At an Equipment and Tool Institute (ETI) meeting held in April 2010 Tom Trisdale, an executive for Toyota Motor Sales USA, made a presentation called “Directions in Diagnostics”. The presentation, in PDF format, is available here.
Toyota provides some of the industry’s strongest aftermarket support through the Techstream Lite program covered in this post. In this presentation Tom explains how Toyota uses aggregated repair information, pulled from the “back end” of the Techstream tool to generate new diagnostic information.
The ability of Toyota to view the data pulled from the vehicle enhances and assists a technician’s diagnostic capability, Trisdale said. Personnel at Toyota can see what a vehicle’s DTCs (diagnostic trouble codes) are when a vehicle is connected, he said. “I can see what the tech saw,” he said, adding that it’s a real-time data view that’s integrated into Toyota’s back-end system.
Take to time to look at this presentation and you will see the big picture and it looks pretty good to me!
