At an after hours get together during SEMA, I ran into David Wall, CEO of Freeman’s Car Stereo. David asked me what I’d seen at the show. I told him I hadn’t seen anything that blew the doors off yet, but the mood of the show was right.
Maybe there’s a reason David has been doing this so long. He’d found something I walked right past without seeing the value in it. David first heard about it from Brett Farquharson, the Rockford Fosgate distributor from South Africa.
It was the hands-on NAPA XcceleratoR AI/XR demos, built to make repair shops more productive. Among other things, it uses extended reality to train technicians on everyday jobs like brakes, air filters and oil changes.
And there’s a reason NAPA is investing in this. The automotive repair trade has the same problem we do: getting new people in the door. Many young people don’t want to buy thousands of dollars in their own tools or start at the bottom. If the mechanics’ world is turning to technology to solve that, maybe we should be paying attention.
I’ll admit it, with over 30 years in this industry, I never looked at it the way Dave did until he started explaining it. And I want to be clear that what follows is conceptual. But it’s worth thinking about.
What if that same idea was used to train installers?
Picture your lead installer wearing the goggles while he does a complete install in a Dodge Ram. He talks through every step as he goes. “I run the wire here. I tie it down here, so it won’t get pinched by the seat when everything goes back together.”
He removes the door panels without breaking a single clip. He sound deadens the doors and mounts the speakers. He finds a clean path through the firewall, runs the wiring through the truck and explains where the fuse holder goes and why. Then he mounts the amplifier and installs the subwoofer.
Now your rookie puts on the goggles and does the same job virtually, start to finish, right over that veteran’s shoulder. They don’t just see the steps. They hear the reasons behind them. And with AI built in, they could ask the same questions they’d ask in the bay, like why the wire goes here and not there, and get your shop’s answer.
They walk away with a roadmap. Best practices. Your shop’s way of doing things.
Do the same with a Chevy truck, a Ford F-150 and a few popular cars, and a retailer like Freeman’s has its own training library. Your best installer can only work in one bay at a time. This way, his skills are in every bay.
Here’s where it gets really interesting. A tech could virtually do a Dodge Ram install today, and when the real Ram rolls in tomorrow, they’ve already been through it once.
It may sound futuristic, but none of it seems out of reach.
What Is NAPA XcceleratoR?
NAPA XcceleratoR is a productivity platform for automotive technicians. NAPA built it with Solera, AutoVitals, the National Institute for Automotive Service Excellence (ASE) and Skillmaker. It had its full release at SEMA on November 3.
The goal is to get new techs up to speed faster. Instead of sitting in a classroom, they put on a headset and train in lifelike simulations. The training includes 53 lessons and more than 148 hours of hands-on work.
The headset is not pure virtual reality. NAPA calls it XR, or extended reality, which blends the real world with digital images.
The platform also includes Direct-Hit XR, smart glasses a tech can wear while working. The tech asks a question and gets an answer without putting down the tools.
The XcceleratoR XR Training Goggles won a 2026 SEMA New Product Award in the Emerging Technology category.
What struck me most wasn’t the technology. It was that Dave looked outside our industry, found something useful, and brought me along for the journey.
Maybe looking outside our industry could be the answer to some of our industry’s problems. We just have to start looking wider.
*photo and video from https://napaxccelerator.com/
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