ADAS, short for Advanced Driver Assistance Systems, are the cornerstone to vehicle safety for the next 5 years. Common ADAS systems are radar cruise, automatic braking, lane departure, pedestrian avoidance systems, night vision, blind spot, and 360 cameras. They are present on not only Tesla’s but nearly every new vehicle sold in model year 2022. By 2025 automatic braking and lane departure systems will likely be mandated under the Biden Transportation bill. The problem with these systems, for SEMA members, is that they are designed to be in a certain spot on the car with respect to the road. Simply raising or lowering a vehicle moves the positioning and causes safety malfunctions. Many sensors are also integrated into bumpers and simply repainting the bumper will add thickness of material and cause the sensor to read incorrectly. 

The company I manage, Opus IVS, encounters these systems every single day as we help our professional repair shops fix cars. These systems represent complex challenges just for every day repair, let alone customized vehicle. After service, many of these systems need to be recalibrated using a complex procedure that involves scantools and targeting systems.

The reason these systems are important to SEMA is that we must, as a network, begin to influence vehicle design so these sensors can dynamically adapt and adjust if the vehicle is customized. If we do not manage this challenge together with car companies, it could be likely in the future for customization to be illegal because it’s causing safety systems and autonomous vehicle features to disable or incorrectly measure distances.