The Car That Tells You Where It Hurts

It seems that the days of repairing the car in the backyard are gone. Dad will no longer spend the week-ends working on the family car, getting full of oil and grease. Already, most cars have most of engine parts encapsulated and hard to access without the proper tools and knowledge, but a new intelligent system is going to make life impossible for the amateur mechanics.

The new intelligent system is being developed by engineers at the University of Cambridge, and will be able to tell mechanics which of their parts need servicing, and even call them by sending data via satellite, when it detects a malfunction.

At a European technology show, this week, academics at Cambridge's Institute for Manufacturing unveiled a specially-adapted Fiat prototype that can tell garage staff about the state of its components in seconds by using electronic tags inside its engine.

A similar system is already equipping some supercars, like Ferrari or Bugatti, and uses a sort of black box that records data during the day and transmits it overnight to the manufacturer, to see if the cars are properly exploited.

The new system will use electronic tags and sophisticated software, and it's designed to speed up servicing and identify which parts can be recycled or reused when the vehicle reaches the end of its life. Thus, the car makers could gather information from many vehicles to find out which parts of a car need redesigning.

Radio-Frequency Identification (RFID) tags, each with its own unique identification number, are attached to the car's engine parts. As the car is driven at low speed over a one-meter square servicing pad, which is fitted with an Ultra-High Frequency reader and four antennae, the readers transmit the ID number from the electronic tags to a computer, where specially designed software applications convert it into accessible data.

A computerized database is used to cross-reference the information and to show the parts' date and manufacturer, thus helping mechanics identify those parts that needed to be checked for wear at the click of a mouse.

Professor Duncan McFarlane, from the University of Cambridge's Institute of Manufacturing, said: "Ultimately motorists could be driving into a garage over the same sort of sensor, which would instantly tell both the driver and the garage staff which parts needed replacing and which might be good for several thousand miles more.

"But there are potentially great benefits beyond this as well. When the car is sent to be scrapped, for example, RFID tagging could be used to identify which parts still have a useful life left in them. The system will tell the car producer whether separate parts can be reused, recycled, or need to be disposed of in landfill. It will also highlight which parts need improving for a longer life."