TU Dortmund spin-out detects car damage

Adomea, a spin-out of Dortmund Institute of Technology (TU Dortmund), has developed a fully automatic, mobile device that can measure car damage caused by hail storms.

Hail storms are a problem for insurance companies as the numbers of damaged cars they need to examine can quickly grow to several hundred during a single storm, a time and cost intensive undertaking. In 2013, a total of 450,000 cars were damaged in Germany, costing insurance companies €2.7m ($3.5m).

The device was first used in the field in June 2014 by German insurer Westfälische Provinzial following a particularly nasty storm, dubbed Ela, which caused more than €100m of damage in the German state of North Rhine-Westphalia. More than 800 cars had to be examined for hail damage.

Adomea’s device is able to scan all current car models with high resolution cameras, detect damages and classify them. The process takes five minutes, with the car only standing inside the device for two minutes.

Adomea is marketing the technology under the subsidiary Amova Services – an acronym for automatic mobile vehicle assessment). It has dubbed the technology itself Miko (an acronym, in German, for mobile identification system for detection of surface damage to cars) and is entering the European, Japanese, Shanghainese and Thai markets.