Tomorrow's cars will book their own maintenance and order their own parts

By dpa | 22 September 2016


FRANKFURT: On arrival at a workshop, future cars won't need a mechanic to look at them: their electronic innards will have sent messages in advance by wireless about what ails them, a consultants' report for the German car-components industry says.

Robotic driving, where every car swaps data with every other vehicle on the road is only one part of the sea change coming to the car industry. The other side is that cars will book their own repairs and order spare parts for themselves by wireless while they driving around.

"Each car will spit out several terabytes of data logs on entering the workshop," says Jan Witkamp of German auto supplier Bosch.

Today, mechanics use laptops and rely on electronic diagnosis to track down faults, but tomorrow's data streams will be far too great for a mechanic to comb through. The idea is completely automate the diagnosis.

This electronic health check will compare new data with old already saved in the workshop's database, facilitating everything from wheel alignment to replacing parts in the lights and air conditioning.

The study, entitled Future of the Car, was carried out by the consultancy Teradata and released at the recent Automechanika trade fair for parts suppliers in Frankfurt.

Bosch and its German parts competitor Continental say all the separate electronic diagnostic devices used in a garage today will be networked with one another tomorrow.

They expect tomorrow's mechanics to wield tablet computers that visualise the repairs: justifying the work in simple terms with clear pricing for the customer, while describing them in detail for the grease monkey.

"Augmented reality is the user interface of the future for mechanics," Witkamp believes.

Databases of parts will keep up to date instantly on ever-changing models, so that the wrong parts are never delivered and repairs delayed as often happens nowadays.

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