Los Angeles startup uses AI to make your car tell you what's wrong with it

A Los Angeles startup is applying artificial intelligence to car diagnostics to turn your car into a sentient being.

Sort of.

In short, with this technology, your car should be able to tell you what’s wrong with it.

The idea is sound, but there are a few things worth bearing in mind.

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This Los Angeles startup, Sparq, previewed its new car diagnostics tech at the LA Auto Show.

With exceptions, Sparq is offering a type of technology that’s compatible with most modern cars.

Simplified and summarized, Sparq is trying to give your car a voice (literally) to tell you things you’d only know if you ran a car diagnostic test with computers and cables.

The idea behind this predictive tool is sound, but there are a couple of things worth pointing out.

First, in order to understand the technology we should remember that most modern cars rely on software a lot more than we realize.

The car’s ‘brain’ is able to run diagnostic tests and tell you what’s wrong with it, and Sparq simply wants to streamline and simplify that process.

The tech basically translates complicated diagnostic results into speech and relays them to the driver. (You can watch it in action in the video at the top of this page.)

In other words, this piece of kit might save you some time and make your life easier.

It sounds great, but it doesn’t necessarily provide information that is any more (or less) accurate than you’d get by running a ‘traditional’ car diagnostic test.

Second, artificial intelligence applied to cars is something worth exploring but the technology is still not 100 percent reliable.

Just like anything else AI-related, outages are always possible, and glitches are also not unheard of.

And even though it’s cool that the car is able to tell you what your next service is going to cost based on previous data, it is obviously not information you should just blindly accept at face value.

It’s still an interesting idea, and has exciting potential.