The Truth About ADAS Calibrations Every Shop Needs to Hear [THA 494]

0:01This is the Automotive Repair Podcast Network. Hello everybody, Carm Capriato, Remarkable Results Radio, and another Town Hall Academy. I have a show here today for you that I'm calling a reaction to a viral reel episode. What the hell are you talking about? Well, stick around, I'll explain details just a minute, and don't forget Your, your critical job in this episode is this: hang out, listen, learn.

0:34If you get something from this episode from our very brilliant group here, Matt and Keith, then I want you to implement it. It may not necessarily be about what we're going to talk about, but it probably— you're going to probably write something down that says, you know what, I think I better learn about that, and I think I better do something about it.

0:52And so my challenge in podcasts that you listen to, and especially ours, is to walk away with something that makes you better, smarter, more learned. You may even laugh a little bit, because I guarantee that's going to happen. Thank you so much to our great partners. Hey, let's face it, your shop management system is the most critical tool in your shop, and NapaTrax will move your shop into the SMS fast lane with on-site training, 6 days a week support, and local representation.

1:23Find NAPA Trax on the web at napatrax.com. Hey, how well does your team know their stuff? Test their automotive skills with the Today's Class basic, advanced, or service advisor quizzes. It's a quick, effective way to spot gaps and grow stronger teams. Take the quizzes now at todaysclass.com/tcquiz. You're probably tired of chasing new customers who never return. We understand. Pit Crew Loyalty ends the one-and-done cycle, turning first visits into lasting, reliable revenue.

1:59On the web at pitcrewloyalty.com. Shop owners, stop juggling multiple marketing tools. Kukui's integrated platform— they deliver 4 times better website conversions, automated follow-up, and real-time ROI tracking. Get industry-leading customer support with Kukui. That's kukui.com. Hey, get our app, arpn.app. Whole bunch of stuff all in one place. Share episodes with friends, create your own listening playlists. You can download them to listen when there's no internet.

2:37It's a great, great app. All the shows on the Automotive Repair Podcast Network are there. Let me introduce our panel. Look at this. Keith Perkins. Hello, Keith. How are you? Good. How are you? I'm great. L1 training, L1 automotive, L1 programming, industry educator, and ADAS specialist. Hmm. Maybe that's what we're going to talk about. Member of the, uh, NASDAF advisory board, Keith?

3:08Yeah, I'm on the executive committee. I'm the treasurer and secretary. Very good. Matt Fonzlow's here, technical specialist and shop manager, Riverside Automotive, Red Wing, Minnesota. Hey, Matt. How's it going, man? Good. ASE subject matter expert, industry educator, and the podcast on the Automotive Repair Podcast Network, Diagnosing the Aftermarket A to Z. Guys, Keith, you and Liz were in my makeshift studio in Tarrytown, New York at the TST Big Event, and it was a really great episode and we got into the details cuz I was really curious about How do you talk to customers about ADAS?

3:48And you were sharing some of your background. And Tracy, our executive producer, my daughter, takes this 3-minute clip of yours. We put it up on YouTube as a short, as a reel, and it's had 433,000 views. Okay. I just have it on constant loop, so half of them are probably just from me. Oh, okay. Well, thank you, Matt. Appreciate that. I just like hearing it in the background.

4:19That was nice. Nice of you. So when I saw all this going on and I realized the impact that, that segment that you were kind of not necessarily ranting, Keith, but you were really talking about the reality of what was going on in your world with your wife's car and an 8S calibration and the dealership. We're gonna talk about all the talk that was going on in those threads, and I was blown away by some of the gaps of knowledge, Keith.

4:55Yeah, where people wanted to come in and say you were wrong in almost every case. Believe it, maybe it was Matt who chimed in, who was, if you will, a support partner, and all the other great people we know in the industry were saying, are you nuts? So it showed me this huge knowledge gap that we happen to have in our industry and the old do-right rule, Keith.

5:18And so thank you for doing that. Thank you for Tracy to put it out because I think what it did, Matt, Keith, it, it opened up some eyes and perspectives on this education, this training, this knowledge gap. Yeah, it's the 80/10/10 rule, right? Like 10% of people will be stuck in their mind forever. They will never learn anything. They are convinced that they know everything.

5:39There's 10% of people that will always learn, that are always going to find out. They're always going to have the information because once they're curious, they will outreach and find that info. And so they won't argue and, you know, they won't even really converse much about something. They're going to listen and go, that's interesting, think to themselves, I need to go find out.

5:57And that's who most educators are and all the people that we see at all the training events. And then there's the 80% of the industry that are just fixing cars, trying to at least doing their thing, and that's the ones that we can hopefully sway, right, to the one side or the other. But there's 10% of them that usually comment that are not willing to learn.

6:15They're not willing to understand. And, you know, I saw 2 parts of that. There was that 10% talking about that, and then there were some that didn't closely pay attention. It was a soundbite. Maybe that's part of what happens with Reels. They didn't realize there were— that was actually a period of 5 minutes of time, I believe. It happened, but it was crushed into a reel and there was a cut there where we were talking— I was talking about one system in the Ford, and then I was talking about another system in the Ford.

