Last week, we wrote about how most of the collision shops we meet don’t calibrate enough cars because they don’t know they need to. But what happens afterwards? Once a shop figures out they need to calibrate a vehicle and they set out to actually do the ADAS repair? 

Again, we’ve found the majority of shops – this time both collision and calibration – do the same thing: they manually figure out how to do ADAS repairs. They’ll spend up to 60 minutes (a lot of the time it’s even more than this) sifting through fragmented sources, like car manufacturers, aftermarket aggregators, and OEM procedures, to piece together enough information about the ADAS operation in front of them to be able to perform it. And they’ll do all of this for each ADAS calibration. It’s an incredibly inefficient process; it cuts into the time mechanics are able to spend doing repairs, and anything that cuts into their time cuts into their revenue. 

When we ask shops why they do this work manually, we usually get two answers. 

“It’s the only good option.” 

To be honest, they’re not wrong. A lot of ADAS tools and aftermarket systems that claim to have calibration requirements readily available are littered with broken links to documentation or completely outdated requirements. Some aftermarket systems don’t even have the updated requirements for months, or even up to a year, after they were updated. And, for shops, it’s frustrating! It takes one broken link to break the trust and for shops to feel as though they’re better off doing safer calibrations if they look up the requirements themselves. 

“We already know how to do ADAS repairs.” 

These are the technicians who’ve done a lot of ADAS calibrations in their lifetime and feel secure in their ability to know what has to be calibrated and when for each vehicle, model, year, manufacturer, and so on.

Our response to this: it’s just not possible. There are over 500,000 unique ADAS procedure combinations based on variables like make, model, trim, package, and model year. Multiply that by thousands of distinct original equipment manufacturer-mandated repair procedures for each make and model. There is no way a technician can commit all of these to memory. (Although we’d love to be proven wrong!) 

On top of that, OEMs are continually making tweaks to new vehicles coming off the line, meaning changes in ADAS calibrations happen incrementally and in real-time. For example: in 2018, Toyota only required a camera calibration if the camera itself was removed and replaced. By 2022, Toyota required a camera calibration if the windshield was removed and replaced, even if the camera wasn't touched. What was true in 2018 changed by 2022.

To add to the blow, there’s no such thing as ‘pattern-matching’ here, either. Two vehicles with exactly the same damage can have wildly different calibration requirements. All it comes down to is what emblem is on the front of the vehicle. 

Basically, ADAS repairs are the Wild West. 

We’re trying to make it easier to navigate this. Revv provides shops with accurate and up-to-date documentation around why a calibration needs to be performed and the procedure on how to perform it. All they need to do is upload an estimate or use our native integrations with CCC ONE and other estimation softwares.

We take a lot of pride in our link accuracy. We invest a lot of time constantly updating our database of links and maintaining a direct connection to new OEM data as and when they become available. 100% accuracy is hard to achieve in general due to the complexity and underlying nature of industry requirements – but we’re already the best in market and are constantly finding new ways to get even better, be more robust, and supercharge our accuracy as part of our core roadmap. All the shops we work with today have experienced bad links and out of date information with previous ADAS information tools in the past, and we’re not willing to break their trust by jeopardizing our ability to link with precision. Even more, we’re not willing to jeopardize the safety of vehicles put back on the road with incorrect calibration instructions.