Most car owners are not mechanically minded people. And modern cars are extraordinarily complicated machines. So when something goes wrong with our cars, most car owners will react with panic. What is that noise or smell, and how much is this going to cost me?
On top of that, there’s the fear of being fleeced by a dealership or garage to fix the problem. You have no idea what’s wrong, but you can be sure that it will be a very expensive repair bill.
Now one company is trying to demystify car maintenance for consumers, helping to provide a better picture of what their car problems may be by harnessing a worldwide community of car owners and the power of artificial intelligence.
Carly is a company that has been around for a decade, having started when its German founder Avid Avini was quoted €12,000 for a gearbox replacement on his BMW. Not believing the garage, he bought a cheap garage scanner and discovered that it turned out to be an €80 part that required minimal labour costs to fit.
Today, the company is best known by car enthusiasts as a maker of special scanners that allow you to access you car’s diagnostic systems. Now the company has launched a free AI-powered tool called Carly Repair Costs to help car owners diagnose problems with their vehicles.
On the Carly website, you enter details about your car – the make and model, fuel type, year of manufacturer and current mileage – and select from a list of symptoms you are experiencing with your car. The AI then analyses a database of more than 60 million vehicle fault records to identify your problem.
You’re presented with a list of the three most likely issues, as well as providing a risk level for each potential fault. To get more information – as well as the estimated repair cost – you need to register with Carly, but the service remains free.
The system will give you best- and worst-case scenarios, as well as an assessment of how confident it is in its prediction based on the available information.
How does this help me?
Carly claims its AI repair tool offers several benefits for car owners:
- Estimated repair costs, based on real-world data, including labour and parts.
- Repair priorities, with issues are categorized as moderate, high, or critical. This helps users determine which repairs need immediate attention and which are less urgent.
- Community support, with a global forum for car owners around the world to share and receive advice. AI translation provides global communication.
- Transparency for car owners, with clear, data-backed estimates to reduce the likelihood that you’ll be ripped off by a garage.
- Education, as the tool explains the predicted faults and procedures so owners understand what is involved with each potential repair.
By rolling all of the above into one tool, Carly aims to place plenty of information into car owners’ hands, helping them to plan and budget for the most important repairs.
AI increases fault-finding power
Carly’s AI tool draws on a database that claims to have more than 60 million vehicle fault records, which its uses to predict the cost of necessary parts and labour to fix the potential problem on your car. That’s obviously an enormous resource that AI can analyse in a way that not even a huge team of human researchers could ever manage.
The Carly system is a good example of the growing influence of AI in the car industry. The learning capability of AI means that the system will only get more accurate over time as more data points are added to Carly’s global database.
By pulling in so many vehicle records, Carly’s system could also help garages to reduce diagnosis time. Most symptoms (unusual smells, increased exhaust smoke, rattles, intermittent electrical gremlins, etc.) could be caused by a number of different faults, meaning diagnosis of the exact problem with your car can be time-consuming and costly. Conscientious garage owners don’t like wasting their customers’ time and money chasing mystery faults, especially as they can often be intermittent or only appear under very specific circumstances that are not evident in a workshop environment.
If a garage has solid information about the main issues for your car based on the reported symptoms, based on the car’s current age and mileage, it can start its diagnosis with the most likely problem based on worldwide data from similar cars.
It’s still early days for this technology, so we’ll have to wait and see whether Carly can make a definitive difference in reducing repair bills for car owners. The theory sounds good, and other providers are surely working on similar projects, so hopefully we will start to see a useful improvement in maintenance costs for millions of car owners.