6:422 different ADAS systems, 2 different setups and designs. I was talking about a static calibration of a 360 camera, and then I was later talking about the forward-facing lane departure camera and lane centering system or BlueCruise system, whatever particular instance of that there was. And because those sound clips were together, a lot of them blew up with, it's not true, it's just a 360, it doesn't matter.

7:06I'm like, well, what I was talking about was not the 360. So people just miss out. That was exactly the talking point I was going to bring up, is that there seems to be confusion about what he was talking about. And it could have been the editing and all that. But the reality is, is if you know, you know, and you can blow off a 360 however you want.

7:27It says at the end in service information that this calibration needs to be done, you need to do the calibration. When do we get to decide what really needs to be done and doesn't? When did that ever become a thing? Like, not from a diagnostic perspective, but from an actual repair procedure process. When did we ever get that type of power, if you will, to decide what really needs to be done and what we can look the other way on?

7:56That doesn't fly. And you can pick so many different examples of that. Nissan transmissions come to mind. Like, are we going to skip some certain steps? You certainly can, but it may come back and bite you. If you torqued 4 out of 5 lug nuts on every car, how many of them would a wheel fall off? None of them, probably, right? Probably.

8:17Statistically, tens of thousands of cars, no wheels would probably fall off because you did 4 out of 5 or 5 out of 6 or I wouldn't do 2 out of 3 on a smart car, but that's just statistically, right? People talk about, well, I don't have to follow. It doesn't matter if you do this. It doesn't matter. You're right. It probably actually doesn't matter if you did 4 out of 5 wipeouts, honestly.

8:40But would you ever really do that? Your job is to do that. It's important to do it correctly. You're probably paid to do it correctly. And that's the argument a lot of those guys had is they were like, oh, I worked at a dealer and they didn't pay us to do that. That's a warranty job. Win some, you lose some. Toolboxes have wheels.

8:57I don't even want to get into that argument. If you don't think you should, you're not thinking you're being paid enough to do your job, go somewhere else. Jim Farley said himself, there's 600,000 open job positions, right? Go find another one. Why do we love to complain all the time? Is every other industry that has like skilled trades like we are, do the plumbers and the carpenters all bitch like that?

9:20That can be such a rabbit hole, but yes, they do, especially the ones that take their jobs very seriously because there is minimum code. But most of the ones that really take their jobs very seriously, consummate professionals, oftentimes minimum code isn't good enough. Yeah, they do complain. It's a little bit different in licensing and all that, that, and that's probably a subject for a different episode.

9:47But, but Matt, based on all the stuff that came out, is our gap in our industry way too big? The knowledge gap, the knowing-doing gap, is it way too big? That's hard to answer because just the nature of what we do has so many ranges and levels. Like, who should know? In this case, it's inexcusable, specifically with forward-facing cameras. Inexcusable because It's right in service information.

10:15Keith linked it. He talked about it in the short, where to go to find it. On Google, by the way, not just a paid service information. I double-checked, I Googled it today. You could still type in Ford job ADAS and Google it and Ford crash parts website comes up and it's the actual PDF from Ford service information for free 90 free. Free, free $100.

10:39I'm kidding, it's free. I just Googled it and found it. That's what I'm saying is like, it's inexcusable. That's like, I agree with Matt on that. It makes no sense if you're like, well, I didn't know it was there. Well, then you shouldn't work on the system if you're not trained in it. I don't, I don't know. There was a comment that said, uh, 35 years as a master tech, I've never reprogrammed a camera after doing an alignment.

10:58It's like, was that the actual words? I don't want to beat you up on this one, Carm, but if he said he's never reprogrammed a camera, well, you wouldn't reprogram one after you Right. In alignment, you would do a calibration because a calibration, a configuration, an initialization, a programming event are all different things, but they are conflated together. I think those were the real words.

11:16I think Trace pulled them off. Probably. And very probably. That's why I didn't, I didn't want to try to correct it if it was your words. And he, yeah. No, but you just brought up something huge. Reprogramming versus calibration. Yeah. Totally separate ordeal. The vehicle in question that we took was a '19 Lincoln. So a bunch of the other comments I saw were, was that's a dynamic calibration.

11:36That's not even static. He doesn't even know what he's doing. Well, since no one looked up the service information, that was a '19 Lincoln. It has a static calibration only. There is not a dynamic calibration for the 360 camera on that car. The lane departure and lane camera or lane centering or what it depends upon what system we're working on. On that '19 Lincoln, it just has lane departure assist or lane keep assist, whatever you want to, whatever acronym you want to use.

11:59I think Ford uses LKA, lane keep assist. Just to check, since I have the document up from Google right in front of me, I'll just quadruple check here. Lane keeping camera, that's the component, and the lane keeping system. So on the LKS, it is a dynamic calibration. So those were the 2 systems we were talking about in that video. That's the issue.

12:18And a replacement of one of those components requires probably not even programming, to be honest. It probably requires coding, which is typically done through an as-built or programmable module installation function on Ford specifically. That's their terminology. But that is coding and configuring that module. It already has software in it. Now, there may also be a software update that is a programming event, but replacement of that front camera actually required a LIN bus initialization and not a PMI.

