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Author 丨 Orange Orange
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"200 blocks to fool me? " is an original rights protection song that was widely circulated among the owners of wei carriages at the beginning of the year.
The reason is that some car owners have found that WM officials use the preferential policy of 200 yuan Jingdong card and free maintenance to attract Weima to the 4S shop for maintenance, but it is suspected that the vehicle is secretly configured through OTA to "castrate" and implement the "lock electricity" behavior. One of the brain-opening riders wrote the song to express his displeasure.
According to the feedback of the owner of the Wei carriage, the vehicle suspected of being locked in the electricity actually lasted only about 180 kilometers, which was about 50% smaller than the officially advertised cruising distance of 400 kilometers. Some car owners also sent a lawyer's letter through official channels, but as of press time, WM has not made any response to this matter.
Coincidentally, in July last year, GAC Toyota's new energy model iA5 was exposed to the problem of restricting the vehicle's power without the owner's permission to forcibly upgrade the vehicle's BMS battery management system through the background. At that time, the incident also alarmed the State Administration of Market Supervision.
In fact, the two "locks" also have common points, that is, before the incident, the models involved had a number of spontaneous combustion accidents.
According to this deduction, car companies seem to have regarded OTAs as one of the means to protect the car machine system and reduce the risk of vehicle use.
01 The kindness of the depot?
OTA full name "Over-The-Air", that is, over-the-air download technology, has been widely used in mobile phones, tablets and other digital products, with the convenience of remote upgrades, OTA technology ended the early years of digital product upgrades, must use the physical data line cumbersome.
The new energy vehicles led by Tesla have created a precedent for automobile OTA. After years of development, OTA technology has been widely used in the automotive field, and has even become the focus of publicity of many car companies.
Volkswagen CEO Dean said in 2019 that he decided to build Volkswagen into a software-driven automobile company; Chen Hong, chairman of SAIC Motor, also said in an interview with the media that "software-defined automobiles" has become the strategic consensus of the head enterprises in the automotive industry chain.
This can also be seen from the increase in the number of OTA upgrades of car companies.
According to the data released by the State Administration for Market Regulation, in 2021, major car companies reported OTA upgrades, a total of 351 times, an increase of 55% over 2020, and the number of vehicles involved increased by 307% year-on-year.
For example, Ideal Auto will push the assisted driving function at the end of 2021; Xiaopeng Automobile will push the parking lot memory parking function in 2021.
It can be seen that as the automotive industry becomes more intelligent, OTA technology that optimizes the smart car experience is providing stronger market competitiveness for smart car products.
However, when the OTA technology that is used to improve the user experience is transformed into a means for manufacturers to "wipe their butts" for the problems existing in the design stage, it is inevitably a little unreasonable. For example, through OTA upgrades, the relevant parameters of BMS (battery management system) are rewritten to limit the power lock behavior of power battery performance.
According to the previous report of China Energy News, in order to solve the potential spontaneous combustion problem of the battery system, a number of OEMs have limited the endurance level and charging efficiency of new energy vehicles by rewriting the procedures of the battery management system, that is, "locking the power", thereby reducing the risk of spontaneous combustion of the battery to a certain extent.
In this regard, Cao Guangping, an independent researcher of new energy and intelligent networked vehicles, said: Changing the battery power by "locking the power" method is equivalent to modifying the performance parameters of the vehicle mileage, reducing the performance of the product, which is no longer consistent with the mileage of the announcement directory on the product, and will cause insufficient battery power under the condition of opening air conditioning or heavy load, which is not the normal attenuation of the battery.
The most critical thing is that many "locking" are operations made by manufacturers themselves without being informed by the owner.
At the end of 2021, WM Motors, which caused "public anger", launched the so-called "New Year's Eve User Premium" activity for consumers, not only for free comprehensive inspection of vehicles, but also gave the owner a 200 yuan Jingdong card.
However, according to consumers, after the inspection, the performance of the vehicle has changed, before the maximum charge can be charged to about 70 degrees, after the inspection can only be charged to about 48 degrees, the vehicle endurance reduced by dozens of kilometers. Moreover, this problem is still discovered by WM users themselves.
This is also the direct cause of the owner's rights protection, according to the corresponding reports, as of now, the scale of the number of rights defenders has exceeded 100 people.
One of the car owners told the "new knowledge of science and technology" that even after the protection of rights, WM still does not care about the user, the owner is more blunt: even if the development to now, these uncles (referring to Weima) people still ignore you, even if I buy a bicycle quality problem, the manufacturer he has to manage it.
The core behind this kind of problem caused by OTAs is the huge degree of information asymmetry gap between consumers and car manufacturers.
02 Blind spot for car owners
According to the data of the Association, the wholesale penetration rate of new energy vehicle manufacturers has increased from 5.3% in 2020 to 15.7% in 2021, and the retail penetration rate has increased to 14.8%. While new energy vehicles are popular, OTA technology is becoming more common. According to CITIC Securities, the penetration rate of automotive OTAs has increased from 4% in 2019 to 42% in November 2021.
In stark contrast to the significant increase in the number of OTA upgrades and the number of vehicles covered, consumers are in an extremely weak market position when dealing with car companies' OTAs.
Because the development of the industry is in the early stages, the relevant laws and regulations are not perfect, resulting in many consumers often have nowhere to complain when they encounter unreasonable phenomena caused by OTA upgrades.
In July 2021, Ideal Auto pushed a version of the OTA upgrade to car owners. According to the update at the time, the version of the OTA upgrade provided two options of "agree" and "disagree" when the user chose, which seemed to give the user enough choice. However, if the user chooses not to agree, the user will lose the right to use the corresponding functions such as remote control.
