Driverless cars, meet your eye doctor

• Modern cars are equipped with sensors to support driver assistance systems and safety features.
• Kinetic is a startup that provides sensor calibration after a car is involved in a collision.
• Kinetic CEO Nikhil Naikal said his company aims to service autonomous vehicle fleets.

Human drivers aren't the only ones who need to have eyes on the road.

Many cars on the road today are equipped with at least half a dozen sensors, from cameras to radars, to support safety features and advanced driver-assistance systems (ADAS) that are now ubiquitous in the modern automotive industry. And as automakers continue to offload the task of driving from humans, cars will become even more sensorized.

Kinetic, a Southern California-based startup, wants to scale a service that will fix those sensors if a car ever gets into a collision. The CEO analogizes it to the modern car's optometrist.

"We have eyes, and when we need to correct vision, we go to an optometrist who places all these letters at 20 feet, measures our vision and prescription, and then gives us the glasses to correct our defect," CEO Nikhil Naikal told Business Insider. "In the same way, this is a digital prescription to correct the errors of the car's understanding of the world around it."

No car is the same as it once was after its first fender bender.

Panels get bent, parts are replaced, and the paint won't match the original exactly.

The same principle goes for the sensors on a car, Naikal said. Sensors are highly sensitive to alignment, and a fraction of a degree can significantly affect the effectiveness of an ADAS or self-driving feature.

Once a vehicle is in a front-end collision or rear-ended, those sensors could be thrown out of position. Mechanics can put the sensors back in place, but they won't be re-mounted in a spot perfectly identical to their factory placement.

That's where Kinetic's robotics platform and software come in to calibrate the sensors — or, as Naikal put it, give them a "digital prescription."

The auto shop of the future

An 8,000-square-foot facility in San Francisco's Dogpatch neighborhood is one of eight Kinetic hubs on the West Coast.

The inside is unlike loud, messy auto body shops. A Kinetic facility is quiet and mostly empty save for a rotating platform and a robotic arm attached to a short track. A typical location is staffed with up to two technicians, Naikal said.

On a Wednesday afternoon, Kinetic was servicing a 2022 Toyota Camry Hybrid LE that had been repaired at a local body shop after a front-end collision.

The car was driven onto the platform, where Kinetic's camera package takes detailed photos of the car, and a robotic arm points a laser at the radar sensor embedded in the Toyota's grill.

Kinetic's software then puts the car and the sensors back in sync.

"What the car thinks it's going to do and what the sensors think the car is going to do needs to be aligned," Naikal said. "The sensor thinks that the car is going to go right, whereas the car actually needs to go left — that's a problem. It causes unstable things like ghost braking and jerking."

The entire process takes about 10 minutes. Naikal said a single Kinetic hub can service about 80 cars a day.

Some repair shops might rely on a mobile service, in which a specialized technician comes to calibrate the sensors. Naikal said a lot of body shops don't have the space, lighting, equipment, or trained technicians that can accommodate an in-house service. Local body shops can either choose to send cars to Kinetic's hub or, if they have space, lease the company's equipment.

By the end of 2026, Naikal said he aims to have 20 hubs in the US.

Kinetic's platform can also perform damage inspections and develop repair plans, but Naikal envisions servicing autonomous vehicle fleets, which require constant cleaning and sensor maintenance, as another line of business. The future, he said, will require a new kind of service infrastructure built around robotics and software rather than a traditional body shop.

"It's going to be more than just Jiffy Lubes and Valvolines," Naikal said. "We think of ourselves as the infrastructure layer for the future of autonomy."