A Brief History of Diagnostics and Repair: The Ralph Pompea Interview, Part 3

For anyone unfamiliar, what does ‘drivability’ encompass?

Every time a check engine or service engine soon (SES) light comes on, any time a vehicle sputters, spits, or stalls out, you’ll find a corresponding area of technical specialty with its own ASC certification called drivability.

So, right: fuel injection systems, ignition systems, computer-controlled systems, those types of things. And this is back in 1982, when OBD-I was just coming into play, so I was working on computer-controlled carburetors with OBD-I and II, right at the beginning of the fuel injection era.

What was it like to observe the growing pains of OBD technology firsthand?

You know, [laughs] the automobile is not the ideal environment for a computer.

It seems funny now, I guess, but back then we were asking, ‘How do you create a computer that resists the vibrations of a vehicle?’ Because this technology doesn’t necessarily like being banged around inside a metal shell while they’re operating.

It took a few years before they worked that out. [Laughs] 

Back then, you could make a car stall just by tapping on a compromised engine control module. Those chips were pretty loose on the board.

As you’d expect, then, this created some problems on the diagnostics and repair front. Experience plays a big role in identifying failures. Whatever diagnostic approach you’re using, you’re at a loss unless you’ve seen something before, right?

Right.

We’re at a loss for any problem that’s not designed in. Who knew the chips would get loose on the board?

CAUTION: COMPUTER ON BOARD

I do remember, back in the 80s, long-time car guys were upset when computer components first started appearing in cars.

Not everyone was happy about it. Any time there was a new software update, you actually had to put a new chip in the computer. You couldn’t just flash it; there was no software download. You had to order a part number.

Yikes. 

Yeah. So, say you’re a customer. You come in with a complaint. I diagnose it and find out, ‘Oh, GM has a new fix for that. It’s a software fix, but it requires a new chip. It’s a memory calibrator, called a memcal.’

The technician would have to order that chip. It would take 10 days or more for it to arrive in the parts department. Now you, the customer, would have to bring the car back in.

You put that part in, but it’s an engineering fix, so sometimes it would fix the problem and sometimes it wouldn’t. Most of the time, the work was covered under the five-year, 50,000-mile emissions warranty, but still, the customer is upset. They’re mad. ‘I’ve brought this thing in twice now, you worked on it, and it’s still doing what it did!’ 

Right, no one enjoys that. 

That whole paradigm was not the best for technicians, and it was not good for the customers. 

Nowadays, you can update the computer right in your bay. You do your over-the-air software flashing, you go for a test drive, and you see if you’ve fixed it.

In the old paradigm, you had one chance to get it right. Sometimes, while you were waiting for this new memory calibrator—or whatever part it was—to be delivered, the OEM might release a second update. Now, there’s another chip that supersedes the first one, and you haven’t even installed it yet. It hasn’t even arrived yet, and it’s already outdated.

It would move that fast sometimes. 

In the current paradigm, you just continue diagnosing. 

So, you’ve seen major shifts in how vehicles are repaired and diagnosed. How did this experience lead you into what you’re working on now with Troubleshooter?

Well, alongside the connected transformation that’s happening, we’re also seeing this huge decline in the number of technicians working. The overall number of technicians is going down, and we’re also losing the experienced technicians.

This is a familiar story, right?

It’s a familiar story, but I’d like your take on it.

People like me, who have that technical background, have moved on to different jobs. No one I came up with is still in the bays. They’re doing something else, or they’ve retired. It’s just like with nurses, you know? There’s such a need for them, and there aren’t enough in the workplace to begin with, and the backfill rate is really low.

So, now you’re seeing dealers sponsoring young adults just out of school and basically training their own technicians in the automotive world and in heavy equipment because they can’t get them any other way.

They’re having to build their own technicians by supporting them in multiple different ways, trying to get these new techs the experience they need to be successful.

And that’s where Troubleshooter will really shine, because it takes your entry level technician, someone with rudimentary skills, and lets them perform at a more senior level. Their speed goes up, the quality of their judgment goes up, and they’re placed in a position where they can start to identify regular patterns between certain issues and root causes. So, it’s an educational tool, as well. Think of it as training on-demand.

LEARN AS YOU GO: GUIDED DIAGNOSTICS AS PROBLEM-SOLVER AND MENTOR

An educational tool with guard rails.

Pretty much. It’s the coach, you know? It’s the friend in your corner. It’s the shop foreman guiding you every step of the way, so that you learn. And, if you follow the process, your results will be that much better. Otherwise, you’re just flipping through a virtual book trying to figure out, What do I do next?

Which is the biggest problem? The younger or more inexperienced technician often doesn’t know what the next step is. Troubleshooter really resolves that problem.

It’s not just less experienced technicians, either. You might have a very knowledgeable technician from one OEM who comes to work for another after 10, 15, 25 years. This is not a rookie technician, you know? But there’s so much variation between manufacturers, this tech might be completely taken aback.

Having a guided diagnosis platform like Troubleshooter is going to avert a whole lot of heartache and frustration. 

