AASA Conference Discusses Technology and the Aftermarket

Oct. 1, 2020

A session of the 2020 AASA Technology Conference discusses where vehicle technology and aftermarket business processes easily intersect.

Oct. 1, 2020—The automotive aftermarket may be closer to the Amazon model than we think.

According to a recent AASA Tech Conference session titled “Where Vehicle Technologies and Aftermarket Business Processes Intersect,” the aftermarket is at the point to meet customer expectations through new vehicle technology. How? Vehicle data.

The session featured AASA’s senior vice president Chris Gardner moderating, along with Shiva Bhardwaj, the CEO of Pitstop, a platform that aggregates data and uses machine learning to perform predictive maintenance for vehicles; Alison Burham, vice president of data science at RepairSmith, a mobile auto repair service provider; and Joe Fried, head of Americas sales and business development at Otonomo, an automotive data services platform.

Companies like Otonomo are collecting data from vehicles, including mobility data, accelerometer data, diagnostic data, and ADAS data as well, making aggregated data on a group level available, as well as vehicle-specific data, available to the aftermarket. In fact, Otonomo in particular is working with upward of 15 OEMs, like Daimler and BMW, on the initiative.

According to Bhardwaj, this data will improve the aftermarket supply chain process. With fleets, he says, it will help companies to understand when something will break down, and could even help in the process of managing and reducing excess inventory in the market.

For example, Burham says while they are operating their own fleets to get the job done, their other fleets include their customers’ vehicles. She says if they have the data on when all vehicles are in need of these repairs, they can prepare for that. 

“It brings in a new era of owning your car,” Burham said. “The new era of a sticker on the windshield will be a phone call or a text.”

So far, Bhardwaj says we are only at a fragmentation of the entire process, and it’s at a small scale right now; we have the pipeline in place, but more pieces are needed, and these businesses are taking a step-by-step approach to put it all together. Bhardwaj says this is how technology works in general: technology is built on top of technology to get to that perfect world.

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