In August of the same year, the Ministry of Industry and Information Technology issued the Opinions on Strengthening the Management of Intelligent and Connected Vehicle Manufacturers and Product Access, proposing to standardize software upgrades and clarify that enterprises should file with the Ministry of Industry and Information Technology before implementing online upgrade activities. If the upgrade involves a change in technical parameters, the enterprise is required to go through the change procedures in advance.
But this does not seem to affect the "hegemonic" behavior of car companies when upgrading OTAs.
According to reports, in the first version of the OTA upgrade pushed by Ideal Automobile in September, it clearly stated that it would collect sensitive information such as App account information, navigation data, and search history, and the upgrade did not seem to provide users with a "deny option", and if they did not agree, they would not be able to continue to use the vehicle normally.
In contrast, if the ideal car at least provides consumers with a nominal choice, the behavior of Weima, which has not yet responded to it, is even more barbaric.
According to the feedback of the owner of weima on the "new knowledge of science and technology", even if the vehicle is turned off, WM can still realize the OTA upgrade of the vehicle through remote control, and this process does not require the owner to perform any operation, which is a silent upgrade.
In the black cat complaint platform, some netizens also encountered a similar phenomenon, some people said: "After receiving the complaint, WM continued to make small moves, violated the regulations of the Quality Supervision Bureau, silently upgraded through remote OTA, changed or deleted user car data in batches in the middle of the night, creating the illusion of unlocking, but the actual endurance was not improved." ”
What's more, some users found that WM quietly adjusted the corresponding legal information of the OTA link, adding a clause to the updated clause: "We can remotely update or modify your vehicle system without further notice to you or obtain your consent." Software updates or modifications may affect or even delete personal information stored in your vehicle's systems. Please take care to store and back up your personal information. You expressly agree that we may make such updates or modifications in accordance with these Terms. ”
This means that the depot can skip the user authorization link and directly adjust and modify the relevant configuration of the vehicle, which has a sense of "overlord clause".
It is also true that some Weijia owners have previously reacted to the media that Weima uses the OTA function to remotely change the display data of the car and machine on a large scale, that is, false unlocking, trying to destroy evidence, and the battery life has not improved at all
It can be seen that even if the new policy has been issued, some car and machine manufacturers still go their own way, with the OTA method, infringing on consumer rights and interests, and the power lock is the most obvious consumer perception in this kind of information asymmetric OTA upgrade.
03 Recite the crooked Good Scriptures
Need to first admit the fact that power locking is a protective measure, almost all new energy vehicles, the factory has a certain degree of power lock settings.
According to the paper "The effect of discharge depth on battery life" study found that for lithium-ion batteries, when the remaining battery power is between 80% and 95%, it is easy to cause partial loss of battery capacity, between 20% and 80%, because the battery deterioration is small, it is conducive to prolonging the service life of the battery.
This means that reducing the depth of charge and discharge is conducive to battery safety and prolonging battery life, so vehicle manufacturers also have certain restrictions on power batteries when new energy vehicles leave the factory.
The lock electricity that is now criticized by consumers is essentially a "secondary lock", that is, further protective measures made by car companies for the safety and battery life of delivery vehicles.
This also explains why the "power locking" problems exposed by GAC and WM all occurred after the spontaneous combustion of vehicles.
For the matter of car companies locking electricity, Cheng Duanqian, deputy director of the data product department of the China Automobile Research Institute Data Center, also expressed his own views - locking electricity is only a remedy and should not be used as a normalized means.
After all, whether it is OTA locking or product recall, its essence is a remedy for problems in the early development of vehicles.
Today's car companies, however, seem to be increasingly relying on remote OTA technology as an alternative to vehicle recalls.
According to data from the State Administration for Market Regulation, in the whole of 2021, the domestic OTA recall involving defective vehicles has approached 30% of the total recall volume of the whole year, involving nearly 3 million vehicles.
In this way, there is a possibility that the later technical remedy will be the operation of exaggerating the publicity in the early stage.
For example, car and machine manufacturers can improve the performance indicators of the vehicle in the early stage of product launch, relying on the high reliability of the early hardware in exchange for excellent feedback from the first users. Since then, with the help of OTA upgrades, the performance indicators of the vehicle have been reduced to maintain the safety of the vehicle.
After all, from a legal point of view, although the power locking behavior may infringe on consumers' right to know and privacy, it is not false propaganda, and due to the reality of information asymmetry, the vast majority of consumers often have greater difficulties in the evidence collection stage.
Undoubtedly, the relevant departments still need to increase the supervision of car companies OTA, whether it is the WM incident or the previous GAC iA5 incident, which reflects the car manufacturers' attempts to use OTA technology as a tool to evade responsibility, as well as the unsoundness of corresponding laws and regulations.
This is not good news for the realization of the development vision of "by 2025, the competitiveness of the mainland new energy vehicle market will be significantly enhanced, key technologies such as power batteries, drive motors, and vehicle operating systems will make major breakthroughs, and the safety level will be comprehensively improved".
Perhaps, for car companies, due to the particularity of power batteries, locking the battery capacity in a safe range can prevent the short circuit phenomenon caused by overcharging and due to the accumulation of lithium ions, so as to avoid serious accidents such as spontaneous combustion in vehicles.
However, it must be admitted that this is a great unfairness for consumers, that is, consumers need to take responsibility for the problems that manufacturers may have in the product design stage, not to mention, if the vehicle itself already has safety hazards, how many consumers dare to continue to use the vehicle.
As the annual 315 International Consumer Rights Day approaches, perhaps the entire new energy automotive industry should think about whether OTA technology is in line with long-termism, a way to provide a good experience for consumers, or a remedy for design mistakes and advance layout.