Is there really that much variation between OEMs?

There is, unfortunately. It’s a thing.

It’s similar to medicine, with specialties for hearts, lungs, different areas and systems. A GM tech probably won’t be super successful right out of the gate fixing a Stellantis vehicle, or a Nissan, or a Toyota, because they’re different animals completely.

So, a tech needs to know how to respond to that variety. How did Toyota do this? How did Stellantis do this?

Where does all this variety come from? It seems wild to me that a dome light wouldn’t just be a dome light.

Well, a lot of it comes down to patents. You can’t blame an OEM for not wanting to pay for a patent or not wanting to pay to license software or technology from other companies, so they all do it differently to avoid the infringement.

I remember back in the day, one OEM would have a dome light that turned off and on just by touching the ground. You know, it was power and ground. But there’s a patent on it, right?

So, now this other OEM, they don’t want to pay a royalty on that patent. So, they have to do things differently.

This is a very simple example, but if you don’t know that going in, you’re completely thrown. Multiply that difference by all the components in a vehicle, and you’ve got a completely foreign system.

Delayed wipers were a big deal back in the late ‘70s. Everyone wanted a wiper delay. That was patented technology, so manufacturers had to figure out how to do it without paying the patent. Sometimes they’d just pay it, but plenty of times, they’d, you know…

Change the circuit.

They changed the circuit, exactly. And this drove divergent technology until all these vehicles were very different from one another.

And, in that environment, you don’t just need a technician anymore. You need a Ford tech or a Toyota tech. Other OEMs had multiple brands. Pontiac and Buick were as different as night and day. You could be a great Pontiac tech, but Buick used sequential fuel injection while Pontiac used port fuel injection. Different systems.

Even within the same brand, often, different option levels will be designed differently and require different diagnostics and repair.

ENTER THE EVs

Where do electric vehicles fit into all this? Do EVs complicate things?

Obviously, the systems themselves are simpler than with internal combustion engines, but I imagine that alone introduces a whole lot of new variation.

It does. It does. And the fact that EVs could be more dangerous to work on, given the high voltage components, becomes its own concern.

Most of the problems on EVs are communication errors. They’re not specific subsystem failures. In any vehicle internal combustion engine, you’ll find a lot of networking between systems, for sure. But inter-system failure is mitigated.

Just for instance, in an ICE vehicle, a failure within the ignition system doesn’t impact or create failures in other systems, you know?

On an EV, the battery cooling system affects everything. If you have trouble there, you could see system failures elsewhere, in totally unrelated systems. And now a technician has to parse all that out, and they might not be very familiar with these concepts because EVs are so much newer. And now you’re losing time on the floor once again.

So, EVs have simplified a lot of things, but they’ve certainly introduced their own complexities. 

(GUIDED) DIAGNOSTICS AND REPAIR

So, guided diagnostics.

Right. And the old guided diagnostic systems were not very helpful. They shepherded you through 25 preparatory steps, and it felt like going back to kindergarten. And they’d ask, you know, ‘What’s the temperature outside?’ and you’d have to give them so much information before it actually diagnosed anything that it felt almost putative.

So, technicians didn’t want to use guided diagnostics because you’d had to give it so much data, and at the very end, it didn’t give you a result that was valuable.

These systems are much better now. Today’s guided diagnostics are able to interface directly with the vehicle. They’re all web-based, whereas before they were actual resident applications.

I’d say, from a diagnostic perspective, anything in the ‘80s and ‘90s was there to get data for the OEM more than it was designed to help a technician fix a vehicle.

The new systems are finally skewing toward actually helping a technician identify the root cause.

So, VIN-specific guided diagnostics, more specifically.

[Laughs] Right. And they, hopefully, provide the most recent verified fixes to help you fix the thing quickly without all these unnecessary test steps.

Is the resistance to digital diagnostics and repair platforms finally fading among technicians? Because it sounds like they were just avoiding it altogether in the ‘80s or ‘90s.

It is. The newer technicians are much more digitally connected, and they’re used to the format, the step-by-step approach. There’s less resistance and more acceptance for anything that’s going to provide real, meaningful assistance.

And, obviously, it’s not like technicians completely avoid any kind of reference material.

Of course not. But it has to help, it has to be clear, and it has to be immediate.

We used to do surveys at the OEMs, trying to find out which resources the technicians found most helpful, and so on.

The single most useful product put out by any OEM was the wiring diagram. Over and over.

Because the technicians want to lay the circuit out and see it for themselves. What’s the architecture? How does it work? Because once you can see it, you can fix it.

That was true then, and it’s true today.

So, how does this feed into what you’re working on now with Troubleshooter for the Connected Vehicle?

It highlights the value of having a system that tells you, quickly, “Check this, this and this.” Something that shows you, in 3D space, where you need to go on the physical product, and then tells you what to test and in which order. It’s expert-level guidance, so you know exactly what information you need to figure it out yourself.

The product variations you outlined earlier are still going to present some issues, though, right? Even in this context?

Fortunately, no. Variation ceases to be a concern.