In the past two years, when I look at cars and buy cars, I always listen to the sales staff tell you that vehicles support OTAs. So what is an OTA? What is OTA for everyday use of cars?
The full name of the OTA is Over-the-Air Technology; Direct translation is the aerial download technology, what does it mean? To put it bluntly, the vehicle's own system can be upgraded online.
Just like the phone in your pocket, every once in a while the system will prompt you that it is time for the software to upgrade. After the upgrade, you can fix the vulnerabilities and patches of the mobile phone, fix the bugs, after the system upgrade, the mobile phone is smoother to use, it will be safer, just like you gave you a vaccine when you were a child, you can prevent potential diseases.
Car OTAs and mobile phones are not the same, and car OTAs are divided into FOTA and SOTA. SOTA refers to software upgrades, such as maps, music software, and chat software upgrades in our car-machine system, which all belong to the category of SOTA. Almost all of the new models currently on sale have SOTA upgrades. This is actually more like a mobile phone OTA upgrade, mainly for the car's car machine system.
FOTA upgrade is mainly for the vehicle firmware upgrade, which includes the engine, motor, gearbox, chassis, brakes and other parts, this upgrade for the performance of the vehicle or has a greater impact, FOTA in some pure electric models more applications, Tesla, Weilai, Xiaopeng and great wall, Geely, Roewe and other models support FOTA upgrade. In the future, FOTA will likely become one of the standards for smart cars.
Vehicle OTA upgrades seem to have many benefits, but is that all good for consumers? There are some chicken thief manufacturers' models OTA has a lot of charges, such as OTA acceleration needs to be charged, OTA seat heating upgrade needs to be charged, battery life upgrade needs to be charged, auxiliary driving upgrade needs to be charged, media center chip upgrade needs to be charged, vehicle remote function upgrade needs to be charged, etc. After seeing so many items that need to be charged for upgrades, the general family must have a tight wallet, which is not like the membership function of a network disk.
Another charging mode, before your vehicle leaves the factory some hardware functions have been installed on the vehicle, but you can not use, if you want to use the need to open through the software fee, this charging model gives customers more choice space, the function I have, the user can not be your freedom.
The follow-up voyage of pure electric vehicle OTA has been greatly reduced? In today's rapid development of the "new four modernizations" of electrification, networking, intelligence and sharing in the automotive industry, some technologies need to continue to be improved to better serve car owners. There have been car owners before, more than one brand of car owners, after discovering their vehicle OTA, the battery life has seriously shrunk, as little as 10%, more than 20%, these are all in the owner is not unaware of the situation, there is no request for confirmation of the message prompt. For this kind of operation of the manufacturer, many people express that it is difficult to understand. This behavior, known as "locking the power", is to change the upper limit and charging rate of battery charging through the system upgrade level, and the manufacturer is known as the safety of the owner, and the logic behind it is still immature in technology.
Last year, the Ministry of Industry and Information Technology also issued relevant policies in response to this situation, requiring enterprises to "implement the main responsibility of enterprises, strengthen automotive data security, network security, software upgrades, functional safety and expected functional safety management, and ensure product quality and production consistency." "Based on the rapid development trend of intelligent connected vehicles, more and more consumers will buy intelligent networked vehicles, and the responsibilities of enterprises must be clarified. to protect the rights and interests of consumers.
Finally, do you think it is reasonable for manufacturers to upgrade the fee and "lock the power" after the OTA upgrade of the pure electric car "for safety"?