A new approach is proposed for fault detection. It builds on using the relationships between sensor values on vehicles to detect deviating sensor readings and trends in the system performance. However, in contrast to previous approaches based on such sensor relations, our approach uses a fleet of vehicles to define the normal conditions and relations. The relationships between the sensors are also determined automatically in a self-organized way on each vehicle, i.e. no off-line modeling is required. The proposed method is the first step in a remote diagnostics and maintenance service where error detection is done automatically, followed by a download of special purpose diagnostics software for the particular subsystem where the possible fault was detected. © 2009 SAE International.