Automotive Workshop Software in 2026: What’s Law, What’s Coming, and What’s Just Noise

Already Law: Vehicle safety standards, and a code that isn’t

This one has firm dates. Australian Design Rule 98/00 was announced in November 2021 and required newly introduced models to be fitted with autonomous emergency braking from 1 March 2023, extending to all new vehicles from 1 March 2025. ADR 98/01 went further, adding pedestrian detection. By 2030, an estimated 43 per cent of the Australian car parc will be fitted with ADAS of some kind.

Here is the part most workshop marketing gets wrong. Those design rules apply to vehicle manufacturers, not to you. As the Australian Automotive Aftermarket Association has put it, ADR 98 governs what happens when a vehicle enters the market. It says nothing about what happens afterwards, when a windscreen is replaced, a suspension is repaired, or a wheel alignment is performed.

That gap is exactly why the Automotive Repairers Council of Australia developed a national ADAS Industry Code of Conduct, launched at Autocare 2025. It sets out calibration procedures, checklists and documentation guidance, and it names tyre specialists explicitly alongside collision repairers and windscreen services.

The Code is voluntary. There is still no Australian law telling you that you must document an ADAS calibration.

What there is instead is a growing number of people who will ask. Insurers, fleets and manufacturer programs have all begun checking whether workshops follow the Code. When a question arises about work you performed, the answer comes back to the same evidence trail every time: what the manufacturer’s procedure required, what work was actually done, and whether you can back it up. That is automotive liability protection in practice, and a verbal recollection is not it.

Your automotive workshop software should be holding photographic and written evidence against the vehicle record, not in a folder on the office computer. We covered this in more depth in our guide to ADAS calibration and wheel alignment.

Already Law: Privacy – and this one is new

In the first week of January 2026, the OAIC ran its first-ever compliance sweep, checking the privacy policies of around 60 businesses that collect information in person. Car dealerships were on the list, for the details they take before a test drive. Independent workshops were not, and if you turn over under $3 million, the Privacy Act still exempts you.

Two things get past that exemption.

The exemption already has holes. The OAIC’s own guidance confirms that regardless of turnover, the Act covers any contractor providing services under a Commonwealth contract, and any business related to one the Act already covers. Take on government fleet work and turnover stops protecting you.

And since June 2025, individuals can sue for serious invasion of privacy, with no small business exemption at all.

So the question isn’t whether a regulator will knock. It’s whether you can answer the question your customers will often ask: what personal information do you hold, where does it live, and who can see it?

Under review: mandatory tyre stewardship

You will hear this described as imminent. It is not.

In November 2025 the House of Representatives Standing Committee on Industry, Innovation and Science opened an inquiry into the Australian tyre industry, with product stewardship schemes among the things it is considering. Australia generates over 67 million end-of-life tyres a year, many going to landfill, into stockpiles, or exported without adequate oversight. Submissions closed in January 2026, and the inquiry is still running.

Tyre Stewardship Australia is pushing hard for mandatory participation, and its supply chain analysis makes the case: companies behind 47 per cent of replacement tyre imports contribute nothing to the voluntary levy, and only 26 per cent of Australia’s end-of-life tyres are reused or recycled. But tyres have been on the Minister’s Priority List since 2022-23 and no mandatory scheme has been implemented.

So don’t buy software for this. Just note that if your system already records unit volumes at point of sale, you are covered either way at no extra cost. If the rules change, you file a report. If they don’t, you have lost nothing.

Market pressure: new brands and thin staffing

No deadline on these two, and no regulator. They just quietly cost you money.

Chinese brands have gone from 9.0 per cent of the Australian market to 25.8 per cent in four years, and now account for 54 per cent of small SUVs and 77 per cent of plug-in hybrids. Models on sale are forecast to rise from roughly 72 this year to about 120 in 2027. A technician who cannot find a service interval in ninety seconds is a bay sitting idle, and that problem is set to nearly double in size. We looked at what servicing Chinese cars actually demands of a workshop earlier this year.

Meanwhile, the shortage of qualified technicians means more of your work is being done by people who have not seen that fault before. Mechanic training only scales when the knowledge lives somewhere other than one senior technician’s head, which is the case we made for standardised workshop procedures.

Both are data problems wearing a staffing costume.

What to actually ask a workshop software vendor

Cut through the demo and ask these six questions.

1. Can I produce a complete, dated, photographic record of a single job in under a minute?
2. Where does my customer data physically live, and who can access it?
3. Can I export everything I hold on one customer if they ask for it?
4. Does the system identify parts and service intervals for vehicles my team has never worked on?
5. Are unit volumes captured at point of sale, or reconstructed later?
6. When something in the software breaks at 6:30 am, who answers the phone, and where are they?

That last one is not a throwaway. A workshop management system you cannot get help with is a liability.

Where COSTAR fits

COSTAR was not built as a compliance product. It was built to run tyre and automotive workshops. The reason it stands up to the list above is simple: a system that records the job properly answers most of these questions as a by-product.

Digital vehicle inspections capture photographic evidence against the job, with notes and images synced into the customer record, which is what protects you when someone questions work done months ago. Inspection checklists can be customised to your own requirements, so a junior technician works through the same structured process a senior one would. The COSTAR Registration Checker provides what our product page calls the most reliable and precise vehicle data available in Australia, and integrations with Repco Navigator Pro and Burson EzyParts bring logbook schedules and parts information straight into the job. Stock movements are recorded at point of sale as a matter of course, which is the tyre volume question already answered.

On the question of where your data lives, COSTAR is installed locally, on your own machines. Your customer records do not sit in an offshore data centre. That’s not a security guarantee on its own. However, local storage means backups and access control.