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Automotive Technology Professor Jeff Robson made a conscious decision to steer clear of the family hog farm.

His affinity for technology took him to Seattle and back and employment with General Motors and service manager positions at vehicle dealerships before he started teaching at Southwestern Michigan College in 2013.

This fall the SMC automotive fleet added three electric and hybrid cars for $45,000 and a “training bench.”

“The only way to keep up with the technology explosion is to buy things that literally expose them to the basics, this is how this system works. We’re not teaching Tesla or General Motors, we’re teaching general principles of systems because every engineer will do it differently. It might be re-engineered from one model year to the next,” Robson said.

“We’re teaching them to be inquisitive technicians who can learn on the job and get along with others. I’m no better at fixing this car than you except I’ve had 40 years of principles of knowing generally how systems work. The best time spent is 15 minutes in the service manual before I start a job.”

SMC acquired a gray Tesla Model 3, a fully-electric Chevy Bolt and a Toyota Prius Plug-In Hybrid.

The training bench is like an ant farm affording a transparent glimpse at the components arrayed inside an electric car.

Periodic federal Perkins funds help with such acquisitions.

Robson, of Niles, who learned about carburetors and solenoids studying for his 1982 automotive service technology degree at Ferris State University, teaches alongside a former student, John Golob, and a myriad of diagnostic screens.

The new Tesla’s dashboard is blank except for a tablet. The front trunk is known as a “frunk.” It opens with a tap of what looks like a credit card.

“(Artificial Intelligence or AI) helps diagnostics,” Robson said. “It’s going to configure some of the screens for data. Output is anywhere from 200 to 500 different data PIDs (Parameter IDs, shortcut codes used in software to automatically fill in default values across different screens and transaction codes.)

“Wheel speed, brake position, steering wheel angle. You have to know which ones to display. We might have 50 to 70 modules on a car, so we have to determine which system we want to look at, and we have to discern which data we have to actually look at to evaluate that system for that code, then understand how it’s designed to work and do our symptoms match? There’s a lot of interpretation.”

Robson worked for Gene Wesner Chevrolet in Buchanan after college, then returned to school to study automotive management.

“General Motors hired me as a field consultant,” Robson said. “I did that in Seattle for 3 ½ years.” The father of four became a service manager at 29 for a Toyota dealership in Seattle.

He loved technology even in college and tutored classmates. As a service manager for decades he was sort of a teacher as a liaison between customers and technicians.

“I can talk to an engineer and explain it to a lay person at a level that they can understand,” Robson said. “I want my students to be competent to ask good questions and fundamental skills of information-gathering, tool usage and evaluate with critical thinking to say, ‘I’ve got this, this and this,’ which is different than saying, ‘Fix it.’”

Referring to Waymo, the self-driving cars, Robson said, “All they added was a steering wheel position sensor, cameras for lane recognition, radar, LIDAR (Light Detection and Ranging) and run it through a processor. Waymos were in Phoenix where we had electric vehicle training.”