Written by | Liu Yiwei
Edit | Yang Guang
Produced | Automotive Sankei
The trouble caused by OTA upgrades, WM may not be the first encounter in smart electric vehicles, but it is the most intractable at present.
Last month, 173 car owners jointly sent a lawyer's letter to WM Motors to defend their rights, asking them to admit the fact of "locking the electricity" and apologizing to the owners to compensate.
A person familiar with the matter told The Auto Industry and Economics that a week or two after the public issuance of the rights defense lawyer's letter, the OTA upgrade in the back of the vehicle appeared at least four or five times, and although the charging voltage display returned to normal levels, the battery life still could not keep up.
"At 2 o'clock in the middle of the night on the eve of the Spring Festival, the company made remote changes to the vehicle system through OTA, secretly eliminating the evidence of power locking."
Activist car owners called the wave of operations in Weima a "fake unlock."
A scene of déjà vu happened a few months ago.
In September last year, a large number of GAC Toyota iA5 car owners posted evidence on social platforms that car companies were "locking the electricity" through OTA remote upgrades, and successive whistleblower letters even alarmed the State Administration of Supervision.
According to incomplete statistics, last year alone, some pure electric models under SAIC Roewe, GAC Toyota, WM, Great Wall and other brands have had a "power lock" situation.
Judging from the results, most car companies are in the name of OTA upgrades, secretly correcting the battery voltage parameters or "locking" the battery output power, which in turn leads to a large contraction in the mileage.
When the industry generally agrees with the statement of software-defined cars, OTA upgrades are becoming a routine operation in the development of smart cars, especially the OTA function of the whole vehicle is gradually becoming an important symbol of future cars.
However, at the beginning of the rise of OTA technology, relevant laws and regulations are still in a large blank period, in the process of technology landing, some car companies began to move "crooked minds" on OTAs, and users with higher requirements for intelligence have unfortunately become victims.
While probing, while "out of control", while optimizing, the cycle is perhaps the most realistic portrayal of the current OTA in the terminal.
NO.1
["Locking" is right and wrong]
At the end of last year, WM Automobile launched the "New Year User Premium" campaign to users. For 18,888 lucky users, an official gift package, a comprehensive vehicle inspection and a 200 yuan JD card were prepared.
Li Zhi is one of the "lucky ones".
"I didn't take "locking electricity" seriously, and even felt that the remarks on the Internet were a bit cloudy", as the earliest group of owners of WM, he has absolute trust in the WM brand.
What really interested Li Zhi was the data detection results of more than 400 people in the rights protection group.
The experience summed up by everyone is: to determine whether the vehicle is locked, it is necessary to look at the power battery voltage on the dashboard when it is almost full.
(WM EX5) 400 model, when charged to 97%, if the power battery voltage is displayed less than 400V; when the charge reaches 99%, the voltage display is less than 406V, it is locked.
And it is.
After participating in this event, when the power reaches 99%, the vehicle shows a voltage of 396V, which is about 10V less than the previous voltage in the same stage.
Perhaps it is not how to run long-distance reasons, after realizing that it may be "locked", Li Zhi also ran a long distance, and found that when the power is too low, the battery is no longer displayed when about 6%, and when the power is displayed at 3%, the power drops significantly, and finally even if the acceleration is stepped on to the end, it can only reach 47km/h.
In terms of cruising range, the official announcement of the 400 km WM EX5, the current winter endurance is only 160-180 km.
However, like Li Zhi, he is relatively lucky, at least 200 yuan of "compensation", and a large number of car owners have been officially "locked" for various reasons as early as last June.
As one of the representatives who initiated the joint rights protection of WM's "lock electricity", Liu Yi revealed the latest progress to the auto industry and economics.
"My car was recruited around May last year, and I was told that I could enter the store for free maintenance, and some riders were locked because they were notified of the new "and plug and charge" function in June last year. The reasons given by the 4S store are different, but the users who were locked in the electricity in June last year did not receive the Spring Festival maintenance notice. ”
Liu Yi believes that Weima is looking for a fish that slipped through the net, under the guise of a Spring Festival gift bag, to attack the last lucky person (lock electricity).
In fact, about the original intention of WM to lock electricity, car owners are not incomprehensible.
From a professional point of view, "locking electricity" is that car companies rewrite the battery management system (BMS) to re-fix the voltage range of the power battery to limit the upper charging limit of the battery and the total discharge charge, which can reduce the probability of thermal runaway of the battery to a certain extent and reduce the incidence of spontaneous combustion accidents.
