Now that humanity (as financed by the United States) has visited every major planet in the solar system, it turns out that the endeavor teaches us a great deal about the future of the auto repair business.

The final piece of this puzzle came together last month when our New Horizons spacecraft flew within 7,800 miles of Pluto, which used to be the most distant planet.  Now it’s the biggest dwarf planet, because there are several other dwarves orbiting even farther away. After it flew past it looked back and took the photo below, showing sunlight glowing in Pluto’s thin atmosphere:

Looks like vapor, doesn’t it? Something that’s not quite there, much like the distant future of the auto repair industry. You can see it, clear as the ring in this image, but you know it won’t be real for a while.

The day will come when an auto’s onboard computer won’t just flip on a dashboard light to ask for help. If the car is under warranty, it will communicate wirelessly with the dealership and the service department will contact the driver to schedule a repair.

If it’s not under warranty, it might contact a service like Berkshire-Hathaway’s Openbay instead. Boasting tens of thousands of users already, the startup phone app lets drivers request bids for repairs from local shops.

Auto repair shops in their network bid fixed prices to get the service job, and then the one the driver selects pays 13% to Openbay.

The nature of repairs done in this new environment will change as autos learn to speak for themselves. In fact, an entire new system of unbelievable complexity will be added as fast as the OEMs can invent it: Autos will begin talking to each other around 2017, with the Cadillac CTS among the first to incorporate the ability.

The NHTSA expects there to be 300 million connected vehicles within 25 years. The computing power required boggles the imagination.

But right now, there are still a few glitches to work out. Wired Magazine hacked a Jeep, for example, and Chrysler/Fiat is facing a class action suit one source said “could snowball into one of the largest court settlements in history, following things like asbestos.”

So let’s get a little closer to Earth.

We’re good at exploring Mars. In fact, when our Curiosity rover made its spectacular “seven minutes of terror” landing in 2012, our Opportunity rover was still driving around on the red planet’s surface, as it had been for the previous nine years. We also had a satellite in orbit, which took this phenomenal image of Curiosity parachuting to the ground:

A little more familiar to today’s auto repair shop will be hybrids, with their computer-balanced powertrains and dangerous battery packs. You may have even seen a pure electric or two, if you service Toyota, Fiat, BMW or a handful of other brands.

They’re already out there, and at some point in the future they’ll become common. But right now they make up a tiny portion of the market, and over the last several months sales of alternatives cratered right along with the price of gasoline, so that transition may still be a ways off.

So, then…a little closer to the Earth.

We haven’t found any good reason to go back to the moon, except perhaps just for the sheer adventure of it. All of humanity is in this photo – except for one person: the photographer. Michael Collins was the first person ever to be that alone and, even more incredible, when he passed behind the moon his antenna was blocked so he was alone and had no communications whatsoever:

We can still experience the thrill of those lunar missions because not everything has to be thrown away and replaced.

In fact, today’s car owner expects to keep his vehicle a lot longer than before. The Great Recession forced many people to stick with their vehicles, and now that so many of us have owned a car for ten years it seems normal.

And the recession pushed people into leases, which NADA expects to flood the used car market in coming years, boding very well for the auto repair industry.

Which isn’t to say that things will just remain the same.

And that’s largely due to the people living in this photograph:

Silicon Valley is at the bottom, and Tesla’s factory is just above it on the east coast of the Bay.

While self-driving electric cars that can talk to each other won’t impact your business any time soon, the tech sector did lead us out of the recession – and it changed the way people think about service.

And some entrepreneurs may have already discovered how that’s going to impact auto repair.

Going mobile may be the next big thing.

Successful shops have added successful mobile repair services, and successful mobile repair services have opened shops.

Entrepreneurs enjoying success selling this service to busy professionals find that they really appreciate having the garage come to them.

And they’ve found a lucrative way to expand their business even further: by maintaining fleets.

Fleet operators can delete the problematic logistics of getting vehicles into and out of repairs if the repairs go to the vehicle. It’s possible that the convenience and cost efficiency of the model will gain traction in this market, and the first mobile repair shops there may expand fastest.

As an established business, you have a tremendous advantage as well. Media coverage of mobile repair has repeatedly uncovered scams, and almost all of them have one common denominator: the “mechanic” did not have a license.

You might focus your marketing on the fact that you do have one, and that you’ve been in business at a location for a while.

Your van-driving mechanic may quickly become a profit center you can replicate.

If you investigate the mobile idea or not, we’re here to tell you that change often comes more slowly than people expect – especially for an industry as massive as autos.

We learned that from payment processing, actually, because people have been predicting the end of checks for forty years. But today many businesses receive up to 70% of their revenue in checks.

If you go mobile, you might find instances where accepting checks for COD items becomes important, and we can eliminate most of the risk from accepting those payments. And you’ll certainly want to streamline your payment processing by getting “Remote Deposit Capture” or RDC, which enables you to scan a paper check and deposit it right then and there.

You can go green by eliminating wasted time and fuel on trips to the bank, and you can accelerate your cash flow so you can add another van to take care of your first fleet customer.

When you’re running a business for your family, you don’t want a New Horizons or Michael Collins deep space thrill ride. You want a partner you can talk to. Learn how here.