12:46And so that's what I spoke about in there. I thought it was really entertaining that there was so much either confusion with the car, and a lot of it was they watched the soundbite and they didn't watch the video. And if they watched the video, I talk at great lengths even when people don't want me to. And so, to quote a movie there, Matt, in case you can figure that one out, a little Dogma action.

13:08I gave the whole story, and what's crazier about that story, and you guys know this, since that video came out, that car has been rolled. Yeah, my wife and both of my daughters were in that car, and that car got rolled, and it saved their life because all of the safety systems were thus calibrated. Somebody said, well, then do it yourself. I did.

13:26After that, we used that car in every ADAS class we do— used that car in every ADAS class we did. We have one coming up in one week, well after this airs, so you guys all missed it. Sorry. But we have an in-person one that we use it, and we always use that car. We do a 360 calibration, we do dynamic calibrations.

13:43That car gets calibrated over and over and over again, along with many other vehicles we have. And we replaced that vehicle, so now there'll be a new vehicle we're using. Unfortunately does not have a static calibration anymore because it's like the system the other people talked about. So your make model's important. Looking up the service information was important. And yes, it has to be done.

14:01To Matt's point, regardless of what you think, you're not the engineer, you're not the lawyer, you're especially not the prosecuting lawyer. So I would follow the OEM procedures. Yeah, or a group of 12 of your peers and Another example that comes to mind, I was thinking about the lug torquing or wheel lug nut torquing. We're talking about not doing the procedure correctly with ADAS here, and the example of the video is skipping it entirely.

14:31So, one example that kind of comes to mind would be there are some car lines where on jobs that we have done, and some of the people listening have done literally thousands of times, Literally, a car line will change something where a certain part has to be replaced. I'll use an example of Ford. I don't want to be picking on Ford because we're talking about Lincoln in this case, but it's the best example I can come up with off the cuff is that there's bolts that need to be replaced with caliper replacement, or if the calipers have been removed, and in service information it tells you to discard these bolts.

15:06There's people that have done thousands of brake jobs They don't read service information. They never look it up. Those bolts never get thrown away. They get put back on. And when they find out that they were supposed to, they probably, in this case, comparing it to this ADAS situation, they're blowing it off. Like, what are they gonna do? Are they gonna break?

15:28I don't know. They want you to replace them for a reason. They're, you know, torque to yield or something once. And now if you don't do that, What position are you taking, presumably in a courtroom or just amongst your peers, your friends? What position are you taking? Like, well, they looked good. I mean, cripes, they're big enough. Why would they shear off?

15:49None of us would do that. They should have been fine. It's not my fault they can't design a bolt. But they told you flat out, this needs to be done. You're going to tell a jury of your peers like, well, I know better. I've been doing this for like 30 years, 20 years, 15 years, 40 years. I know better than them. That's gonna fly?

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19:02Get industry-leading customer support and book a demo with Kukui. That's kukui.com. Why are we so quick in our industry to jump in? Well, I know better. Why do we always want to be right instead of being humble and constantly wanting to learn? Shame. Yeah, shame. Psychologically, it's shame. Yeah. I mean, you're based on everything you do all day, every day is pretty much being right.

19:30Right. And every time you're wrong, it's a comeback, right? Right. And you're getting punched. Most shops have some kind of thing. Almost every shop I've worked in has had some kind of thing. A car comes back on a rollback and they go set the comeback bus on top of your toolbox, a little rubber Magic School Bus. For 2 shops had one like that.

19:48I was like, what was the comeback bus? I've seen dunce caps. I've seen all of those things. Who had the most? It's a metric, right? We all talk about it. The thing we hate is being wrong or missing something. And every single job, I mean, to lean to Carm's side and away from Matt's side on this one, I think it's way worse than what it should be.

20:08It's a much bigger gap. If you go look and read service information for every job you do, you will find out you've probably only done like 40% of every job correctly. There's something that was missed. There was a calibration, a relearn, a torque spec. It's torque specs, right? If we really want to beat people up on it. And I won't name names, but like I had a— there was a conversation between a bunch of people of someone saying, oh, well, flat rate techs are by and large better than hourly techs, was what someone said.

20:36They said, I would venture to bet. And I said, I will not only venture, I will indulge you in that bet. I will bet. And then at the time, I bet that person $10,000 to the charity of their choice. We would both bet $10,000, charity of our choice, and we would put 2 of his best flat rate techs versus 2 of my— I only have hourly techs— 2 of my best techs.

20:56And they would both diagnose a job and they would both do a repair and they would be judged on who got it done the fastest. So leaning towards the job of the flat rate, but it had to be correct, which meant they had to go look up service info. And I wasn't going to lay out what meant correct. You either know how to do a job correctly or you don't.

21:14That was not taken up. I made every effort to make that happen, so it didn't. And it's not an open bet. I don't have 10 grand burning a hole in my pocket right now. I've made a few investments now. But, and it's because that person realized, yeah, my guys don't torque every bolt. They don't read every instruction. They don't relearn everything they're supposed to relearn.

21:31They didn't replace every component they were supposed to replace. We just did calipers, well, not we didn't, we pulled calipers off, but we did a control arm. And some other suspension work on a Mustang recently, and it was a 2007, like 20-year-old Mustang. Had to replace all the bolts. $89 in bolts. Thank goodness we estimated, because otherwise that would've been $89 coming out of the incidentals fund that we estimated on that job, right?

