AirPro Incorporating Software to ID ADAS Calibrations

Dec. 16, 2020
adasThink made an award-winning splash at SEMA, will now be integrated into AirPro’s diagnostic platform.

AirPro Diagnostics announced in December that it was partnering with adasThink, a new software platform that can scan a body shop’s estimate and automatically generate a list of advanced driver-assistance systems calibrations that need to be performed on the vehicle.

The diagnostics company says in a release it’s “proud to be the first to market to offer the adasThink technology integrated into its cloud-based diagnostic platform to elevate the ease of access for shops to identify vehicles requiring ADAS calibrations for repairers across the U.S. and Canada.”

Just days prior to its official launch in November, adasThink was the winner of the Specialty Equipment Market Association’s Best New Product Award in the Collision Repair & Refinish Product category as announced during the SEMA360 virtual trade show.

As part of its release, adasThink put out a study that shows many needed ADAS calibrations are routinely missed in body shops.

Missing calibrations

The study, which focused on Canadian collision repair shops in all the country’s provinces, and included estimates on a range of OEM vehicles, including Ford, Lexus, Mercedes-Benz, Honda, and Toyota, found that 88 percent of calibrations were missed in estimates at the shops included in the study.

The founder of the Toronto-based software platform, Nick Dominato, says the survey’s results are in line with what he expected, because of how new ADAS calibrations are in the collision repair industry and because it’s difficult to nail down when they need to be done.

“I can’t say it was surprising,” he says, adding the results of the study were in line with his expectations.

Dominato, who started in the collision repair industry working in sales and marketing for asTech, says he noticed that shops weren’t carrying out nearly as many ADAS calibrations as they should have been in order to ensure complete repairs.

“These calibrations are so often required [by the OEM] but they’re not happening,” he says. “It’s hard for these body shops to find these calibrations.”

Breaking habit

Often, such missed calibrations, says Dominato, happen due to habit and a lack of information. For example, when replacing the front bumper on a 2018 Corolla following a light frontend hit, he says, Toyota requires calibration of the front radar sensor as part of the bumper replacement.

He says that calibrations can be overlooked because shops have done thousands of bumper jobs, and because the calibration’s requirement and others like it can be buried in OE remove/install procedures, or within the vehicle’s calibration procedures.

“The industry needs to have a change in philosophy,” Dominato says. “We’re used to repairing cars with the steel and the plastic and the body, and now these ADAS systems are an important part of the car.”

Complete repairs

To that end, he says adasThink enables shops to carry out proper repairs when there’s a lack of information about how often calibrations are required. The platform also provides documentation of needed calibrations, which is key, he says, when dealing with insurance companies, as well as simply keeping a record of how the vehicle was repaired.

“It’s my personal belief that if you don’t have documentation that a repair was done,” says Dominato, “it wasn’t done.”

“ADAS is a new field, there’s not a lot of information and there’s not a lot of understanding,” he says. “If there was, my product wouldn’t exist.”

By incorporating adasThink into its diagnostic platform, AirPro says it is aiming to increase understanding of when calibrations are needed.

“Assisting repair facilities to identify required ADAS calibrations on the vehicles they repair is a value we recognized.” Eric Newell, executive vice president of AirPro Diagnostics says. “Education to the repair community is one of our key strategic focuses, [and] this service bodes well to help repairers get access to the service information they need to perform complete repairs.”

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