The "wealth code" of new energy vehicle companies - OTA upgrade

Image source @ Visual China

Text | Car smart driving

Since entering November, as if it had been agreed in advance, major domestic and foreign car companies have launched OTA upgrade in-vehicle system update plans. Last year, it was only the "patent" of Tesla and a few new energy vehicle companies to upgrade the vehicle OTA, which seems to have become a new "wealth code" to stimulate sales.

Among them, there are domestic car companies such as Geely, Beijing Motor, and Trumpchi, as well as joint venture car brands such as SAIC-GM and FAW-Volkswagen. Recently, the veteran traditional car company Buick announced that it will launch an OTA upgrade plan covering 14 models, and volkswagen's main series of new energy vehicles, the ID.family, also announced the news of achieving OTA upgrades next year.

Car companies that have already provided vehicle OTA upgrade services, such as Tesla, Ideal, Xiaopeng, Weilai and other brands, have also continuously expanded and increased the number of models that can be upgraded by OTA on the basis of the original. For a time, the OTA upgrade of the whole vehicle seems to have become the standard equipment of new energy vehicles, and without this link, it seems that the value of the body will fall several grades.

However, although the OTA upgrade has long had a mature technical accumulation in the field of mobile phones, at the level of the automotive system, it is due to Tesla's explosion in the past two years that it has gradually entered the public eye, and even many people in the industry know very little about OTA. Will such a temporary superficial frenzy be just a false proposition?

Connect IOT to pave the way for the next stage of autonomous driving

OTA upgrade, also known as space download technology, was first applied to the online update function of the mobile phone system, which belongs to the iterative technology of "flashing" with the help of ROM firmware in the traditional update method. Nowadays, the update of the operating system of mobile platforms such as Android and IOS is also following this technology.

In 2000, some overseas car companies began to try to apply OTA upgrade technology to the automotive field, but at that time, this technology was still called T-BOX, and its functions were limited to basic functions such as remote start, car locking, and road assistance. Then, with the development of science and technology and the continuous improvement of the mobile Internet system, OTA upgrades really began to be used for in-vehicle system updates.

Among them, the early OTA upgrade acted on the fuel vehicle platform, mainly to achieve partial entertainment functions of the car machine system, such as music player, navigation, CarPlay and other software. This type of technology that focuses on in-vehicle software updates and upgrades is also known as SOTA.

Nowadays, the vehicle OTA upgrade technology that is sought after by major car companies is a firmware upgrade for the vehicle electrification architecture, which can continuously optimize the performance, driving experience and energy consumption of the whole vehicle through program updates. This technology is called FOTA, and its earliest application to new energy vehicles was the "OTA in-flight upgrade" that was first carried when Tesla launched the Model S in 2012.

The earliest contact with Chinese Tesla owners is probably the V5.9 version of the on-board system that began to be updated for free in 2014, and in the subsequent updates, the voice navigation service, automatic cruise, anti-collision reversing assistance, automatic emergency braking and so on were extremely advanced at the time.

And what really makes everyone start to pay attention to the OTA upgrade of the whole vehicle is that in 2019, Tesla CEO Musk announced that he will add 50 horsepower and 12km cruising range to the Model S "out of thin air" in the OTA update. The size of horsepower may only be suitable for some consumer groups with racing demand, but the increase in mileage can directly alleviate the mileage anxiety of all new energy vehicle owners.

In addition, most of the current vehicle OTA upgrades are remote control of cars through mobile phone APPS, which has become a further extension of IoT-related application scenarios. In addition to establishing an independent closed-loop ecosystem under the IOT framework, the innovation of interaction methods brought about by new energy intelligent vehicles has spawned the market demand for smart cockpits, which is inseparable from the support of OTA upgrade technology.

At the same time, in the vehicle OTA upgrade plan that some new energy vehicle companies have announced, there are many mass production functions related to automatic driving, such as navigation assisted driving, one-key parking, traffic sign recognition, adaptive cruise, etc. It is not difficult to see that in addition to the optimism about the vehicle OTA upgrade business, the main purpose of major car companies is to pave the way for the next stage of automatic driving scenarios.

At this stage, domestic and foreign automatic driving scenarios are constantly laying, unmanned distribution, unmanned taxis, unmanned rails and other related businesses are already in the stage of imminent landing, through the vehicle OTA upgrade, can make their own automotive products in advance to adapt to the latest automatic driving technology, in the industry environment before new changes, seize the advantage of the system.

Although the empowerment brought by the advantages of technology is obvious, the current stage of vehicle OTA upgrade is still in a relatively early stage, and there are additional risks that cannot be ignored.

Bugs, OTA escalation invades privacy?

The reason why car companies are eager to upgrade the vehicle OTA is mainly based on the general trend of the automotive industry to the continuous transformation of artificial intelligence. In this industry environment, software-defined cars are gradually becoming the general consensus of the industry.

As a means of transportation, the automobile has always maintained the characteristics of being driven by the power source since its birth. In the era of steam power, machinery defines the car; in the electrical age, the internal combustion engine defines the car; in the information age, electronic parts define the car; in today's new energy era, the motor begins to replace the engine, and the software system loaded with artificial intelligence has become the new definer.

It can even be said that today's automobiles are already moving in the direction of "software products". What determines the core competitiveness of future automobiles is no longer the size of horsepower, mechanical properties, and the appearance and interior, but the high intelligence of the vehicle system.

The highly intelligent vehicle system naturally means that the number of software codes continues to rise. Especially for the high-end technology attributes of new energy vehicles, most of the high-end models have about 100 controller nodes, and the code amount of the vehicle system also exceeds 100 million lines.

