Change now moves so quickly it can catch us all off guard
In everything change is inevitable — usually being more iterative than instantaneous.
While this remains the case in the automotive world, the space between what was and what is becoming seems to be getting much smaller, such that the iterative starts to look a lot more instantaneous.
Growing up as a kid there didn’t seem to be that much change in the 1978 vehicle in which I secured my driver’s license and the vehicles of the early ‘80s when I was finishing school and starting my first job.
However, if I compare that to the change in vehicle propulsion, vehicle materials, and vehicle safety technology between 2013 and 2018, the changes have been significant.
In the last five years there have been fundamental changes in propulsion technologies, safety technologies and materials that have been largely driven by the two tranches of GHG emissions regulations — the first phase of which started in 2011 and ended in 2016 — and the second of which started in 2017 and will end in 2025.
The current debate in both Canada and the United States — necessitated by the U.S. mid-term review process — is whether the assumptions made years ago about the technology uptake, composition of the vehicle fleet, and consumer preferences etc. have materialized in reality.
The fast pace of change and the magnitude of change in each of these areas have added significant complexity to the vehicle manufacturing process, the vehicle sales process and the collision repair industry.
In each of the areas — materials, safety and propulsion — it would seem that we are working through the process of determining whose responsibility is it to educate consumers, salespeople, service technicians, collision repair technicians about all of these technologies.
Consumers may not need to know about the different materials used to build vehicles today from highly specialized strengths of light-weight steel, to aluminum, to magnesium to carbon fiber reinforced plastic, but collision repair technicians better know the difference and the different tools, practices and procedures to repair modern vehicles comprised of a myriad of different materials.
Not only that, but all of the new Advanced Driver Assistance Systems (ADAS) on vehicles require both more, and different competencies from collision repair technicians.
They are now required to do scans of vehicles after the repairs to ensure that the vehicle not only looks good but can also assure that all of the sensors, cameras etc, in the repaired areas have been properly aligned and calibrated so that the safety systems that consumers are increasingly relying upon, operate as they were intended to do after the accident vehicle has been repaired.
In the last five years there have been fundamental changes in propulsion technologies, safety technologies and materials that have been largely driven by the two tranches of GHG emissions regulations
Even now many collision repair facilities don’t fully appreciate that the slightest tap on the bumper of the car may be able to be superficially fixed easily so that it looks nice but if the sensors are all not checked and calibrated properly as part of the repair the ADAS technology on the vehicle will not work as it was designed to — which incorporates significant risk for drivers relying on these safety technologies. It also adds significant liability for the collision repair facility that did not fix it properly. It is for this reason that many of the vehicle manufacturers are developing “certified” collision repair programs
Consumers will — theoretically — care more about ADAS on their new vehicles because most know that these systems improve driver and occupant safety.
However, many consumers are reluctant to spend another 30-60 minutes at the dealership while staff take them through all of the active safety technology built into a modern vehicle.
Nor is there an incentive for the dealership to have staff spending an additional hour with the customer to walk them through all of the different safety warning and active intervention systems on their vehicles.
All well and good that all of the information is in the owner’s manual(s) of the vehicle but the consumer would actually have to read it.
YouTube videos could be the answer, but consumers need to make the time to sit down and watch them. One can quickly appreciate that there will be a number of consumers on the road that have absolutely no idea what ADAS technology is on their vehicle — let alone how it operates.
Thus, the very technologies that are intended to improve safety can actually become a detriment to that objective because the lights on the dash, the shaking of the steering wheel, the constant beeping of the bumper sensors etc., all become more of a distraction to the task of driving the vehicle if the driver is not aware of what these indicators mean.
And what about propulsion?
For thirty years after I acquired my license to drive the idea that vehicles might run on something other than gasoline or diesel was more like science fiction than a possible reality.
However, over the last ten years, and especially over the last five years, we have witnessed the introduction of a number of mainstream fully electric, plug-in hybrids, and even hydrogen fuel cell electric vehicles into the market.
This has presented challenges for manufacturers in terms of how to market such vehicles, for salespeople to understand the technicalities of different propulsion systems and how to sell these new technologies, and for dealers in trying to figure out the true consumer demand for alternative propulsion vehicles so they aren’t sitting on expensive inventory.
The fast pace of change and the magnitude of change in each of these areas have added significant complexity to the vehicle manufacturing process
The space between what is and what is becoming is definitely shrinking and it was perhaps Mary Barra, CEO of General Motors who summed this notion up best when she noted back in 2016 that the automotive industry was going to change more in the next five to ten years than it has in the last 50 years.
We are most certainly in a rapidly evolving industry and I have not touched on the automated and connected vehicle technologies that will most certainly become more pervasive over the next five to ten years.
While I do not believe we will be travelling in fully automated, fully connected, fully electric pods that will come and pick us up when we want, where we want, any time in the near future, I do think we will start to see specific applications of such pods/vehicles very soon.
The space between iterative and instantaneous change is rapidly being eliminated.