21:59And it was, why do you have to? Are they torqued to yield? They're not torqued to yield. So to Matt's point, 'cause I know what he was alluding to, and I know he didn't wanna get too technical with it, but I'm gonna get technical with it. A lot of bolts, are made to be tightened one time and the threads warp and move and tighten and flatten.

22:14And the breakaway torque of that bolt after it's torqued one time is like, what was it? I think 68% higher was the number that there's a test that we did. Everyone passed around for a while. A bolt that's made as a one-time use bolt torques and the threads fold and then the clamping force is that force, but only one time. And then the next time you try to reuse that bolt, because the threads are already warped over, it doesn't have the same clamping force.

22:40So the torque that you would install it at actually isn't correct. And there isn't a way to replicate that because of the stretch of the threads every time. So a lot of bolts are made that way. General Motors does it too, not just Ford. Every manufacturer has many one-time use bolts, some torque to yield and some not torque to yield, but some one-time clamping force.

22:58So it's important and there's a reason why. And there's always a reason why. If there wasn't a reason why, you got to think this manufacturer is factoring in, we might have to do this under warranty. What is it going to cost us? So the plan is to make the car last 36,000 miles or whatever the warranty is, right? Everything beyond that, you can argue that they made that spec up just to get it out of warranty, or they set that to get that J.D.

23:22Power Associate Award for the lowest cost of ownership in the first 90 days or first 2 years or whatever award they were trying to get. You can come up with all those examples if you want, but there's a reason for all of it. And it's always weighed on safety and cost. If I want to make the devil's advocate argument here, well, they only said that because they want to sell more parts or they want to do more work.

23:4578% of every repair of a vehicle outside of warranty is done at an independent shop, not at the dealer. So they're trying to make us more money? Okay. I mean, that would be nice. I agree with you. I'll take it. So there's a reason our job is to follow OEM procedures and fix cars right the first time and to fix problems. And most of the time that problem is a car.

24:05Regardless of what your reasoning of how long you've been doing something, your argument of authority doesn't work. It doesn't matter. I'm not going to take it. Guys, let me jump in here and talk about static and dynamic, which you guys of course brought up. Are we as an industry say, oh, it's probably dynamic, so I'm not going to worry about it. Has that clouded the issue?

24:25Keith probably has a better take on this. I still think it's a— they're basing it off something they've seen, read, or heard in a class, but they take it to an extreme, meaning that there is a little bit of self-learning going on even after a calibration. But then they assume that if I drive it long enough, it will recalibrate itself, and that Really hasn't shown to be the case.

24:48No, I agree with Matt on that one. There's a massive shift on towards vehicles having both options, static and dynamic. I'm seeing more dynamics than what I've seen before. The problem I see is a lot of manufacturers are not going to make everything all dynamic, mostly because not everywhere in the country, everywhere in the world can use— exactly, do they fit the infrastructure of what's needed for that?

25:12A lot of them you have to drive. I taught an ADAS class in Brooklyn, New York. And so I said, now this car we have to drive. And I read the specs on this Suburban of what it was. And I was like, we need to drive over 35 miles an hour and not accelerate or decelerate. And we need to not change or turn very often.

25:29I'm like, well, that takes out everything in an hour radius of here. So I asked guys, what do you guys do? He goes, oh yeah, we have to go out to X, drive over to whatever, get on the freeway and then go do them and come back. He's like, yeah, it's always, It's 20 minutes to get out there, 40 minutes to get out there depending upon the time of day.

25:45And then it's, you know, it's only a 10, 12-minute drive, but then it's 30, 40 minutes to get back. He's like, yeah, so, you know, most calibrations take an hour and a half. I'm like, I am 42 seconds from the freeway at my shop and it takes maybe 8 minutes to do a cal. Like, our test drives are like 25, 30 minutes total calibration time.

26:02Calibration time away from the shop, stop, clear codes, check all those things. Any other post-calibration, key off for 2 minutes, like a lot of them say, key back on, then drive the car back testing the system. It's, you know, 20 minutes. It changes things for a lot of places. So I see that back and forth, and a lot of guys say that about dynamic.

26:20They're like, oh, well, I just have to drive it. No, we still have to hook up a scan tool, initiate a routine in a module that goes through a process inside the module, and it comes back with feedback. They're missing out on a lot of that stuff. But yes, to Matt's point, cars do have adjustments in calibration, but it's not a calibration.

26:38It's an adjustment, some self-learning machine learning that happens to, to quirk for suspension sag, tire wear, those kinds of things. Does the normal public who owns all these great vehicles really appreciate the high-tech industry that we're in? I don't think they ever have. No, no, Matt, that's a perfect answer. I mean, I don't think they ever have. I don't think they ever really know.

27:04And no, I keep thinking about this skill gap thing or knowledge gap you brought up and like, I'm wrestling with that and yeah. Depending on, you know, not to make this just all about like a relative statement, but what does that mean? Part of it is if we're talking about the truth, like how something really works, the gap between the vast majority of the profession versus how something really works, that gap is, yeah, it's huge.

