"Our car can be upgraded by OTA, and it can be used more and more new." This is the language of many electric vehicles, especially the new forces of car manufacturing, which in the long run makes people think that this is the function of electric vehicles. In fact, as long as the vehicle's electronic and electrical architecture is advanced enough, fuel vehicles can still be rapidly iteratively upgraded through vehicle OTA.
When you give your car maintenance, you may do a software upgrade by the way, which can fix some small problems to optimize the car experience (of course, there are also cases of reverse optimization).
However, this kind of offline upgrade generally has a long cycle and a cumbersome process. If you don't like to go to the 4S shop for maintenance, and don't visit the forum without adding a car friend group, you may never know that your car can be upgraded.
OTA remote upgrade has been applied to mobile electronic devices for a long time, and in recent years, with the development of automotive electronic and electrical architecture, the popularity of mobile Internet, and the improvement of security technology, it has been applied to cars. Tesla is a pioneer in this field, and later new car-making forces are also good at this.
Geely Automobile proposed a vehicle OTA when it launched Xingrui in 2020. In 2021, the Star Yue L equipped with three large screens built-in Galaxy OS car machine system was launched, and the car machine system received more and more attention.
Xingyue L is probably the largest model in the history of Geely Automobile with the largest total screen area, and friends who often play computer games know that the higher the screen resolution and the greater the number, the higher the performance requirements for the graphics card. Xingyue L is equipped with Qualcomm Snapdragon 8155 chip, 7nm process, which is the top performance model in the current mass production of car machine chips.
More importantly, the GEEA2.0 electrical and electronic architecture opens more than 1300 signal interfaces for Geely Galaxy OS and implements more than 170 vehicle control functions, so that the vehicle OTA has a basis for implementation.
Geely Galaxy OS is the latest model car machine system created by EGATONG Technology, which is inextricably linked between EGAT AND Geely, co-founded by Mr. Li Shufu and Mr. Shen Ziyu in 2016, and currently provides vehicle system solutions for Geely Lynk & Co and other models.
One of the major features of Geely Galaxy OS is that the update iteration is fast. The system was released on July 20, 2021, and as of the end of last year, it has been updated twice, 1.1 and 1.2, adding 70 new functions and upgrading 49 major functions, which will only appear on new forces electric vehicles before.
There are a lot of new features, and after I've been experiencing them for a few days, there are a few that have left a deep impression on me.
Added goddess mode, the seat automatically moves back when the co-driver gets in the car, and when the door is closed, the seat automatically moves forward to the appropriate position. At the same time, the virtual voice image is moved to the passenger screen and the welcome message and welcome music are played. In addition, the co-driver screen can also be set up with an exclusive screensaver, which is suitable for a surprise to the girlfriend.
When the main driver opens the door and gets on the car, the left side of the home page of the central control screen automatically pops up three high-frequency car control buttons for high-frequency use, namely start-stop switch, seat adjustment, and trunk switch.
With new game features, the co-pilot can play more items in the car, and you can even play two games on two screens.
The co-pilot screen can now be turned off individually, so it doesn't look wasteful when driving alone, and it can also reduce some distractions at night. In addition, the screen brightness can be automatically adjusted according to the ambient brightness.
Speech recognition is more powerful, and continuous dialogue can cover car control functions such as windows, air conditioners, seats, etc. If you turn on the experimental "main driver geek mode", you can complete most of the functions of conventional speech recognition without waking up. Of course, this feature is more suitable for when driving alone.
In my opinion, in addition to absorbing the opinions of users, Geely Galaxy OS also draws on the successful experience of those new forces in car-making to a certain extent, and raises the user experience of traditional fuel vehicles to a new height: in addition to responding to needs, it can also be empathetic and first what users think.
Of course, it also has some places that can be optimized, such as the menu can be more concise: daytime and nighttime modes can be combined with the brightness of the screen; the seat heating and ventilation has a total of four buttons, in fact, there is no need to divide into two submenus; there are four or five entrances related to the setting in the application bar, and the learning cost is higher.
When switching driving modes, the hand is turned by the knob, but the outer ring is rotated in the screen, which always seems to be in reverse direction, but it seems logical to think about it. The early Audi MMI also had this problem, often unable to navigate the direction.
It is reported that Geely Galaxy OS will soon release version 1.3, I don't know what kind of upgrade there will be, I will test it for you again when I have the opportunity. In addition, it is also expected that more geely models in the future can be equipped with Galaxy OS systems, especially Xingrui.
The author of this article is Ao Yifeng, a kick car gang