Aug 11, 2008Car-wash operator Cruz Thru Express is employing an RFID system it designed itself to automate the way it provides services to its customers. The company had been offering patrons various prepaid wash packages that provide unlimited use of its car-washing services on a monthly basis, and had sought a technology able to move customers through the car wash as conveniently and swiftly as possible. After trying both bar-coded labels and license-plate recognition, Cruz Thru Express adopted a system last year using passive EPC Gen 2 RFID tags.
Nearly six years ago, the car-wash operator began with just one facility in Bakersfield, Calif. At that site, the company offered the option of unlimited service, typically at a rate of about $30 per month. A customer could prepay for one month, or for repeated months, using a credit card associated with a bar-coded number printed on an adhesive label and attached to the inside of that individual's car door.
"The prepaid offering turned out to be a very popular thing," says Raymond Roselle, a Cruz Thru Express partner. When a car arrived at the store, an attendant would open the door and reach into the vehicle to scan the bar code with a handheld scanner. The car's operator would then proceed through the car-wash tunnel. But Cruz Thru needed a faster and less intrusive method for allowing customers through the wash, Roselle explains.
As the partners acquired four additional stores—larger than the first, and with multiple lanes—they designated one lane specifically for customers with unlimited-use prepaid accounts, and installed cameras facing the front and rear license plates as the cars queued up for an automated wash. The cameras photographed both plates then transmitted the images to the company's back-end system, which compared the photographed license numbers with those stored in the database. If the system discovered a match, it displayed the related information on a screen for the vehicle operator, greeting that person by name; if it did not, then that indicated the vehicle's license plate number had been rejected.
Roselle designed a software system that enabled all of these steps, including capturing the data, searching the database and instructing the gate and wash mechanisms as to which operations to provide for both the bar-code and license plate systems.
However, Roselle says, the license plate recognition system had its shortcomings. Letters on the plate were sometimes blocked—either by dirt, sun glare or reflection—and the system occasionally picked up the license plate of a vehicle behind another car that should have been rejected, opening the gate for that vehicle despite its lack of authorization to be washed. In addition, as customers signed up for the unlimited service, the system depended on an employee manually writing the license plate number on a piece of paper, which office employees then keyed into the computer system, allowing the potential for mistakes.
In the meantime, Roselle says he observed the cost of RFID technology. In the five-year period since the company began offering unlimited-service membership, he notes, the price of RFID labels dropped from approximately $6 apiece to about a dollar. Once he determined the system was affordable, Cruz Thru began purchasing Metalcraft UHF EPC Gen 2 tags. A unique ID number is encoded to each label's RFID chip, and also printed as a bar code on the front of the label, which is attached to the exterior of the upper part of the windshield on the driver's side.
The RFID labels can be utilized at any of the five Cruz Thru stores in Bakersfield. Since the original store does not have room for a dedicated membership lane, however, attendants at that location scan the bar-coded number on the RFID label.
According to Roselle, the initial set-up employed both license plate and RFID technology, with the system first capturing a digital image of the license plate and, if that license plate was not recognized, the reader then attempting to capture an ID number. However, Roselle says, the shortcomings of the license plate system eventually convinced the business to terminate it entirely and offer RFID labels to all of its members, including those already utilizing license plate recognition.
There were some challenges the company had to overcome in installing the system, Roselle says. Metalcraft designed an RFID tag that could be placed on the outside of the windshield, making it easier to read. Therefore, the tags needed to be robust enough to withstand the rigors of the car wash, as well as weather. To test the tags, he explains, Cruz Thru and Metalcraft placed several inside the car wash for one month of heavy washing, to ensure they did not fail. In addition, the tags were designed to break if anyone attempted to remove a label from one vehicle's windshield and attach it to another in an effort to obtain free washes for an unauthorized vehicle.
"That was challenging," Roselle says, "getting a tag that could live in this environment outside but be destructible enough so that if it is removed, the tag would be destroyed." However, says Aaron Hobert of Metalcraft's RFID sales support team, Metalcraft was able to accomplish this by combining a KSW Microtek inlay with its own custom-designed label. Metalcraft is now offering the same labels for other similar deployments.
The system has been working successfully for about a year, Roselle says. When the car washes are busy, he claims, each processes approximately 100 membership vehicles per hour per store, with little delay in queues. Those who do not purchase membership, he notes, often wait in lines five cars deep. The business currently has around 5,000 members and provides about 35,000 washes monthly for those members.
A New Jersey car-wash operator, Deptford Shammy Shine, is using a similar system (see Car Wash Operators Find RFID Helps Them Clean Up), provided by Innovative Control Services (ICS).
