October 2018

Y ou hear a lot of funny words, or groupings of letters that function as words or end up becoming a word at least, getting thrown around the workshop. It’s nothing new. Acronyms make life a little easier as it saves you spelling out a whole sentence full of words. It does get confusing, even for in-touch-with-the-trends types such as myself. Take GDPR, for example. When people first starting using this abbreviation to describe the new data protection rules, I thought they were talking about East Germany. Considering the penalties for not complying, I still sometimes think they were talking about the former Soviet-run rump state! To be honest, the headache with GDPR is having to set up the system, once you have that in place and you are all covered, eventually it is just another level of bureaucracy which runs in the background of a professional business… What? I really have cracked it, completely compliant, job done. I do read the other articles they run in Aftermarket you know. I read up, I acted. It happens sometimes. So that was one thing, but there are many more that are a tougher hurdle to jump. Advanced driver assist systems, or ADAS for short is another favourite of mine. This had been creeping up on us for a while, then it got hungry and decided to pounce. More and more cars are going to have these cameras and the alignment is going to require some serious precision. See, still reading, still acting, still happening! That said, when I first heard about ADAS, I thought the person who said it was talking to my young staff member Darren, “hey Daz!” When he didn’t reply I clipped him round the ear for rudeness, metaphorically speaking. Later, having received a more realistic example of such a punishment from Mrs P, I realised my mistake and found out what ADAS actually was. I put young Darren in charge of the wheel alignment bay at Parkit Motors, with a view to getting him towards being our ADAS ‘Tsar’ down the line. And another thing, why am I calling him ‘Tsar?’ Do you ever think it’s funny that people dropped in to run Quangos get given the title Tsar? Why Tsar? Why not Sultan? Or Kaiser? It makes about as much sense. Still, considering the prevalence of acronyms in our sector, perhaps we should reverse engineer something so we can appropriate the term and start going around going on TSAR this and TSAR that. Any suggestions for what TSAR could stand for in the aftermarket, please send on a postcard to me, care of the Editor at Aftermarket magazine. Anyway, we are seriously looking at the ADAS opportunity, and are weighing up our options. We get cars with cameras in here all the time, and I don’t want to send someone wobbling down the road in a car that’s not got a particular sensor pointing in exactly the right direction. We don’t know exactly how we will handle it yet, but it is on our to-do list. That’s the process here – hear a bizarre word, misunderstand it in an amusing way for the benefit of the readers, then master the situation! What does that stand for? 66 AFTERMARKET OCTOBER 2018 TEABREAK: MEMOIRS OF A MOTOR MECHANIC www.aftermarketonline.net