The Ministry of Industry and Information Technology issued regulatory standards for car OTA upgrades to bid farewell to barbaric growth

With the development of technology, automotive software online upgrade (OTA) has become a watershed in defining traditional cars and smart cars.

Compared with the traditional offline software upgrade, OTA upgrade has the advantages of timely, convenient and low cost, and at the same time has the advantages of quickly repairing system defects, realizing product iterative upgrades, and improving product experience. However, with the hot sales of smart cars in recent years, the potential risks of OTA upgrades have gradually been exposed, among them, in 2021, it was exposed that many car companies have "locked the electricity" of sold vehicles through OTA upgrades without informing the owners, which has damaged the rights and interests of many car owners.

Is there any need to regulate automotive OTA upgrades? Recently, the Equipment Industry Development Center of the Ministry of Industry and Information Technology issued the Notice on Carrying out the Filing of Online Upgrades of Automotive Software (hereinafter referred to as the "Notice"), which includes five parts, including the scope of filing, filing requirements, filing workflow, implementation arrangements and corporate responsibility, which will supervise and manage the whole process of OTA behavior by car companies from the source to the upgrade.

Speaking of the OTA upgrade filing, yuan Shuai, a capital market researcher, said in an interview with the China Business Daily reporter: "At present, the scope of online upgrade is not limited to the software system of the vehicle, but gradually extends to the power, chassis, battery and other content, the car is not a computer, not like a mobile phone, it is not only about personal safety, but also involves public safety, once there is a problem to pay a heavy price, so I personally think that the supervision of car OTA upgrades is very necessary." ”

OTA "fast forward" brings new challenges

"Evolvable cars", "Upgrade without going to the store", "Vehicles are often new". At present, the vehicle OTA has not only become an important indicator to evaluate the R&D strength and intelligent technology level of the automobile OEMs, but also an important choice basis for consumers when buying and changing cars.

A set of survey reports in the "2022 China Automotive OTA Industry Analysis Report" released by guanyan report network shows that 50% of consumers will use car OTA as an important basis for car selection when buying and changing cars.

For car OTA as the basis for choosing a car? Many car owners who purchase OTA upgrades reflect that "the cars they buy have new changes after each OTA, which makes them have more expectations for car products and services." ”

When it comes to car OTA upgrades, a senior executive of a car company once expressed its value: "Throughout the life cycle, the models purchased by users will maintain the same software capabilities as subsequent new cars on the market, and OTA upgrades will also become the new normal of future cars." ”

"The significance of OTA is to provide services that are constantly upgraded and updated, and more and more possibilities are realized through the download and update of software. For the intelligent automotive industry, this is the next key direction of technological development, user needs, information security, driving safety, car company services, after-sales maintenance will need it. Yuan Shuai told reporters.

The reporter paid attention to the fact that although OTA technology has been widely used, it has exposed many types of problems due to the lack of effective supervision at the beginning of development.

"OTAs are the highlight of the current smart car, but there are also some problems with the current OEAs of vehicle companies." Yuan Bo, senior engineer of communications and strategic planning expert, said in an interview with reporters, "First, some of the highlight functional features promoted by (car companies) in the early stage were not delivered to customers as scheduled, but they were publicized to be supported by late OTA, but there was a deviation between the functions and functions promoted by OTA upgrades, which caused disputes; second, the content of OTA upgrades lacked supervision and review, and they are still in a blind spot, the permissions of car machines are easy to be abused, and the privacy of users cannot be guaranteed." ”

It is understood that OTA is mainly divided into SOTA (Software OTA, the essence is software upgrade) and FOTA (Firmware OTA, the essence is firmware upgrade), SOTA update is limited to the car central control large screen and related ECU (driving computer) based updates, and for the auxiliary driving system and motors, battery packs and other systems can not do anything. FOTA opens up most of the ECUs on the car, realizing almost 100% hardware control of the whole vehicle by the vehicle software operating system.

At present, there are many car companies that can do SOTA, but because FOTA involves the important controller of the whole vehicle, including the update of subsystems such as body, power and automatic driving, it is more difficult.

