Max 12K and Bay Max 14K lifts last summer to bolster the functionality of the IA900 and enable the entire diagnostics to calibration process to be performed in a single bay. These flush-mounted hydraulic scissor lifts with twin jacking beams and floor lift tables allow the technician to safely stand under the entire length of the raised vehicle to make repairs. And when the lift is lowered and flush with the ground, the technician can position the vehicle anywhere in the bay to perform nearly every ADAS calibration type.
Autel's All Systems AutoSCAN has been standard on its advanced diagnostics tablets for many years, and technicians have benefited from the scan's identification of ADAS components and detection of any system faults. ADAS, however, presents technicians with additional challenges. Even though the sensor may operate without a code, this does not mean it performs as intended. This is especially true for systems on vehicles involved in crashes when even a minor collision might have altered the camera's vision field or the radar's angle.
Repairify's AdasThink is a perfect supplement to the AutoSCAN to aid the collision shop in identifying all the safety and convenience features on the vehicle and those that a collision may affect. Subscribers to the platform can upload a MaxiSYS-generated PreScan. Working with the most popular estimating systems, AdasThink provides VIN-based reports that identify required operations based on the estimate line item and the manufacturer's recommendation, including non-ADAS resets, initiations, and ADAS calibrations. The report links repair and service instructions and sources the OE requirements supporting the procedure.
Autel's Remote Expert platform is ready on the Ultra series tablet and the MaxiFLASH XLink for shops needing to program or code replacement modules. Technicians can place orders with experienced and vetted module programmers and diagnosticians with OE subscriptions and tools. Since its release last year, Remote Expert has seen significant success, with over 1,600 programming, diagnostics, servicing, and coding sessions a month.
Finally, let's talk about documentation. The IA900 system guides the technician to document each step in real time, including the pre-scan, visual inspection, tire depth analysis, steering angle sensor reset, alignment, calibrations, and post-scan. Reports can be safely stored on-tablet and through the Autel Cloud report management application and shared via email with customers or insurance companies.
In just a few short years, the industry has gone from just a handful of new vehicles with ADAS to about 90% of light-duty vehicles with automatic emergency braking coming standard. With that many ADAS-equipped vehicles on the road, collision shops will become overwhelmed without a comprehensive process. The Autel workflow is the solution the collision industry has been waiting for.
