ETI Delivers Second Market Research Study

As a follow up to ETI's first Market Research Study on Vehicle Flash Reprogramming, the Equipment and Tool Institute (ETI) continues to assist its members in bringing new and improved equipment and tools to the marketplace.

ETI's second Market Research Study covers Tire Pressure Monitoring Systems (TPMS) and specific questions on the growing trend of the OEM’s to equip vehicles with Telematics. The survey was designed to collect data in order to provide our industry with information that is valuable for the repair of vehicles on the road today. 

Automotive repair facilities were surveyed in an effort to find out more about their familiarity with TPMS and Telematics.   ETI will use this research to help all segments of the automotive industry provide aftermarket shops with better tool and equipment solutions.

TPMS

TPMS has been mandatory for all new vehicles sold in the United States since late 2007. There are a number of different TPMS solutions provided by domestic and foreign OEM’s. These different systems are sometimes difficult to identify or tell apart.  Automakers may employ more than one TPMS system within the same model year requiring different service equipment. This happens because there is no single standard for TPMS. The government only requires a certain level of accuracy. How the results are achieved is left to the individual OEMs and their suppliers. This means that there are several different systems aftermarket repair facilities must learn. Profits can be lost due to a lack of TPMS system knowledge. Examples include broken sensors and TPMS systems that do not reinitialize after otherwise seemingly routine repairs or maintenance.   Jobs that were once considered the simplest in the shop such as tire repair or tire rotation, now have taken on a whole new level of complexity.

ETI’s Research Objectives:

·         Measure the market’s current level of familiarity of TPMS.

·         Evaluate the market’s use and experiences with using TPMS as well as their future business expectations in implementing TPMS services to their business.

·         Identify the key issues and/or obstacles in successfully servicing vehicles with TPMS.

·         Learn more about what brand of vehicles they have done TPMS services to and the brand/model of tools they have used.

·         Find out what support the market needs to implement or grow their TPMS business

Results:

The final report from the survey contains over 45 pages of charts and graphs covering many aspects of TPMS marketing information.  Here are some examples:

·         93 % of the shops responding to the survey said that they have trouble servicing TPMS systems

·         Most technicians are self taught and do not have the correct tool required for some TPMS services

·         Most shops agree that there will be more TPMS repairs to deal with in the future and want to be able to perform these services.

·         Respondents were split as to whether or not TPMS services will be a significant profit opportunity in the future.

·         The cost of TPMS equipment was seen as the largest impediment to service growth in this area.

·         Slightly over half of the respondents currently own some TPMS equipment

·         GM-Saturn vehicles were considered the easiest to work on.  Nissan-Infiniti was considered to be the most difficult.

Telematics

Telematics vehicle monitoring technology has been growing in popularity recently. Pioneered by General Motors with the introduction of OnStar, the technology allows the carmakers to continually market their services to motorists with regular maintenance reminders and alerts through e-mail and other means.  Carmakers have the opportunity to leverage their entire dealership network to assist the customer wherever they may be travelling.

Telematics has been called “the biggest threat” as well as “the greatest opportunity” for the future of the automotive aftermarket repair industry.  The threat has to do with carmakers retaining customer loyalty to their service departments. The opportunity is for the aftermarket to leverage telematics in a similar fashion as the vehicle manufacturer only over a much larger aftermarket service network and provide customers an even broader portfolio of services than carmakers can offer.

ETI has formed a Telematics subcommittee to study and monitor the telematics evolution and any opportunities that may exist.  To that end the telematics subcommittee asked the marketing committee to add some questions to this year’s TPMS survey to get a glimpse of what the automotive repair community knows about telematics, what fears they may have and what kind of telematics environment they envision in the future. The results of this study will be used to: assist ETI in prioritizing telematics based on our member’s needs and educate our members on subjects about which we feel they should be informed.

ETI’s Research Objectives:

·         Measure the market’s current level of familiarity with telematics technology

·         Evaluate what factors are important to industry in implementing a remote diagnostic system

·         Explore price points for the hardware and monthly service fees associated with telematics services

·         Explore the industry’s opinion relative to “who should bear the expense” of telematics hardware and services

·         Learn more about concerns and questions the industry has relative to telematics

Results:

The full report on Telematics is included with the TPMS report on the same CD.  As with the TPMS survey there are many pages of information including charts and graphs explaining the results of the survey.

Carmakers have not been as successful in marketing telematics as they hoped they would be.  For example, after many years GM is now selling renewals to about 60% of the people who purchase new GM products. This makes the OnStar system only marginally profitable and it is estimated that it has not made a profit if the whole life of the program is taken into consideration. If a large car company can’t make it, what chance does the aftermarket have?

Aftermarket attempts to market telematics have also been difficult.  So far many of the attempts have concentrated on very specific niche based services. For example, a device to track your teen’s driving habits, or a rental car companies desire to make sure that you don’t drive their car outside a predefined territory. Other niche success has been found in fleet tracking services, especially with medium and heavy duty trucks. But what about the possibility of competing with OEM systems like OnStar. Can this be done? Who should pay for it? These are the questions we asked. Here are some examples of what we found out.

·         A system where the vehicle notifies the shop when emergency services are needed is slightly more important to shops than the generation of an OnStar type  maintenance required report

·         The majority of shops feel hardware cost should be $50 or less while 30% of new car/tire dealers indicated that reasonable cost is more than $250

·         While the majority of respondents felt the owner/driver should cover the cost of both the hardware and monthly service fee, shops were more likely to cover the cost of the hardware

·         While new car dealers are “more” likely to cover the costs of the hardware than other shops, it is still not a high likelihood even for their top 100 customers

·        Shops do not feel they have enough information to make good decisions on telematics

Want to own a copy of both Studies?

There is a lot more to learn from the entire data set.  ETI has made this study available on a compact disk. It is available for $9.95 to ETI member companies and $695.00 to non-members. Click here for more information. Want to become a member? Click here for more information.

Click here for more info