Lonnie Margol

As an innovator at heart, Lonnie has always facilitated advancement and innovation in every field he has been involved in. From creating and building a parts company, International Parts Locators (IPL), into one of the world’s largest used automotive parts distributors, to working with Microsoft in spearheading the e-commerce movement with the first .Net frameworks to sell parts and track inventory, Lonnie has made a career of elevating the standards in the automotive industry. He continues to do this with AirPro Diagnostics, pushing how we manage and access the technology we need to repair vehicles.

In 2002, after reorganizing IPL into Nationwide Parts Distributors (NPD), Lonnie saw the advancement of automotive technology on the horizon and the disruption to shops if they couldn’t fully repair their customer’s vehicle because they didn’t have access to the programming technology they needed without outsourcing the job. With the idea of rebuilding the vehicle control modules and reprogramming that needed local installations, Lonnie saw a solution and quickly created QuickStrike to allow shops to access the programming technology so they could repair vehicles correctly.

Realizing the need to fill the space between OE technology and collision shops, Lonnie saw a way to help bridge that gap by providing a unique solution for body shops to get access to the latest technology. He decided to move into the collision market, forming Collision Diagnostic Services (now known as asTech). With Collision Diagnostics, Lonnie led the development of an alternative option for shops to have a remote provider who could diagnose and reprogram vehicles, creating a solution that transferred the information across the internet and decoded it at the other end. AsTech was later acquired by Kinderhook in 2015.

With the advancement in the technology field growing rapidly, naturally, Lonnie didn’t stop looking for quicker, more reliable solutions for the market. In 2016, Lonnie was approached by a friend and colleague who owned CompuFlash. Lonnie saw the benefit of a tool that shops could use which would be directly connected to the vehicle, running software compliant to the OEM specifications, local on the tool, with a simpler, more complete coverage of their scanning, diagnostic, and programming needs. From there the AirPro tool was created and AirPro Diagnostics was founded in April of 2016, to provide the shops with the most complete, accurate, and reliable technology to properly repair vehicles.