27:28And it's even larger going to the vehicle owner. That's a topic you and I have talked about quite a bit with information asymmetry and credence goods service, stuff like that. That's what it is by definition. So I don't know that they've ever really appreciated it as cars have gotten more and more complex. I think they kind of know they're more— they're complex, but they're also under the delusion, which maybe sounds a little more condescending than I'd like it to, but they are under the impression that we have very sophisticated equipment that plugs into these vehicles and tells us what's wrong with the car.

28:04All I keep thinking about is I don't have ADAS calibration equipment. And so it's really kind of easy just to ignore it. Talk to the hand, the face ain't listening. Just send them down the road. You can send them down the road, just send them down the road to somebody that has some ADAS calibration equipment. Yeah, that's my point. My point is, is that the owners of ADAS calibration equipment either aren't marketing themselves to a local community and say, hey, listen, when you know you got to be there, I'm here for you.

28:35And because it is such a big buy to want to get that equipment in the right environment to put it in, it— maybe that's where we're getting lazy and have an attitude about calibrations, because I don't want to do them, I don't want to afford it, and I don't want to go down to my buddy down the road. That's greed. It's all greed.

28:55And this is where, like, a lot of shop owners hate the point where I talk about this, and, and But do you do tie rod ends and ball joints and drag links and stuff if you don't have an alignment machine? And if you do, you probably partner with an alignment company to do that, right? Because that's part of the job and you know you have to do that and it causes a problem with the customer.

29:14And we have that same— a lot of guys have that same argument. Well, I've been doing this for 30 years. I said at ETI, and they had a panel where there were 2 shop owners, 2 or 3 shop owners, I don't remember how many there was up there. It was a couple years ago. And they sit up there and these were guys that were representing me.

29:29I'm in the audience and just listening to the panel. And they said, one of the guys said, well, I went and talked to my master tech and he's been doing this 20, 30 years. Again, he starts this conversation with the argument of authority of, I've been doing this this long, or my technician's been doing it that long. I'm sorry, we all have the same amount of time experience on ADAS if you've been in the industry that long.

29:49So it doesn't matter. They didn't have ADAS 30 years ago, not as we know it today. The first ADAS car with a LiDAR radar component that we know of is a 1992 Mitsubishi, only in the Japanese domestic market, and it was a LiDAR system for advanced cruise control. And it was only done in 2 years because it was a $4,800 part on a $28,000 car in 1992.

30:11It was crazy. So realistically, since the mid-2010, '12, '13, '14-ish, when it really started to come into its own, we've all been working on cars those 10-plus years. So who cares how long you've been doing this? So I've talked to my master tech for— and he's been a master tech 30 years, and he said, if I take the part off and I put the part back on, you know, I'm not gonna need to calibrate that.

30:30He said that up on stage at ETI in front of every vehicle manufacturer and tool manufacturer, scan tool manufacturer in the country as a representation of our industry. Then the guy next to him said, yeah, we don't really work on Teslas very much because we can't get access to the information. This was after it was released for free. Again, this is again my— Tesla has it for free.

30:51If viewers don't know, you can go to epc.tesla.com, make yourself a— go to the diagnostics tab and stuff, make yourself a free account and get free access to service information for free for Teslas from Tesla. It's there. So this is who represented us and it's constantly a battle of ignorance. So when I talk to these shop owners about the equipment and stuff, they go, well, I don't see the profit in it.

31:13I don't see the profit in me having business insurance, but it's required for me to run my business and do my job right. I didn't see the— most shops don't see a profit in their alignment machine, the profits in the repairs equating to that. It's exactly the same thing. If you're going to do X repair that requires it, if you're gonna change tire size on a Ford vehicle, it requires a forward-facing camera alignment when it's done, which means you need to be able to do that.

31:37And there's no tools for that one besides the scan tools you probably already have. You've gotta set the vehicle up, press the routine, drive the car till it's done. Hey guys, Matt, Keith, how many shops in America do you believe have alignment equipment? 80? No, like percent? Yeah, no way. It's probably closer to 50. Yeah, 50 or less. I'm debating if it's lower than 50.

32:01To your point, we're shortcutting. Yeah, we're shortcutting because they don't see the profit in it, so they just decide not to do it rather than realizing they don't have the ability to complete the job. Or hold the customer to completing the job, and then they still do part of the repair and then say it's complete and give the invoice to the customer and collect money, and the customer goes away.

32:19They don't go, look, we can change the tire size in your vehicle, but when you get done, you're gonna have to go take it somewhere to get this calibration done, and we don't do that. As much as I don't even like that part of it, and it's gonna offend a bunch of people, I think if you can't do a complete repair on the car, you shouldn't do it at all because you're probably not knowledgeable enough.

32:34And that's just how it offends people. I'm sorry. I'm mean. I don't know what to say. I tell people every day when they call my shop that says, hey, I just got XYZ shop just told me I needed to call you. I need to buy a computer and put it in and bring it to you to program it. I just tell them straight up over the phone, hey, like 80-plus percent of cars that are brought to us that way didn't need a computer.

32:52Our belief here is that if they're incapable of installing and programming a module, they're incapable of diagnosing it as being a module. We think they're probably wrong. Why don't you bring it in, let us check it out? I do everything I can to to not discredit but dismiss that information. I just don't do it. I don't think if you can't do the whole repair, you shouldn't do any of it.

