Photo by Nicholas Pilch, 60th Air Mobility Wing Public Affairs
The ability to quickly and efficiently repair a vehicle is extremely important, especially when it comes to military vehicles. Airmen assigned to the 60th Logistics Readiness Squadron (LRS) from Travis Air Force Base have partnered with Tesla to gain invaluable experience and improve existing vehicle maintenance and repair procedures.
Fifteen pilots visited the Tesla Service Center in Berkeley, Calif., Nov. 12, 2020 to learn about Tesla's vehicle acceptance process, managing mobile repair, parts warehousing and data-basing, and the customer experience, reported Johnna Crider from CleanTechnica.
“We're lucky to be near Tesla, one of the most cutting-edge and modernized automotive companies,” said Master Sgt. Jerry Voyles, 60th LRS vehicle fleet manager. "We wanted to take an opportunity to get eyes on their processes, to learn how to incorporate new technology and innovative processes in how we manage the vehicle fleet at Travis (AFB), Air Mobility Command and the Air Force."
Voyles strives to achieve a better vehicle intake or mobile maintenance process. Ideally, the fleet at the base would include geo-tagging when requesting service via its smartphone so that the team could know the exact location of the vehicle, he said.
The Master Sgt. said that, at the moment, the repair procedure takes too long, which leads to a long vehicle downtime. Therefore, they should strive to improve the mobile maintenance procedure, which Voyles hopes to learn from Tesla. “About 25% of mobile calls could’ve been fixed by the customer,” he said.
Photo by Nicholas Pilch, 60th Air Mobility Wing Public Affairs
Sometimes a vehicle can be repaired by the client, but due to the lack of a process of recording and comparing historical technical problems that the customer could fix, vehicles simply stand idle for a long time, waiting for repairs. But, if customers could get a list of problems that they can fix themselves, it would greatly improve the existing system. “Giving our customers a troubleshooting list with collected data-analytics in the field will lower downtime for our office and their office,” said Master Sgt.
“Big picture, we want to take what we learn today and share that with units across the Air Force,” Voyles said.
The next steps for LRS vehicle maintenance are to get existing processes audited and incorporate some of the processes learned at Tesla.
© 2020, Eva Fox. All rights reserved.
_____________________________
We appreciate your readership! Please share your thoughts in the comment section below.
Article edited by @SmokeyShorts, you can follow him on Twitter
About the Author
Eva Fox
Eva Fox joined Tesmanian in 2019 to cover breaking news as an automotive journalist. The main topics that she covers are clean energy and electric vehicles. As a journalist, Eva is specialized in Tesla and topics related to the work and development of the company.
