Toronto, Ontario — Collision industry icon Dave Luehr was back on Tuesday morning with another edition of his Elite Body Shop Academy webinar series, featuring Mike Anderson from Collision Advice and Jake Rodenroth from asTech.
Among the top priorities for this latest presentation from Luehr was to dispel some of the most common myths surrounding ADAS (Advanced Driver-Assistance Systems) calibrations, specifically concerning DTCs (designated trouble codes).
A point that the two stressed throughout the presentation was that “your car doesn’t know it’s in the shop.”
In other words, when diagnosing a vehicle based on DTC readings, you must ensure that every sensor or camera on a vehicle that is affected by a repair must be evaluated under real-world conditions, in the form of pre and post-scan road tests.
A common cause for a DTC to not show up when it should can result from something as simple as a drained battery in the vehicle that is not properly powering the ADAS.
Another example; sometimes a vehicle that comes in right off the tow truck may not give an error code because it hasn’t exceeded a certain speed recently, so the error does not arise when it should.
These are the things that lead Anderson and Rodenroth to say that the right scanning tools are not enough. The key is the right technician who knows the right tool to use, as well as its limitations.
The pair also note the importance for shop owners to explain to customers the sorts of road tests that must be completed to ensure that the systems are properly interconnected.
They acknowledge that many customers are confused as to why their windshield replacement requires a technician to drive figure-eights around the parking lot, for example. What they may not realize is that that is how one recalibrates a vehicle’s compass in certain cases.
A replay of the presentation will be made available to members of Dave Luehr’s Elite Body Shop Academy.