33:10I'm sorry. It seems like it's fear-driven. Yeah. And this is probably an incomplete thought, which anyone that knows me knows that's about all I'm capable of. But, but lots of them. Yeah, lots of, lots and lots of incomplete thoughts. Maybe somebody could stitch them together and then make one good complete thought. I don't know, but They fear the customer, right? The fear that we're going to lose a customer.

33:32So they call up, they want a price of whatever requires removal of something that messes with an ADAS camera or radar. So it's going to trigger the requirement to do a calibration. But I don't want to tell them that because it's going to add to this cost. So the wheel alignment following a manufacturer— pick one, pick Audi, I don't know— requires a calibration after a wheel alignment, and they might even point out specifically one that messes with the thrust angle.

34:01But beside the point, if it says it needs it, it should get it. But I don't want to add that cost to my estimate for fear that I'm going to lose this job, lose this customer. So there's that fear. If something horrific would happen, and I really don't want it to, but if something horrific were to happen where just a national news story of an independent repair shop, a dealership, somebody where a terrible accident occurred attributed to an ADAS system not working the way it was designed because the previous, you know, technical specialist, ADAS specialist, whatever, or shop didn't do the job to completion.

34:43They skipped this step. And they see the size of numbers that are going to be the shop is gonna be hit with, now the fear of that repercussion will outweigh the loss, fear of loss of the customer, and magically everyone will be quoting ADAS calibrations on jobs that are required to have ADAS calibrations. So it's like this misappropriation of fear. Since you haven't seen the big lawsuit, you don't fear it.

35:11And since you haven't had a customer come back and say, hey, you know what, ever since you did that, my car slams on the brakes on this corner, If there's a truck coming around. That hasn't happened, so there's no fear. They're more fearful of losing the client or the job, the service, than the repercussions of not doing it right. And then when that becomes a fear point, like a reality, boom, now we're like forced to do the right thing.

35:37It's insanity to me. It's absolute insanity. Well, the more we don't do it, the greater degree of having a major problem happen. And the sheer number of cars that have systems in them that are now in an age of being serviced, the probabilities are going up, up, up, up, up. We're starting to see more and more lawsuits activity for glass companies, and I think some dealerships now.

36:02So I'm sure eventually it's going to happen, but why are we waiting and devaluing ourselves and our colleagues/competition while we're at it? I don't know, my— I guess my new favorite word is just so absurd. Yeah, reminds me of the Anton Yelchin thing. They got the, uh, the actor who played Chekov in the newer Star Trek series, a reboot, the movies. Not a Trekkie or anything, but he just— he passed away.

36:28He got out of his Jeep, walked around to open the gate at his house, and his car rolled forward because it had the knob shifter. And so there was complaints about this, about issues of other stuff getting damaged, property getting damaged, people getting hurt. But until a popular actor was killed by his car, Chrysler, Fiat Chrysler, whatever, French, Italian, whoever owned it that week decided that now we should make a software update recall that when you open a door, that the car should go into park automatically, which Audi and Volkswagen have been doing for years and years and years.

37:04I know because it frustrated me trying to do alignments on them because I'm trying to look down at the lift and open the door and roll the car. And when I open the door, the car goes into park annoyingly. So, so it also really ticks off people that can't back up trailers with just their mirrors. So, hey man, that's why you do Pro Backup Assist.

37:23I beat up on Ford and just so everyone's clear, I own 7 Fords and to replace Liz's Lincoln, we bought a new Ford, new to us. Yeah. Got a '25 Expedition to replace it. So, okay. Well, we're so happy that they came out okay, Keith. I mean, that's, They all walked away too. Yeah, they all— so for those who didn't hear, just that same car, that Lincoln that did not get repaired properly at the Ford dealership, which it's right now the brand new Ford is at a 3rd Ford dealership that we've— we're not burning bridges.

37:53I'm just saying, you know, we find issues and we move our business elsewhere. It's under warranty, so it's got some warranty work. We got a phone call today. As soon as I get off here today, we're gonna go pick it up from the dealer. But that car did its job. That Lincoln did its job. All the safety functions on that car worked.

38:08They were driving highway speeds and they were sideswiped by another car. They went off of a guardrail and off the side of a bridge, down 20 feet and rolled the car at highway speeds. It landed right side up. Every car— Carmel, I'll send you some pictures if you want to find a way to edit in the picture of the car right here or whatever, that's fine.

38:27But that car was crunched in every corner. It was crunched every corner down. The front windshield was caved in. Every glass was almost broken. Every single panel was banged in. None of the doors would open properly, so they climbed out the back glass. My 12-year-old, my 15-year-old, and my wife climbed up the back glass, sat there. Ambulance came by. They all took an ambulance ride, went to the hospital, but no broken bones, just contusions and, and some abrasive stuff from seat belts.

38:51And all the other safety functions that worked in that car, that did everything it was supposed to do— my children and my wife are alive today because that happened. So when people hear me talk about this, I'm like, you're really fired up. I lost my uncle and my grandmother on the same day because they didn't wear a seatbelt. But I got to keep my cousin and her 2 baby children because they were wearing seatbelts.

