On a recent episode of The Collision Vision, host Cole Strandberg followed up on his conversation with Gerard AhQuin and Fox Kajiwara of ADAS Calibrations of Hawaii with a roundtable built around one question: what does doing ADAS right actually look like?
Joining him were Sheryl Driggers, Erin Solis, and Dave Agnew of Hunter Engineering, who spent the episode debating process discipline, facility requirements, hiring and where ADAS liability is headed next.
Equipment is an accelerant, not a fix
Agnew opened the process-versus-equipment debate by putting a number on what good equipment actually buys a shop: target placement that would otherwise "essentially [take] 45 minutes" can drop to about four minutes with the right tool. But he was clear that's only part of the picture. "Process is huge and probably bigger than typical technologies on the cars for the ADAS calibrations," he said.
Driggers pushed the point further from the operator side. "Equipment doesn't fix your problem," she said, adding that scheduling, repair planning, researching OEM procedures, documentation and accountability all have to be functioning systems on their own. Otherwise, as she's seen in shops firsthand, expensive equipment just sits there collecting dust.
Key takeaway: The equipment shortens the calibration itself. It doesn't fix a shop that hasn't built the surrounding process.
Not every shop should bring calibration in-house
Asked point blank whether every shop should be doing calibrations under its own roof, Driggers didn't hedge. "I don't think there's one right answer for every shop," she said. "No, not everyone should be." Agnew agreed, but added a condition for shops that choose to sublet instead: they still need real criteria for picking a vendor. "It shouldn't just be based on who's your friend or anything like that," he said.
Key takeaway: The in-house decision should come down to space, staffing, and vehicle mix, not fear of missing out. And subletting doesn't remove a shop's responsibility to vet the vendor doing the work.
Facility size is the most common planning mistake
Agnew said the biggest facility error he sees is shops sizing up to cover every possible OEM procedure before they've even opened. His recommendation: start with the space available and work out what it can actually cover. As an example, he said front-camera and front-radar coverage alone, which are the two most common calibration types, can be handled with "a fraction" of the space needed to cover everything, putting a shop around 65% coverage on its own.
Key takeaway: A shop doesn't need to build for 100% coverage to get started. Size to the vehicles actually coming through the door, and sublet the rest.
Shortcuts hurt shops and customers alike
Solis was direct about where she sees operators cutting corners: not knowing what they don't know. "The lack of knowledge for somebody who thinks that they know how to do this ... they're really missing large chunks of knowledge on how to do it," she said, pointing to floor levelness and lighting conditions as examples techs sometimes dismiss as arbitrary. "Any kind of shortcut that anyone takes is going to hurt the shops and it's going to hurt the consumers."
Key takeaway: Facility requirements like floor flatness and lighting aren't procedural box-checking. Each one exists to eliminate a specific source of calibration error.
A "clean page" hire can be an advantage
Solis described a technician in her ADAS performance group who previously worked with teachers who support kids with disabilities, and was introduced to an ADAS shop owner through a mutual connection. "She doesn't have any predisposed opinions about anything," Solis said. "It's a clean page, and so you get to just learn right from the get-go, and you get to learn the right way because she's learning from the OEM procedures."
Driggers agreed. "Experience matters, but so does that person who doesn't have tunnel vision, who can come and give a new perspective."
Key takeaway: A hire with no ingrained habits to unlearn can be easier to train correctly on OEM procedure than an experienced tech who's used to doing things the way we've always done it.
Documentation is a legal defense
Driggers traced her documentation standards back to advice she got years ago: "We should be building every repair file like it could one day end up in court."
Agnew backed that up with an anecdote from his OEM days, describing a liability case where every party who'd touched a vehicle (roughly 13 people or businesses) got pulled into litigation regardless of actual fault. His conclusion: "You've got to have that evidence to show up and say, 'I did it right, and I've got all my forms, all my documents right there.'"
Key takeaway: In a dispute, the shop that can produce complete, contemporaneous records is the one that can actually prove it did the job correctly.
OEM procedures are getting more detailed, but not more standardized
Agnew said vague instructions telling technicians to place a target "as accurately as possible" are gradually disappearing in favor of hard dimensions, which he called a positive trend. What hasn't improved, in his view, is consistency across OEMs. With different automakers sourcing ADAS technology from different tier-one suppliers, he said, "you end up with hundreds of different [procedures]," which he'd like to see consolidated into shared standards rather than "seven special ways of doing it."
Key takeaway: Procedures are becoming clearer, but the absence of cross-OEM standardization keeps adding cost and complexity to the service side.
A consistent process beats memorizing procedures
Solis said the antidote to constantly shifting OEM requirements isn't trying to keep every update memorized; it's rereading the procedure every single time. "You could have fixed one yesterday and they wanted it done this way, and today they tweaked it a little ... but if you're reading the procedures every single time and not just assuming that you are the expert, it doesn't matter if the procedures change, because your process is consistent."
Key takeaway: Treating procedure review as a standing step in every job, rather than relying on experience, is what keeps a shop compliant as requirements shift overnight.
Five years out: more systems, more law, more learning
Asked to look ahead, each panelist named a different pressure point.
Agnew predicted commercialized autonomous vehicles will start showing up for calibration work within five years, pushing the average number of calibratable systems per vehicle from roughly 1.7 today toward four to six.
Solis expects a wave of legislation aimed at the ADAS calibration world, "a lot sooner than 10 [years]."
Driggers pointed to culture rather than technology: "We've got to be so intentional to build a culture of continuous learning ... the competitive advantage is going to be we continuously learn and we can adapt fast."
Key takeaway: The panelists don't agree on which force changes the industry fastest, but all three land on the same response: build a shop that can learn and adjust quickly, because none of these variables are stabilizing anytime soon.
The throughline: adapt quickly, stay humble
Asked to finish the sentence "the shops that will win the next decade are the ones that ___," Driggers answered "adapt quickly," Solis said to "keep training, keep learning, and be humble," and Agnew closed by emphasizing the same theme: "You have to know what's going on."
Across a wide-ranging conversation that touched equipment, facility design, hiring, and legal exposure, that was the constant the three panelists kept returning to: none of it holds up without a shop culture built to keep learning as ADAS keeps changing.
