The Art of Automotive Tele-Diagnostics

Automotive Telediagnostics is a multidisciplinary field, composed of Telematics and Diagnostics. It refers to the ability to read, correlate, analyze and transmit real-time information regarding vehicles, its mechanical status, location, safety and other relevant data. 

The major beneficiaries of telediagnostics systems are fleet owners that can improve safety, performance, saving and efficiency of their vehicles.

Telematics:

In-car connectivity devices are taking care of  Location Based Services and infotainment systems. Such devices are featured with GPS antennas and SIM operated cellular modems. 

Diagnostics:

At the old times we could detect faulty engine valve by it sound and a compression problem with simple manometer.

Nowadays, with highly sophisticated vehicles, all the monitoring is being done by numerous on-board computers.

So once the technician is connecting the diagnostics computer, he can easily understand the mechanical status of the vehicle and its components. The data includes Diagnostics Trouble Codes (DTC), last installed software versions and much more. The same computer also resets the on-boards chips and upgrades the firmware.

Few of the leading telematics providers, such as Traffilog are combining an in-depth automotive engineering knowledge with complex algorithms capable of sorting all the on-board data, analyze it and then create meaningful events and alerts, delivered in real-time to the fleet owner, the security officer or maintenance manager.

The recipients can take an immediate action regarding the vehicle and the driver, such as to guide him to the closest repair shop, to alert the driver on evolving problem or any other measurement.

This fascinating field is going to grab all commuters' attention. We foresee that the tendency of more and more on-board devices, Machine to Machine (M2M) and Vehicle to Infrastructure (V2I, V2X) will increase in the upcoming years, so the next generation vehicles will communicate with each other and with the road signs, re-route the trip to avoid traffic jams and collisions.