"Some vehicle companies show the advanced nature of the vehicle through frequent OTAs. In fact, the high-frequency OTA upgrades of some new energy vehicle companies are only to update in-vehicle applications, which is an asymmetric competition for relatively standardized OTA upgrades, misleading to customer purchases, and frequent OTA upgrades are also easy to cause customer resentment. Yuan Bo said.

"Last year, there were a number of car companies ' power locking behavior' related to OTA upgrades. After the car company upgraded the BMS battery management system, many consumers reported that their cars were not charged enough, the charging speed decreased, and the mileage was shortened. Despite consumer complaints, car companies do not admit that if there is third-party supervision, this may not happen. Zhang Xiang, dean of the New Energy Vehicle Technology Research Institute of Jiangxi New Energy Technology Vocational College, told reporters.

What is "locking the power"? It means that the car company locks the SOC (battery charge state) by rewriting the BMS battery management system of the electric vehicle, which in turn affects the battery capacity and charge and discharge performance. This method can reduce the voltage and current, improve the safety redundancy capacity of the battery, have a certain protective effect on the safety of the vehicle, and avoid spontaneous combustion of the vehicle.

Regulation brings transparency to OTA upgrades

When it comes to supervising the upgrading of automotive OTA, a number of industry insiders told reporters, "It is very necessary." ”

The Notice clearly requires that the vehicle manufacturers that have obtained the road motor vehicle production access license, their automotive vehicle products with OTA upgrade functions (hereinafter referred to as "products") and the OTA upgrade activities implemented should be filed for the record. The applicant should be a vehicle manufacturer.

Speaking of the "Notice", Yuan Shuai told reporters bluntly that car OTAs are not upgraded than mobile phone OTAs, and supervision is very necessary, "At present, the scope of online upgrades is not limited to the software system of the vehicle, but gradually extends to power, chassis, battery and other content." The car is not a computer, not like a mobile phone, it is not only about personal safety, but also about public safety, once there is a problem to pay a heavy price, so I personally think that the car OTA upgrade supervision is very necessary. For the car, safe and stable operation is the most important, but also the bottom line, for the OTA upgrade to strengthen the supervision, not redundant, but responsible for public safety. ”

"Now there are some consumers who are worried that the quality of smart cars is immature, and there are bugs in car software. The government's intervention in the supervision of OTA software upgrades will help eliminate some consumers' concerns about smart cars and promote the benign development of the market. Zhang Xiang said.

The reporter paid attention to the fact that the notice pointed out that enterprises implementing OTA upgrade activities should ensure that automotive products comply with relevant requirements such as national laws and regulations, technical standards and technical specifications, and ensure the consistency of automotive product production. At the same time, enterprises are required to complete the filing of enterprise management capabilities, the filing of models and functions and the filing of specific upgrade activities in accordance with the requirements before they can implement OTA upgrade activities.

It is understood that according to the impact assessment of the upgrade activities, the specific upgrade activities should be filed at different levels. For relevant upgrade activities that do not involve changes in technical performance such as product safety, environmental protection, energy saving, and anti-theft, enterprises can directly carry out upgrades after filing.

For related upgrade activities involving changes in technical performance such as product safety, environmental protection, energy saving, and anti-theft, verification materials should be submitted to ensure that the products comply with relevant requirements such as national laws and regulations, technical standards and technical specifications.

It is worth mentioning that the Notice requires that the relevant upgrade activities involving the automotive autonomous driving function (driving automation classification level 3 and above) should be approved by the Ministry of Industry and Information Technology.

"This proposal that automotive software OTA upgrades need to be filed is actually a constraint on vehicle companies in the process, and vehicle companies should be more focused on providing advanced and stable software services that customers are currently purchasing, rather than attracting customers through false publicity, or by deliberately increasing the number of unnecessary OTA upgrades to attract customers." At the same time, for users, the filing mechanism can achieve traceability, and also lays a foundation for regulating the content of OTA upgrades in the future and avoiding abuse of permissions and infringing personal privacy. Yuan Bo told reporters.