He believes that the winter endurance is originally virtual, and car companies should "unlock" the battery to ensure the user's car experience, but what comes after half a year or so is not a solution, but another "trap".
Therefore, in only 2 days, 173 car owners have joined in before and after, and the number of relevant rights defenders has reached more than 600.
It is said that WM official is not idle, around the Spring Festival, some owners found that at two or three o'clock in the middle of the night, the vehicle was remotely upgraded through the OTA automatic system, this process does not require any user operation, secretly carried out.
The terminal performance is that when the vehicle is started again, the owner needs to log in again, and the interface of the car machine has also changed, and when the vehicle is rechecked according to the above detection method, the voltage will return to normal levels.
However, the change is only reflected in the numerical parameters of the voltage displayed by the vehicle.
"The voltage value is back to normal, but the charging speed is significantly slower, and the voltage value displayed by the charging pile and the actual mileage of the vehicle are still the same as before (the level when the power is locked)." Liu Yi said.
Everyone generally calls this wave of operations in WM "fake unlocking".
After the latest OTA upgrade, there is an additional invisible clause in the Wei carriage machine that does not pop up:
We may update or modify your vehicle system remotely without further notice or your consent. Software updates or modifications may affect or even delete personal information stored in your vehicle's systems.
"We're more worried that car companies can change the vehicle system privately through OTAs, which is really scary."
The rights of car owners are hot, and dealers are also feeling pressure.
"The sales volume in the store in January was very dismal, and the relevant demands have been discussed with the owner, and they are still waiting for the official reply of WM." The relevant person in charge of an authorized dealer of Beijing WM Automobile said.
The owner representative and the dealer representative also held an online + offline exchange meeting, and both sides hoped to coordinate and solve the problem as soon as possible.
According to the data provided by dealers, there are currently 985 cars in Beijing alone that are locked in electricity, including WM EX6, WM W6 and other models.
NO.2
[When privacy meets commercialization, car companies choose and trade off]
If car companies reverse OTA "locking power" is one of the unspoken rules of the industry, there is still a tentative approach in the industry.
In September last year, some ideal ONE owners said that they encountered overlord clauses when they were OTAs.
First, after this upgrade, only by choosing to agree can the car be used normally; second, the agreement shows that the ideal car will collect private data such as personal navigation and music playback history, and there is only an option to agree on the interface.
Owners are blocked from choice.
At that time, the OTA's "forced collection" of personal information caused a lot of controversy. The concerns from the perspective of car owners are more from the data security level, and the tentative approach of car companies is also difficult to say.
Different from the era of fuel vehicles, an important label of smart cars is to build and train intelligent driving models based on computing power, and a large number of real data of car owners has become an important foundation, and relying on OTAs to feed data back to car companies has become the fastest and most effective way.
It is said that the relevant person in charge of Ideal Auto at that time was unaware of this matter, but after 2.2 OTA, Ideal Auto no longer had any push, and at the end of last year, through the 3.0 version of OTA upgrade, the owner had the right to upgrade.
Similar scenes have also appeared on Weilai cars.
In October last year, through the OTA upgrade of Nio Cars, the car navigation suddenly appeared advertising pop-ups.
Subsequently, Weilai officials quickly responded: the information seen by the owner was a notification push of Weilai's related business, and indicated that he would not use the car screen to advertise business.
Soon, Weilai withdrew this "advertisement".
For the above situation, auto industry and economic consulted a car company engineer Wang Hua, "OTA technology itself has no problems, if you exclude the external causes of software bugs, this operation is mostly the intention of the main engine factory, collecting data or promoting advertising, more like a tentative action, may be to see the user feedback." “
In Wang Hua's view, the more important reason is that OTAs need to promote the business model of car companies, and its promotion is meaningful. OEMs want to harvest more benefits through OTAs, and create revenue in the software sector, and the space profit is still very large.
NO.3
[Do you believe in futures?] ]
There is a passage on the Internet:
Praise an ugly, lazy and no money person, it can be said that his heart is not bad; praise a low-value, and incomplete car, it can be said that it can be upgraded by OTA in the later stage.
Although the view is still biased, the distrust that comes back from the paragraph is real.
In October last year, the OTA upgrade was emphasized at the zero-run C11 listing conference.
The Zero Run C11 can be launched with 10 functions, including ACC adaptive cruise, AEB automatic emergency braking system, FCW forward collision warning, etc., and 12 intelligent driving assistance functions will be upgraded through OTA in the future.
The charm of car company marketing may lie in the artistry of the speech, fully functional but patiently waiting for the "follow-up".