39:11And then because they had a tire blowout in a Ford Explorer of all things. Wow. A completely different incident. Completely different incident years and years and years ago. And then I got to keep my wife and kids because their car did the thing and seatbelts did the thing. I believe in seatbelts. I believe in safety functions. I believe in all those things.

39:30I had that video that I did where somebody had defeated the pretensioners in the seat belts in a car and was trying to sell the car that way, and I caught it. And everyone's like, you took that really serious. I'm like, yes, I take seat belts and safety and automotive repair serious because that's my job. You bring your car to me, my job is to make sure that I fix it properly and safely, hopefully the first time, and hopefully at the most reasonable price that I can so that you're happy.

39:52But At the end of the day, I just need the car fixed right. I need it fixed safe. That's all that I care about. And so I think these systems being calibrated is safe. I've proven that. Carm, I apologize I haven't got you that trifold image to show. Oh my God, Keith, I'm not even sure we want to go there, but you just said right and safe.

40:09And if we were trying to pull something for the listener to listen and learn and then implement, maybe the kind of language that we're talking to our clients about, Keith, is right and safe. Now it goes back to the acetate that I want Keith to create. And so it's on every— everybody's counter so that it shows if we've got a 1-degree misalignment, then what does it mean down the road?

40:33Because we're looking for adaptive cruise to work and lane keep and all that stuff. And if the client says no, from a $99 alignment plus the, the $299 or whatever the calibration is, to do it right and safe, then you can go down the road and do it because we choose not to. Yeah, that's the other arguments that were in there all the time is guys were saying, I've done tons of these and the systems always work afterwards.

41:00And it's a complete misunderstanding of how they work. They think that, well, I turn, I press the button and I came up to a car and the car slowed down, it worked. And that's where that math came from, Carl. That's where it's showing that the thing of 1 degree of alignment at half of the distance of a capable long-range radar. So at about 125 meters, which for those that know the joke is about 781.25 Nathan's hot dogs, just so we're clear, in freedom units, not tyranny units.

41:28That's why we make that measurement that way. So the automatic emergency braking system has a 52% reduction in distance if the radar is 1 degree off in a single axis. So that's why it's so important to calibrate. It works. It still works. It just doesn't work as designed. And 52% might mean the difference between rear-ending someone and not. Yeah. Or a fender bender and helicopter ride.

41:52Yes, exactly. So, and that's why I like Matt's point. The fear part hasn't got there yet. I don't want it to take another actor's death and we ignore a bunch of less popular people, their damages, their injuries, their whatever, or the risk that's involved. I don't want that to be the case. I would rather us just do it right now. And that's why I don't understand.

42:14I'm in the same boat, Matt. Why are we waiting on that fear versus the other fear when neither one of them are right? We need to just do right regardless. If you go to like the NAPA EV class, right, Bill Weaver, he's going to spend a fair bit of time talking to you about personal protection equipment. He says something that we probably should use more often, and it works for insurance too.

42:36We buy insurance. We don't need that stuff. We don't need the PPE. We don't need insurance, all that, on our good days, on our normal days. We need it on our worst days, and that's when we need all this stuff to work. And not just us, us. I need this stuff to work for my client on their worst day. That's when it's gotta work.

42:58Not day in and day out. Like when they need it, I need it to work. That's when I want it to work. I, hopefully they're paying me to stack the probabilities overwhelmingly so that when they need that on their worst day, it's going to work as designed. I wanna stop and show you, this is a video and I am so upset that I never took a picture of, you see that standup sign behind us?

43:22Great friend Scott Felzer, his wife Anne. He just put in a brand new building, a brand new 8S system. You can see it's a kind of a flat lift, and behind it on that is all the different calibration reasons, Keith. And he has that sign— we had like 25 independents there to look at his system, but that's in the front of his lobby.

43:45So when they need to talk about calibrations they can literally almost walk up and if you like a weatherman, right? To, to point to all those kind of great reasons. So there are ways to do this stuff and there are reasons to do this stuff and there are ways to sell this. I'm crazy about the lack of, and I keep going back to my favoritest word, professionalism.

44:11I'm sorry, I'm not saying if you don't care, you're not professional. But then what is professionalism exactly? I'll say it. Oh, if you don't care, you're not professional. Karma doesn't want to say it. No, I do want to say it. I've been writing articles, I've been preaching about it. I want to give a person a chance to say, I need to step up, I need to be more professional.

44:33I don't want to slap someone down. I'd love to hear a reasonable argument for not doing it, but I've— I'm open to it, but I'm also Probably not. The reasonable argument's that it might not need it, but you can't know it unless you do it. Yeah. We have no other way of determining the accuracy without doing the actual calibration. So by default, you're doing the calibration.

44:57That is the right thing to do. That's— yeah, that's probably the biggest argument I hear is when they put one together, they go, well, I went and drove it and again, it worked and it worked out as supposed to. I'm like, well, you don't know that. Like you really don't know. You didn't test the automatic emergency braking system. I know you didn't.

45:12Nobody can walk away with a clean pair of undershorts and do that. I've noticed that the big glass company that has the commercials on all the time, they were talking about calibration about a year ago and it kind of went away. And now their wording is coming back that we can and will calibrate your vehicle. And again, I always like to say the words back to OE specs, original equipment specs.

