With the advent of the digital era, products can not only bring users an intelligent sense of driving security and pleasure, but also become a platform for enterprises and users to interact. According to the data from JD Power's survey of China's new car purchase intention research, intelligence has become an important car purchase decision factor second only to quality, performance, brand and design.
Under the trend of intelligence, OEMs have also gradually changed from the original product + technology as the center to the process centered on user experience and operation; the boundaries and patterns of suppliers are also being continuously expanded; at the same time, the addition of new car-making forces has also accelerated the development of automotive networking. In the future, the car will become an intelligent terminal in life and an important factor in connecting people and different scenarios. Therefore, more and more car companies and suppliers will add OTA functions to the car, and the car OTA will become particularly important in the current situation.
Image credit: eSync Alliance
Value: OTAs empower smart cars with new value
Tesla, as the originator of vehicle OTA, has the ability to have vehicle OTA capabilities from the Model S launched in 2012 to the latest Model 3. Not only can the in-car entertainment system, application, etc. be upgraded through OTA, but also the ECU software update can be realized, such as battery management system, electric drive control unit, vehicle control unit, etc., and its strategy is quite forward-looking and practical from the perspective of software upgrade.
Through Tesla's OTA experience, we can find that automotive OTAs are constantly breaking the boundaries between human-computer interaction, and in the future, they will also bring many ideas for how to develop OTAs between OEMs and suppliers. Starting from the three aspects of users, OEMs and suppliers, the author analyzes the new value that OTAs bring to smart cars.
Value 1: OTA to meet the personalized needs of users. In the future, users' needs in different models, functions, configurations, price points, etc. will be differentiated, so the value deviation that brings users to perception is particularly important. It is embodied in the personalized transformation of allowing the car to adapt to the needs of users - thousands of people, according to the user's individual personalized needs, so as to be specific to each customer, according to their use scenarios, to customize a product for them. In addition, operations and user experience design jointly connect users and products, in the user experience design stage, through the product target users to study, understand the needs, extract the needs, through interaction design, visual design for user experience design. Let users and products make all-round contact, so that users continue to develop stickiness with the vehicle during use.
Value two: OTA empowers oem product operations. Under the impetus of technology, business relationships are being reshaped, and new business relationships also put forward new requirements for user operations. At present, the car is leaping from the platform model of 1.0 to the experience mode of 2.0, especially the community thinking represented by Weilai, maximizing the value of user experience and activating their social relationships. Based on the model of social relationship fission to obtain new retail, this new ecological model can be built through automotive OTA, allowing users to actively provide new business value with word of mouth.
Value Three: OTAs add software to vendors. At present, young users have a positive attitude towards the personalization of products, and in the industry, Wuling, Great Wall, and Geely have launched personalized products, attracting the favor of countless young people. Under this trend, various software technology development providers are also planning future OTA software value-added technologies and services. In autonomous driving and parking, it is the most obvious aspect of user perception, and it is also an area that is currently being iteratively upgraded. From the perspective of the intelligent cockpit, how to make the connection between sound, light, and electric smell in the car to create a scene for the users themselves has also become a direction with great potential in the future.
Image source: Tesla
Risk: OTAs expose smart car security vulnerabilities
At present, OTAs have begun to become the standard for more and more new cars. In a report, ABI Research, a market-looking consultancy, predicts that 203 million vehicles will be configured through OTAs for software upgrades by 2022, with at least 22 million vehicles with advanced FOTA firmware upgrade capabilities.
Admittedly, OTAs are not a panacea, and its upgrade has caused a lot of trouble. Just 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 for compensation. 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. 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.
Even Tesla, the originator of OTA, has repeatedly recalled its products because of the problems it has exposed. A few days ago, the relevant channels learned that the National Highway Traffic Safety Administration (hereinafter referred to as "NHTSA") announced that due to audio problems, Boombox does not meet safety standards, and Tesla recalled nearly 580,000 OTAs in the United States.
Through the above cases, we can find that OTAs also expose many risks when upgrading iterations. Previously, we took stock of the three major values that OTAs bring to users, and we can find that the car is inside the car, which is actually a huge user information collection library, and the existence of the OTA is to iterate through the use of this data. In fact, cars have as many as 150 ECUs and about 100 million lines of code, and this number is expanding with the development of intelligent networking in automobiles. It seems that the problems caused by car OTAs only involve car companies and users, but in fact, the vulnerability of car OTAs also brings huge hidden dangers to the information security of users and OEMs, and also creates the risk of being hacked at any time.
The security vulnerabilities and risks associated with OTAs come not only from automakers, but also from outside. In 2020, a company called Ingenext offered Tesla owners a low-cost solution, and owners only need to plug a connector in the car's MCU to get software updates, which costs half the official price of Tesla. Subsequently, Tesla announced that it would take action against this so-called "hacking" attack. Some Tesla owners who have purchased Ingenext equipment have begun to receive in-car notifications warning that they have detected "incompatible vehicle modifications," which could lead to "potential safety risks." This means that OTA technology must more strictly follow the layout of the entire car information security.
Contradiction: whether to loosen or block or choose the best balance point
According to Gaz Automotive News on February 16, 2022, foreign media reported that Sibros, a car networking software and data management platform company, announced that its automotive OTA products Deep Updater and Bootloader have obtained ISO 26262 ASIL-D certification issued by global safety certificate provider UL. Sibros offers a comprehensive automotive OTA software management system that enables original equipment manufacturers (OEMs) to provide in-depth, secure and reliable software updates for safety-critical components of a variety of vehicles. The ASIL-D rating indicates that its products meet the highest functional safety requirements for automotive OTA software, such as updated best practices, processes and procedures. In addition, these best practices apply to the UNECE WP.29 regulatory framework, helping automakers achieve cybersecurity requirements throughout the vehicle software development and use lifecycle.
Image credit: Sibros
This news is undoubtedly gratifying, but at the same time, the mainland's increasingly strict management of data security has caused a certain contradiction with the idea of upgrading and iteration of OTA to provide users with personalized services. Its relevant laws and regulations involve safety, energy saving, environmental protection, anti-theft parameters, but where the development needs to involve the above must be declared to the Ministry of Industry and Information Technology, so the declaration for the basic performance of the vehicle will have a great adjustment, the main engine factory needs to think about in what range can provide users with appropriate needs. This has also become a difficulty and problem that major OEMs and software developers actually encounter in the process of developing OTAs and carrying out software upgrade iterations.
How to develop in the conditions permitted by laws and regulations, in line with the safety standards of OTA products, but also has become the current industry is delving into the direction, Gaz Auto as a participant, witness and builder of the automotive industry, in the automotive industry booming today, for this industry hot topics are naturally also very concerned, in order to fully cope with the challenge of vehicle information security, Gaz Auto will be held on March 17-18, 2022 2022 China Automotive Information Security and Functional Safety Conference, to understand the industry trends, Clarify the direction of development.