ETI ToolTech 2025 — Top trends in automotive
This year’s ETI ToolTech event hosted over 160 attendees from March 31-April 2 at the Coronado Island Marriott, in Coronado, California. The industry professionals in attendance included member companies, shop owners, industry partners, and OEMs. In a little over two full days, the event covered the latest trends in the automotive industry — electric vehicles, virtual reality, ADAS, and more.
EVs
Day one started off with keynote speaker Steve Greenfield of Automotive Ventures diving into a few different industry topics, including the future of electric vehicles.
He noted that though we’re seeing a bit of a downturn in how many electric vehicles are being bought right now, we’ll continue to see an increase in the EV market. One of his slides depicted a graph from BloomeNEF showing all electric and plug-in hybrid vehicle sales from 2015 projected to 2050. By 2050, it’s estimated that 89 percent of the market share will be held by EVs and plug-in hybrid vehicles.
The precursor to this continued growth, Greenfield notes, is the improvements being seen in battery technology.
“In the future, we’re going to have batteries that don’t catch fire because they’re solid state [and] that you can charge within minutes to full charge, that may do 1,000 miles or more on range,” Greenfield says. “The next generation of kids will look back and look at the fact that we plugged in cars with a wire, the same as anybody in the audience today would look at rotary phones or phone booths.”
Virtual reality
Another day-one presentation dove into using virtual reality to train technicians.
I-CAR’s Mike Mertes discussed the virtual reality training program I-CAR has developed and the benefits of using this type of training to learn new skills.
“Two-hundred and seventy-five percent of people said they were more confident to act on what they learned after training with a VR course, as opposed to a traditional online course,” Mertes notes.
They were also four times more focused and faster learning than traditional learning methods. I-CAR hopes to continue expanding the virtual training they have to offer to greater serve the automotive industry.
ADAS
Day two of presentations brought on the Shop Owner’s Panel where the topic of ADAS arose.
While some shop owners mentioned that when they realized ADAS calibrations weren’t being done on vehicles that ought to have this procedure performed, they went out and purchased the equipment needed to perform the calibrations and made sure their technicians were trained on this. A few other shop owners noted confusion about ADAS and when it’s necessary to perform the calibrations because when looking up service information, they don’t see the calibrations being listed as something that must be done for the repair they are performing.
Overall though, all the shop owners could agree that performing the ADAS calibrations ensures you’re covering many liabilities on your end.
ETI updates
During the event, ETI presented one of their coveted Founder’s Awards. In the 78 years that ETI has been around they’ve only presented 18 people with the Founder’s Award, and this year, they presented the 19th award to Neil Davis.
“The most important thing in my life has been [being] a part of ETI,” Davis says.
Additionally, the new ETI president, Chris Bahlman, was presented with the gavel from former ETI president Bob Augustine.
Bahlman noted that he sees his presidency as an opportunity to expand membership, not only here, but across the pond as well with ETI EU.
“We have a lot of issues to deal with, right to repair, data, complexity, portability … but I believe this is the right forum to address that,” Bahlman says. “We want to expand that forum.”
