The other day, I was cruising through one of my industry trade journals; NOLN National Oil and Lube News and I read an interesting article titled; Back to the Future. The article interviewed many of the most well respected folks in the industry, and got their thoughts on where the industry was going, after the article reviewed where we've been in the past. One of those interviewed noted that in the future we will have driverless cars. It's hard to say if these vehicles will change their own oil, or still come into an oil change business to get it done.
Imagine that your car is getting close to its scheduled oil change time, it alerts the oil change companies in the area finding out the best price and downloading all the services that the vehicle needs. The computer systems at the oil change companies respond, and the artificial intelligence in the driverless car determines what the best price is based on the distance and how much fuel it will take to get there. It then schedules an appointment for the least likely time that the driver would be using the vehicle. It might even be in the middle of the night.
The oil change facility doesn't care, it works 24 hours, even though there are no workers there in the evening, everything is now robotic. The vehicle opens up your automatic garage door drives to the oil change facility at 1:30 AM in the morning, and then it communicates Wi-Fi with the oil change facility which then opens up their automatic door, the self-driving car drives in, parks, turns off the motor, pops the hood, and the door goes down behind it. The robotic system changes the oil, the customer is billed through their credit card, and a car goes home and parks itself back in the garage - too far-fetched for you?
Perhaps that's because you are not looking off into the future far enough, but given 25 or 30 years, and your car may actually flight the oil change facility in the middle of the night, and it won't make a sound due to the new propulsion systems available then. Will your self-driving car also take itself to the detail shop or car wash? Who knows, the future is so hard to tell, and I don't own a crystal ball. Nevertheless, I hope you will please consider all this and think on it. If you have any comments, questions, concerns or would like to design such a system shoot me an e-mail.