In contrast, WeChat has about 500,000 lines of code; Android phones have about 12 million lines of operating system code; and Facebook, the world's largest social media, has only about 62 million lines of code.

The huge number of codes means that there must be more BUGs in the vehicle system, not to mention that this year Tesla was plagued by frequent bugs due to negative information such as "pedal unresponsive", "vehicle stall error", "lock power", etc. Domestic new energy vehicles Xiaopeng, Weilai, and Ideal were also plagued by frequent bug problems.

Although the vehicle OTA upgrade can fix vulnerabilities and solve faults through timely and effective updates, unlike other electronic products, the development and maintenance of vehicle firmware programs is extremely difficult, and it is difficult to completely avoid software risk problems. In the road environment, any program bug can cause direct life-threatening failures, so there are still many unsafe factors in the current OTA upgrade.

And under the current electronic architecture, the OTA upgrade time of electric vehicles is relatively long, coupled with the fact that the update will be the same as the mobile phone and computer, entering the state of having to shut down and restart, it is easy to appear similar to the "wrong touch" and "misjudgment of the upgrade time" of the Owner of Weilai, updating the OTA upgrade in the wrong place, resulting in the vehicle staying on the road for a long time, and then seriously blocking the traffic.

This directly exposes that the OTA upgrade technology of some manufacturers is not mature enough, and they are not ready to deal with the "anti-stupidity" design that causes harm caused by user operation errors.

In addition to the OTA upgrade itself, highly intelligent automotive products, in the final analysis, are still inseparable from the framework of Internet traffic logic, and the core driving force of product design and update iteration is still big data. In order to make a more matching OTA upgrade, software developers must have enough vehicle data and information, a large part of which may involve the personal privacy of car owners, but also a problem that cannot be solved in a short period of time.

Tesla has been questioned and rejected by most domestic enterprises and institutions this year, the main reason is that it has been exposed by overseas media, Tesla will collect private information without the consent of the owner through cameras, radar, voice and other systems.

Of course, the current defects will be solved with the application of related technologies and the development of science and technology, and the high convenience of vehicle OTA upgrades, high user experience, and the advantage of greatly reducing the cost of vehicle recalls still have great market potential. Only from the perspective of policy and market environment, it will take a long time to really land.

OTA landed, can not give up the fuel car

Recently, with Shaanxi, Guangdong, Henan and other domestic provinces and cities have introduced policies to support the development of the new energy automobile industry, coupled with the recent oil prices have experienced 14 consecutive rises, the sales of new energy vehicles have ushered in a new round of rise. At the same time, the market penetration rate of new energy vehicles has reached a level of 13% as of the second half of this year.

However, although from the data point of view, the new energy vehicle market has embarked on a path of rapid growth, and it may not take too long to completely replace fuel vehicles. But in fact, these data are based on the international epidemic out of control, chip shortage, battery shortage and other environments, the overall production and sales of the automotive industry is showing a state of shrinking.

Moreover, in August this year, the Ministry of Industry and Information Technology issued a management opinion on intelligent and connected vehicles, requiring that without approval, each manufacturer cannot add or update the automatic driving function for the car through online software updates. The scene built purely by new energy vehicles and unmanned driving technology is likely to have a very long way to go before it really lands.

Therefore, although there has been a significant increase in penetration and sales data, the popularity of electric vehicles and the cultivation of the market environment still have a long way to go. For OTA upgrades that are not yet mature in technology and still need more market feedback and data support, it may not be the time to abandon traditional fuel vehicles at this stage.

High-tech new energy vehicles are certainly the product platform that is most suitable for OTA upgrade technology, but it does not mean that traditional fuel vehicles cannot use the OTA technology of THE FOTA core.

For example, Geely Xingrui, Beijing Motor Cube, Ford EVOS and other models are loaded with OTA upgrade technology on the basis of traditional fuel vehicles. Although OTA upgrades are too high for automotive hardware, different systems and power drive versions of the adaptation are different, OTA for most traditional car companies are extremely difficult, but Buick, Volkswagen led by the traditional car companies are actively deploying OTA upgrades, but also proved that for manufacturers with technology accumulation and resource strength, it is not impossible to achieve.

At this stage, OTA upgrade technology, like new energy vehicles, is still in the stage of cultivating the market, but it does not mean that OTA upgrade cannot become an independent track, research and development and operation in the name of additional services. From the search related to OTA upgrades in Tianyancha, it can be found that there are already 154 companies engaged in related business, and not a small number of companies have accumulated for many years.

Tesla launched an OTA paid upgrade service last year to improve the acceleration of the vehicle, priced at 14,100 yuan, and then launched an optional OTA upgrade paid package that unlocks seat heating and steering wheel heating. Similarly, many car companies are also gradually promoting OTA upgrade payment, just like the 2750 yuan paid upgrade package of the Geely Xingyue L hybrid model, the Volkswagen ID series or the payment option launched in the future.

For the core factors of future competition in the automotive field, the user experience of car owners is also an important part, these paid services can not only effectively improve the user experience, enhance user stickiness at the same time, but also bring additional stable benefits to manufacturers. Hybrid vehicles that are popular at this stage, and that combine the advantages of fuel vehicles and electric vehicles, as well as bring together the shortcomings of both, may have a greater demand for paid OTA upgrade options that can significantly improve performance and experience.

In general, even if the vehicle OTA upgrade now plays more of a gimmick publicity role, but based on the gradual trend of software productization of the car, OTA upgrade has vaguely shown a trend of becoming the mainstream. As long as we can overcome the shortcomings at this stage, we will surely become a potential stock that cannot be oversized no matter how much we increase investment.