45:36Manufacturer specs. And, and if people who are getting a new windshield put in are told that there is a calibration step along the way, why would, you know, the millions who watch and bump into those commercials aren't impacted by then the language that we're using at our professional counters that, oh, it's just a commercial. No, you're talking about calibration. I've heard that before.

46:02Hmm. Interesting. It's like a lot of stuff, right? All you do is keep educating, you keep bringing it up, you keep doing the work and charging for it. It's like programming, right? Years ago, if you replaced a module, depending on what it was and depending on how far back we want to go, maybe there was a PROM exchange or an EPROM exchange, but you plugged it in and it worked.

46:26And then maybe there was some maybe theft learn that added some time to the replacement. Maybe that was factored into the R&R of the module, maybe not, whatever, but you talked most likely talked about it. And then we had to start programming. Like, we had to upload some sort of firmware to this module so that it would work, and you'd have to charge for that.

46:47And for a while, customers are like, you got to be kidding me, you know, it's never been the case. But over time, now it's just an accepted part of the invoice, or I should say estimate, that we hand them. Like, need to replace this module, we're going to program it. Got a series of these relearns or calibrations or adaptions, whatever terminology you want to toss out.

47:07Same thing is going to be with the ADAS calibrations or whatever services would trigger a calibration of a certain camera radar system has to be done. And I guess we'd just like to see it more unified. What's disheartening about that video is separating who's not in the industry making these comments like, oh, that's stupid, these cars are too complex, or That's why I drive a 1950-something, or whatever their argument is.

47:33But then, who are the professionals, or supposedly working in the industry, presenting themselves as professionals, who are contradicting what we're saying? That's a big problem. That's a frustration point of mine where it's bad enough you don't want to do this. It's bad enough you legitimately don't think we should do this, but why are we running down the tech, the shop, the mechanical specialist, ADAS specialist that wants to do it the right way.

48:02Like, where's the logic in that? It's because they're not capable. They don't understand why. So they decide, well, since I don't know how to do it, I'm going to make fun of the guy who can. Yeah. Right. Think about all the way through. Everyone's got that story of all the way through high school or whatever. They were picked on for being the nerdy kid, smart kid.

48:18Like, that's because the other guy was dumb. So he was jealous of you. Same thing. Nerdy nerds rule. I'm sorry. That's just how it is. International Nerd Day, otherwise known as International Boss Day. Thank you for this. I know we could go on forever and ever, but, uh, you know, and who knows, maybe Tracy could find some segments of this that we can put up and get another 433,000 views of a reel like this.

48:41But I look at the perspective that you brought to this and your point of view to continue this story around the professionalism and the knowledge gap. That exists out there. And, and I wanted to do this soon after all of that stuff transpired so we can get it out there again and maybe we can change some lives, change some people's careers, change how our perspective to the motoring public, our clients.

49:05I think Keith, your company, Matt, your company, and so many other top performers, they get what's necessary to involve our client in this experience of keeping their car reliable and safe. And long-term, and we're here to help. But that negative press and the social media junk that exists out there pulls down so much of the good stuff that we do. If I remember right, and maybe this was a different thread, but I'm pretty sure it was under, in a response to Keith's or your video of Keith, Keith's rant.

49:41There's something about fixing and repairing, and there might be like fixing might be making a symptom go away. Like, I did this and now it's better, whatever that may be. One really left-field example I have is years ago, the car would set lean codes, rich codes, whatever, needed a new mass airflow sensor, was contaminated, so you clean it and then put it back together and the car ran better, had better power, check engine light didn't come back on, but then down the road it would fail an emissions test like an IM240, due to a MAF, mass airflow sensor wasn't reporting properly.

50:21Okay, so that would be a fix. Cleaning the mass airflow sensor is a fix. The repair was replacing the mass airflow sensor. In this case, maybe you fix the car pulls to the right, but the repair is you fix, you know, take care of why it's pulling to the right with the alignment, and then you do the calibrations that are required by the manufacturer of the vehicle.

50:44I'm with you, my friend. And in my language shift, the ADAS specialist, it really should be called a calibration specialist because I think the word calibration has much more weight to the motoring public than the word, than ADAS, because a lot of people, maybe they're learning what ADAS means, but it doesn't mean a whole hell of a lot to our client. But calibrating the vehicle back to OE specs, we're gonna give it to our calibration specialist.

51:08Well, that's pretty darn powerful. It's like going to the urologist, says we're gonna fix that problem for you. Wow. Keith Perkins from L1 Automotive, L1 Training. Wow, Keith, thank you so much for being here. Matt, you too, because I know you guys are so, so busy in a million different things. Please say hello to Liz and the kids for us and wish 'em our best.

51:29Matt Foslow from Riverside Automotive, Red Wing, and the Aftermarket A to Z Podcast, Diagnosing the Aftermarket A to Z Podcast on the Automotive Repair Podcast Network. Guys, thank you so much for this follow up discussion. Oh, it was pretty good. Appreciate it. Thanks for having me. Thank you. Thanks for being on board to listen and learn from the premier automotive repair business podcast, Remarkable Results Radio.

51:54Get your episodic education on the ARPN listing app at automotiverepairpodcastnetwork.com. Also enjoy the podcast on our Carm Capriato YouTube channel. Carm is all for advancing the professional automotive service history. Until next time.