What just happened? Getting your car inspected is a familiar routine: a technician walks around poking, prodding, and scrutinizing every nook and cranny to assess its condition. That outdated process just got a futuristic upgrade in Hawaii thanks to some cool AI-powered technology.
BMW of Honolulu is the first car service center to implement a wild new system that can thoroughly inspect a vehicle without a human ever laying eyes on it. The service manager there, Lydell Bangloy, told KITV that an associate previously had to physically walk around each car with a camera to check for damage. Now, the car just drives through a machine that performs a 360-degree scan in mere seconds; no humans required.
This AI-powered system is like an "MRI for cars." Bangloy mentioned it can even inspect the undercarriage, an area that's pretty tough for a person to properly see.
If you've ever had to sit through an actual MRI scan, you know that the process can take several minutes. But the video demo for this system showed a BMW just casually cruising through the system at a normal driving speed, and the full scan is done in under 5 seconds.
The best part is that when the scan is complete, the owner immediately gets a visual report on a kiosk showing the condition of their car, which can then be sent to the customer's phone.
While some customers might be skeptical about entrusting an AI to properly assess their precious ride, Bangloy insists the technology is "more accurate than humans" at detecting problems.
Tim Palms, the general manager at BMW of Honolulu, brought in this system because he wanted "high-resolution imagery of every car" to do away with the outdated process of manually recording each one's condition. He told the publication that having to take walk-around videos whenever a customer dropped off their vehicle "really slows things down" at the service center. But with AI automating those inspections, the customer check-in process is drastically sped up.
Palms was tight-lipped about how much this fancy technology set the dealership back, but he's confident the efficiency gains will make it pay for itself before long.
World's first "MRI for cars" launched in Hawaii for diagnosing vehicles
