Cisco Systems Works with Automobile Manufacturers and Dealers to Improve the Auto Recall Process
March 2, 2005
By Jason Deign, News@Cisco
Work that Cisco Systems® is carrying out with automotive industry leaders could save car makers millions of dollars a year and helps to make vehicles much safer.
Teams from Cisco are collaborating with manufacturers and dealerships on ways in which intelligent network technologies can improve their operations. Top of the list is auto recalls, a process that is very costly for the industry and has a direct impact on driver safety.
The Consumers Union estimates that almost 19 million vehicles were recalled in 2002 in the United States alone, which represents almost every eleventh vehicle on the road, a level nearly double that of the early 1990s. American auto manufacturers issued 529 separate recalls in 2002, up from 233 a decade ago.
Beyond the direct expense of having to try to contact all the owner of vehicles that might be affected, every recall has the potential to chip away at the value of a manufacturer's hard-earned brand equity, particularly when so many rely on the quality of their products to attract customers.
This damage is not helped by the high-profile nature of the recall process, where manufacturers traditionally have to take out prominent adverts in high-circulation papers to effectively tell their customers there is a problem with their vehicles.
Furthermore, the problem is getting worse. In countries such as the US, tightening legislation means manufacturers are increasingly being forced to tighten up their recall processes so that problems with specific components can be isolated and rectified more quickly.
At the same time, the consumer pressure to deliver new models to market more quickly is giving manufacturers less time test their vehicles, increasing the likelihood of fixes being needed later on.
The fact that cars also carry an ever greater number of software components does not help, either, as this increases the complexity of the product overall. However, it is this software that may hold part of the answer to a more efficient and cost-effective recall process.
Cisco first became involved in talks with the automotive industry over the potential of data exchange systems linking manufacturers to dealer networks and, via Cisco Wireless and Mobile Router technology, to individual cars, for remote diagnostics or 'telemedics' applications.
It became evident that there was only a limited business case for this kind of technology as a value-added feature for consumers, due to its costs; anything that adds more than about US$50 to the cost of vehicle would limit its potential for a mainstream roll out.
But a similar architecture, based on the Cisco Branch of the Future platform currently being evaluated by the retail banking industry, could be instrumental in helping tackle the pressing issue of auto recalls.
Specifically, says Jan Roschek, of the Vertical Markets in EMEA (Europe, Middle East and Africa) team at Cisco: "Most dealers now use software diagnostics tools for servicing and it would make sense to feed this maintenance information into a central database held by the manufacturer."
This, he says, would make it possible to track information on failures and feed it back into the production process earlier on.
In new models with non-critical faults, it might even be possible to conduct 'silent recalls', taking care of defects at the first- or second-service stage, for example, without having to promote the fact that vehicles need to be recalled.
And, for software fixes at least, the technology would make it much easier to roll out updates; patches could be applied automatically whenever a service takes place.
Furthermore, better data management would help manufacturers comply in product lifecycle regulations, allowing them to track more easily where a faulty part has come from if it is the cause of an accident.
There are numerous hurdles to be overcome before the recalls issue can be helped by intelligent network technology. Dealerships, particularly those handling second-hand vehicles, might not be linked to any manufacturer and might be using vastly different or inferior network technologies.
The software on the cars tends to be proprietary, rather than based on open standards such as IP, which can make it difficult to create end-to-end network connections between the vehicle and the manufacturer's database.
Last but not least, the automotive industry is at the same time massive and massively fragmented, comprising everything from one-man backyard mechanics to some of the world's largest multinationals and including a wide range of components makers.
This means that change is likely to be slow. But much of the industry is already moving fast towards a network-based environment that could help beat the recalls problem. A solution might not yet be round the corner, but it is certainly not far down the road.
Jason Deign is a freelance writer based in Barcelona, Spain.
