By John Yoswick
George Lesniak, director of sales and training for Autel, said one of the biggest challenges for shops working to follow OEM collision repair procedures — in particular the steps necessary for calibration of advanced driver assistance systems (ADAS) — is the variation among automakers.
“There’s a complete lack of consistency across the different OEMs when it comes to their service information: where that information is located, where you find the procedures and specifications,” Lesniak said during an industry conference.
But some of the challenges shops encounter in following OEM procedures, he said, has little to do with that inconsistency in how the information is organized.
“The one thing that I’ve found to be very consistent is technicians’ ability to skip steps,” Lesniak said. “The key skill set required to do calibrations is the ability to read, interpret and follow complex instructions and make detailed measurements. Knowing how to use a metric tape measure is absolutely foreign to most technicians. We’ve found easily 50 percent of calibration failures come down to missing or skipping steps in those preliminary instructions.”
Those steps, he said, include having the required space with the right environmental conditions, such as proper lighting, and ensuring that nothing is interfering with the field of “view” of any sensors.
“I actually got called out by a customer who couldn’t get this vehicle calibrated. He had tried multiple times,” Lesniak said. “They sent me out to trouble-shoot, and there was what looked like a grasshopper splattered right in the middle of the camera on the windshield. Step No. 1 in the instructions was to make sure the windshield is clean, especially in front of the camera. They skipped the basic steps.”
Lesniak was just one of several speakers discussing OEM procedures and ADAS calibrations at conference. Sean Guthrie, director of operations for the seven Car Crafters Collision Centers in Albuquerque, N.M., said one thing he thinks may slow the expected reduction in claims count based on ADAS is whether consumers are buying vehicles equipped with such systems. He said he and his wife were recently in the market for a new car and found no dealer in their region with the model vehicle they wanted that included all the ADAS features the automaker makes available for that vehicle.
“It wasn’t just a matter of finding one in the trim model we wanted,” Guthrie said. “From the base of that model to the top tier, there wasn’t one available with the full ADAS suite. I asked the dealer why is it that your cars are among the safest out there, with the most available technology, yet you don’t have one on the lot with that technology. They said, ‘It’s simple, Sean: We don’t sell them. And if we do sell them, the customer wants us to turn it all off. So why would we have a car on the lot that’s $6,000 more for something that someone is just going to turn off?’”
Guthrie thinks it may just be that consumers aren’t seeking out ADAS because it’s not something that is being marketed to them. Regardless, Guthrie said his company is working to do more of ADAS calibrations in-house, in part because dealerships often aren’t prepared to do so. He believes that even shops subletting the work should still research the calibration procedures to know what needs to be done.
“It’s disappointing how often when you tell dealerships, ‘We removed and reinstalled all these things, and replaced these things, so this is what we need calibrated,’ they look at you and say, ‘But it drives fine and there are no codes or dash lights,’” Guthrie said. “This is from a dealership that sells and services that vehicle. Unfortunately, more than once we’ve had an argument with a dealership about what needs to be done. We couldn’t have that argument unless we knew the OEM repair procedures.”
He said subletting the work also doesn’t relieve a shop from the liability that ADAS calibrations were done fully and properly. The only way to ensure that has happened is to road-test the vehicles, something his company does even if a dealer did the calibration work on a sublet basis and should have done its own road test.
“We’ve picked up many cars after they get done at the dealership and had to turn right back around and take it back because they’re not calibrated right,” Guthrie said. “You have to test drive the car to know that. And you need to test every system, not just the ones you affected [during repairs] because they all talk, they all work together. If you affect one, you may have affected five.”
Guthrie said that although it varies by make and model, dynamic system calibrations and post-calibration road tests often require two people.
“You’ve got somebody who needs to be manning the scan tool, while the other person is safely driving,” he said. “There are some cars that you can put into [test] modes and then drive and confirm that it worked. But for the most part, two people makes it much safer.”
Guthrie was asked what happens to a vehicle his company has repaired if neither his shop nor a local dealer is equipped and prepared to calibrate the ADAS.
“The car sits,” Guthrie said, comparing it to a car not being released if an airbag hasn’t been installed. “We had a Subaru for which we didn’t have the calibration equipment. The dealership had the equipment but had never set it up or used it. So that car wasn’t safe to be back on the road. It took almost two months. We ended up helping the dealer getting the equipment set up and getting it done.”
Another speaker at the conference concurred. Darrell Amberson of LaMettry’s Collision, which operates nine collision shops and two stand-alone mechanical shops in the Twin Cities region of Minnesota, has developed ADAS calibration stations at two of its locations. He said companies such as his can be another source of calibration help for other shops if dealers in a market are not set-up to do so. He said that like Guthrie, his company won’t release a car until calibrations are completed; in one case, that even meant not taking in a particular job.
“It was a Toyota van that was a handicap conversion,” Amberson said. “They had put in heavy-duty springs in the back of the vehicle. There was no data from Toyota in terms of how we should calibrate it. We reached out to the conversion company, and they admitted they just performed the conversion and didn’t do anything about the ADAS. We found that situation scary and just stepped aside and didn’t perform the repairs because there was no way we could know how to properly calibrate that vehicle. It was probably fixed by someone who probably didn’t do anything with the ADAS systems.” •
