Savvy Service Customers Respond to High-Tech Auto Imaging

Dealers talking to WardsAuto have found a way to avoid misunderstandings with service customers over damage and needed fixes to their vehicles' exteriors.

To stem those complaints and add a layer of trust between the dealer and service customer, some dealers rely on high-tech imaging of cars that capture detailed images of the car’s exterior. Dealers find that technology also speeds up the accurate appraisal of trade-ins, loaner cars and rentals.

“It’s a great system. I use it every day, I’m always looking up cars,” says Mary Rice, owner and dealer principal at Toyota of Greensboro, NC. “Once you see it, it’s pretty self-explanatory,” she tells WardsAuto.

Although several similar systems are on the market, Rice’s dealership is one of about 300 in the U.S. that subscribe to UVeye. The Israeli company, based in Tel Aviv, was founded in 2016 and originally aimed at detecting bomb threats beneath a vehicle’s underbody. Its U.S. offices are in Teaneck, NJ, and Norcross, GA.

Competitors include Synthetik Applied Technologies, adopted by auction service company Manheim, which is owned by Cox Automotive.

So, how good are these systems? We couldn’t view all of them, of course, but WardsAuto did attend a live demonstration of UVeye at Ramsey Volvo in Ramsey, NJ.

Our take: It’s impressive.

As fast as it takes to say it, a customer drives through a brightly-lit arch of cameras, which capture images of the car’s exterior from all angles, including the underside. The car is driven at a normal speed for the inside of a garage, with no need to creep slowly through the arch or at some specific speed.

One of the main selling points is that the technology is so fast, Jose Pujol, Ramsey Volvo operations manager, tells WardsAuto.

While the customer checks in at the dealership’s service desk, a technician can use the system to produce images of the car. Once complete – in a matter of seconds – the images can be displayed to show customers everything from dings in the sheet metal to tire age and wear, potential rust spots and other potential concerns.

The machine-generated images are impartial and credible, leaving customers more satisfied than traditional multi-point inspections done manually.

UVeye’s Saghiv says dealerships using the technology typically see an increase per average repair order from $30 to $55. “For a dealership with 1,000 R.O.s per month, that’s $30,000,” he says.

That’s more than enough to offset the average dealer cost, which can range between $6,000 and $7,000 for the technology, Saghiv says.

But the technology can pay off in other ways, too, such as increases in sales and higher customer satisfaction ratings.

“It has saved us a lot of time arguing,” says UVeye customer David Shoemaker, general manager for Patriot Subaru, Saco, ME.

“If a car is scraped up at the dealership, we have it run through, and we have ‘before’ and ‘after’ images. We do it with every service customer, every trade appraisal, every rental car, before it goes out and when it comes in,” Shoemaker tells WardsAuto.

UVEye’s Saghiv concedes that the technology has obvious limitations, starting with the fact that it’s only looking at the vehicle’s exterior.

“We don’t do everything. We cover around 70% of what you would get with the multipoint inspection. We don’t look inside the car,” he says. “We’re not perfect.”