Someone made such a summary, the more blurred the timeline, the more likely it is to draw a pie. Bringing imperfect products to the market prematurely, OTA upgrades have become a barrier for car companies to occupy market share in advance.
"If you honestly do a good job of things, and when these problems are solved, what if people have already divided up the market?" Therefore, many products can only be pushed into the market first, and then subsequently optimized. Wang Hua said.
The point given by engineers is that under the software definition, some system flaws need time to be gradually iteratively optimized, after all, no product is perfect from the beginning of the design.
However, some users are optimistic: "The vehicle has not yet fully played the level it should have reached, and then waited for the software upgrade, and once the OTA can not solve it twice." ”
An important reason why car companies use OTA functions as one of the preferred selling points to introduce to consumers is that OTAs are an important enabling means for vehicle growth.
Under the high level of automation, OTA has become the best enabling channel for first going offline and then finding supplements, which means that the end point of the car is no longer the product itself, and the subsequent development capabilities of the main engine factory have the competitive advantage of lasting output.
NO.4
[The "grey area" of OTA recalls]
There are also masters who want to use OTAs to steal the concept of recall, and frantically test on the edge of morality.
Ideal Cars, for example, has caused controversy over the use of OTA upgrades to improve vehicle design.
It didn't take long for Ideal to issue a letter of apology, redefining the upgrade as a "recall" and initiating a proactive recall process.
However, how to determine whether the OTA upgrade belongs to the recall is still in the discussion stage in the industry.
"Many less obvious errors, the main engine factory does not need to rush to recall, you can in the vehicle free first insurance, or through the remote upgrade system, the update process secretly to solve the problem, this is the car company inertia thinking." An internal employee of a car company said.
It is worth noting that the OTA recall model is being widely used throughout the domestic automotive market.
According to the latest data released by the State Administration for Market Regulation, the 2021 mainland OTA recall involves 2.92 million defective vehicles, accounting for about one-third of the total recall volume of the whole year.
For car companies, one of the core values of OTAs is to be able to repair defects, and the biggest advantage of this recall method is that it can save costs and be more efficient, and most OTA recalls can be completed by 90% in 3 months.
According to analysts, by 2022, auto OTAs will save car companies about $35 billion a year, equivalent to the amount of investment in 17.5 Tesla's Shanghai factories.
"While we encourage companies to implement recalls using OTAs, they cannot use OTAs to evade recalls or replace recalls." Xiao Lingyun, director of the automotive department of the Defective Product Management Center of the State Administration for Market Regulation, raised such concerns.
Users also believe that if the OTA can solve the software and hardware problems of the vehicle, and the main engine factory has absolute control, then under the pretext of upgrading to secretly fix bugs, product defects will not become a gray area?
Behind the worries, on the one hand, major car companies are accelerating the layout of OTA technology, especially in the new energy vehicle market, equipped with OTA functions are gradually becoming the standard of automobiles; on the other hand, this year's new energy vehicle market sales will usher in a new round of substantial growth.
The China Automobile Association predicts that in 2022, the sales volume of new energy vehicles in mainland China will reach 5 million units, an increase of 47% year-on-year.
It is foreseeable that OTA upgrades will appear more and more frequently in the public eye, and under this new trend, the policy is already on the way.
At present, the official website of the State Administration for Market Regulation has successively issued the "Notice on Further Strengthening the Supervision of Remote Upgrade (OTA) Technology Recalls of Automobiles" and supplementary notices, requiring car companies to provide relevant codes to the state for the record before adopting OTA upgrades, and not allowing OEMs to "arbitrarily" change the code of automobiles.
NO.5
[Written at the end]
Finally, a little story to share.
In order to prevent the uncontrollable nature of OTA upgrades, some users have put forward the assumption that if our car and machine networks are not connected, is it not possible for car companies to change the display data remotely?
To be sure, the car and machine network is not connected, it is certainly not possible to successfully OTA, and the OEMs cannot change the data and functions.
But the collateral question is, do users know how to disconnect from the network? Know how to disconnect and can the operation be successful in the end? Even if the operation is successful, can you guarantee that it is really successful, instead of showing that it is successful but there is a background connection?
"After all, the card configured by the main engine factory on the car is opened by the main engine factory, and generally will not let the user know or operate." Wang Hua gave the answer.
Therefore, before the legal system is truly perfected, whether the OTA content issued to consumers is a defective patch or a real performance improvement depends on the manufacturer's own conscience.
(In the text, Li Zhi, Liu Yi, and Wang Hua are pseudonyms)