All roads lead to Rome.
In this case, let Rome be your collision shop. Let alignments be one road, and ADAS calibrations another road. The collisions that bring vehicles to your lot can be a third one, literally and figuratively.
What happens when they all meet?
Something good: Rome will have a great opportunity for great profitability.
This is because alignments, ADAS calibrations and collision shops are becoming increasingly intertwined. Let’s start with alignments.
To be sure, not all collision shops keep alignments in-house. This is unfortunate. Not only are alignments about the highest-margin work any shop can do, but nearly half the vehicles on the road right now need them.
Those are just the vehicles happily driving around. When they drive into each other and end up at a collision shop, if they didn’t need an alignment before, they might well need one then.
Now, with ADAS looming so large over the automotive industry, passing on alignments is even more unfortunate, because ADAS calibrations and alignments have become two sides of the same coin. If a shop does one, it may as well do the other. Many times, if a shop does one, it may be required to do the other.
This is where those two roads meet the third one, leading straight to your collision shop.
As you likely know, whenever an ADAS component is disturbed for any reason, a calibration is likely required. As you surely know, collisions tend to be pretty disturbing. Almost by definition, a collision shop will potentially see more daily opportunities for calibrations than most other shops.
Whenever a forward-facing calibration is required, an alignment is also likely required, since if the vehicle isn’t going straight, neither are the ADAS cameras and radar. So collision shops that are passing on alignments – as well as the profit, but not the responsibility, that goes with them – are also passing on profitable ADAS calibrations.
It doesn’t have to be that way. There’s a better option. What happens in Rome can and should stay in Rome.
With Hunter Engineering’s innovative Ultimate ADAS® alignment and static calibration system, not only can you keep alignments and calibrations in-house; you can often keep them in-bay.
Ultimate ADAS® combines Hunter’s standard-setting alignment technology with an efficient and easy-to-use guided target placement system for around-the-vehicle calibration coverage. Gimbal-mounted lasers are the key component, cutting setup time by 70 percent for some static calibration procedures. Ultimate ADAS® also comes standard with Hunter’s ADASLink® scan tool, providing dynamic calibration coverage for vehicles that require calibration while driving.
What Ultimate ADAS® brings to your shop is repeatable accuracy, precision and efficiency. What it eliminates from your shop is a lot of wasted time and effort.
If your techs are currently performing static calibrations with plumb bobs and masking tape on hands and knees – doing geometry on the floor, as it were – that can stop. If they’re doing alignments in one place in the shop and then moving the vehicle to another for calibrations – after first moving all the other vehicles currently in that place, of course – that can stop.
And being less than certain that the calibrations were done correctly can definitely stop, because Ultimate ADAS® error-proofs the procedures.
The gimbals and onscreen guidance provided by Hunter’s award-winning WinAlign® software dramatically increase target placement precision by automatically compensating for non-level floors, monitoring for placement errors, and confirming accuracy with laser measurements each step of the way. All backed up with complete and easily accessible printouts and digital documentation for easy sharing with customers and insurance companies alike.
If there’s a place for everything and everything in its place, Ultimate ADAS® makes it the same place: your place. Alignments can happen, calibrations can happen, and taking advantage of the immense and continual opportunities they both provide to collision shops will happen.
When your business is ready to turn alignments and calibrations into a reliable revenue stream, Hunter Engineering will be ready to support you with guidance, training and equipment.