In this paper, we describe a novel diagnostic archi- tecture, distributed diagnosis agent system (DDAS), developed for automotive fault diagnosis. The DDAS consists of a vehicle diagnostic agent and a number of signal diagnostic agents,each of which is reponsible for the fault diagnosis of one particular, signal using either a single or multiple signals depending on the complexity of signal faults. Each signal diagnostic agent is developed using common framework that involves signal segmentation, a utomatic signal feature extraction and selection, and machine learning. The signal diagnostic agents can concurrently execute their tasks; some agents possess information concerning the cause of faults for other agents, while other agents merely report symptoms. Together, these signal agents present a full picture of the behavior of the vehicle under diagnosis to the vehicle diagnostic a of diagnostics agent DDAS provides three levels decisions: signal-segment fault, signal fault, and vehicle fault. DDAS is scalable and versatile and has been implemented for fault detection of electronic control unit (ECU) signals; experiment results are presented and discussed in this paper.