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ORLANDO, Florida (WESH) — Can artificial intelligence inspect cars? One car dealership says it is an accurate and fast way to find exterior vehicle issues.
Carl Black Chevrolet has been using the technology created by UVEye for two years and says it has changed the way it does service for the better.
The scanners are designed to spot any problems on the outside of a vehicle in less than a minute.
It is specifically designed to find dents, dings, scratches, oil leaks, tire issues and anything else that can be seen driving through the sensor beams.
“You’ll have cameras in the front, cameras in the back to capture it as the car pulls through. You’re going to have cameras on the bottom, cameras in the middle,” said Aaron Shepard, who showed WESH 2’s traffic expert, Meaghan Mackey, how it all works.
Shepard is the service director at Carl Black Chevrolet in Alafaya.
“Back in the early 2000s, every service department wanted the multipoint inspection done in 30 minutes or less so we could relay it to the customer. This machine does it in less than 30 seconds,” said Shepard.
The Israeli-based start-up company UVEye originally designed the machines to detect bombs in the undercarriage of a car. It’s now being used by dealerships around the country, including Carl Black Chevrolet in Orlando.
“It was actually kind of cool because you can see and scroll and see things that you don’t see unless you walk under the car,” said Kacey Witt.
After Witt took his car through the AI machine, he was immediately sent a text with the issues it detected.
Witt has been a customer at Carl Black Chevrolet for years and says the employees are very trustworthy but says that the machine adds an extra layer of transparency.
“We can’t adversely influence anything for our personal gain. It is backed where, if we had to take something off of a car, we had to inspect a tire for tread depth, it’s going to match,” said Shepard.
Mackey wanted to put the technology to the test. She took her own car through the machine. Mackey’s vehicle has 92,000 miles on it and she is getting ready to sell it, so she recently took it to her own dealership to see if anything needed to be fixed.
The machine detected what she already knew, proving its accuracy.
“So, going into this, I knew that my [tire] treads were low,” Mackey said.
“Yep, and in this, depending on how you want to see it, we can go into the individual tires: front right, front left, rear left, rear right,” Shepard said.
In total, there were 76 issues with Mackey’s car. Most were minor, like dents and dings. But the big issue was the tire treads.
Carl Black Chevrolet recommended she get two tires replaced. The entire process of driving through the scanner, getting the results and going through them with a service employee took only a couple of minutes.
Unlike Carl Black Chevrolet, the auto shop Sloan’s Automotive does not use any sort of AI technology.
This family auto shop has been servicing Orlando cars for three decades.
“Both the cars and the technology that we use to diagnose the cars have gotten a lot more sophisticated, a lot more computer-related,” said Kenny Sloan, owner of Sloan’s Automotive.
Car inspections at Sloan’s for both the inside and outside of a vehicle are all done by a mechanic.
Sloan says he has heard of the AI inspection machine and sees the industry moving that way.
“If this full car scanner stuff became more easily accessible, more tested out, a little bit more financially friendly to purchase, if it checked a lot of those boxes, we would definitely be open to it,” said Sloan.
An artificial intelligence car scanner, like the one designed by UVEye, costs roughly $5,000 per month. The price falls on the dealership.
It can only find things on the outside of a vehicle, so anything wrong internally, like your brakes, would still need a human inspection.
“What would you say to people who are hesitant about AI?” Mackey asked Shepard.
“I would naturally say technology as a whole can be kind of scary depending on how it’s used, but all in all, for what it’s designed for, it’s really there to help the consumer,” Shepard replied.
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