After years of technology accumulation and policy support, the development of China's electric vehicle market has a certain market foundation and technical foundation, and by April 2022, the number of electric vehicles in China's domestic market has reached 10.33 million units, breaking through the 10 million mark.
The domestic electric vehicle market is gradually increasing and has passed the initial stage of development, but in this market has not yet ushered in maturity in all aspects. In addition to the problems of charging time and endurance of the old production, some key component safety issues and some low-sensitivity intelligent interconnection problems are often not easy for users to pay attention to.
So, when the electric vehicle market has exceeded ten million vehicles, are these aspects mature enough in this market?
Core components, have higher challenges?
At the forefront should be the safety of electric vehicles, and safety issues include: core component battery safety, automatic driving technical specifications, intelligent vehicle networking security and other aspects. Now power battery suppliers and vehicle manufacturers are claiming to be able to develop power batteries that "do not fire and do not explode"; or claim that their BMS (battery thermal management) has good performance and can prevent batteries from overheating and catching fire.
But whether it is lithium iron phosphate batteries or ternary lithium batteries, it is impossible to achieve the possibility of completely no fire, and no one dares to say absolutely. After years of development, vehicle manufacturers have also launched their own power batteries, such as BYD blade batteries, GAC Aean magazine batteries, Great Wall Dayu batteries, etc.
The development of power batteries is very contradictory, in the ternary lithium battery performance to the limit, but also to improve the battery energy density, so the future power battery development direction began to "high nickel" development, such as the 811 series battery in the Ningde era. The high energy density also represents increased battery instability and reduced safety.
From a safety point of view, the safety of power batteries is a systematic problem, involving the proportion of elements used in batteries, the structural optimization of battery modules, and the vehicle strategy (safety issues arising from collisions) and many other aspects.
The improvement of power battery safety still needs a long cycle, and the follow-up needs to adapt to the higher safety challenges brought by higher energy density batteries.
However, it does not rule out the possibility of a variety of solutions, the first is the power exchange mode carried out by enterprises such as Weilai, which can ensure that the owner can get better safety screening when using the battery; the second, the battery pack warranty of companies such as BYD, if there is a safety problem such as mileage attenuation during use, it can be replaced directly for free; the third is the iterative technology of the BMS thermal management system launched by car companies and parts suppliers.
Is low-perception data security mature enough?
In addition to the core power battery, we still need to pay attention to the safety of intelligent networking. This aspect may be a link that electric vehicle users and consumers cannot perceive, or weakly perceived; it is directly related to the three key points of data security, network security and software security.
When you use the intelligent network connection of electric vehicles, you may form a link between the car end and the mobile phone end, and in this process, you may be able to collect various personal data through this link. In addition, the camera perception device on the body may also expose information.
For example, in overseas markets last year, hackers were able to remotely unlock and control the use of a Tesla's lights, doors, windows, and in-car entertainment systems, although it does not open up the most important module of the driving domain, but it may also pose a certain threat to driving safety.
Although vehicle companies (Weilai, Volvo, Dongfeng), parts suppliers (Mainland, Bosch) and Internet companies (360, Baidu, Tencent) have begun to build their own information security teams, acquire network security companies and launch vehicle intelligent security rescue solutions, there is no standardized set of access regulations and complete security regulations.
The Chinese market is not yet mature in the face of the security provisions of the intelligent car network, and only in April 2020 issued the access management guidelines (draft for comment), and in May 2021 issued a number of management regulations (draft for comment).
What will happen to the insecurity of intelligent networking? What will be restricted?
The unsafe information on the car end may affect the automatic driving function, from the perspective of the previous hackers into the car, it has not affected the driving function of the vehicle, so we do not think it will affect it for the time being. However, it will limit the upward development of the automatic driving function to a certain extent, and the upward development requires Car to X, that is, the car and the internet of everything (smart city, infrastructure) to eventually form a real automatic driving.
If the network security of the car side is not guaranteed, then V2X will have certain restrictions. The current network integration application scenarios are not particularly sufficient, most of them still rely on the single industry, and there are still data barriers in the integration of people, vehicles, roads and signal systems. If you want to open up these multi-party interconnections, you must eliminate barriers, then after the establishment of the internet, there is a need for a reliable and secure link method, and the subject of automotive data security and privacy protection, information infringement liability, and security guarantee responsibility, these problems are still missing in the legal provisions.
With the further integration of informatization and intelligent vehicles, automobiles have changed from traditional means of transportation to intelligent travel carriers, and intelligent networking has become an inevitable development trend. Information security is one of the key technologies of automotive intelligent network connection; at present, information security is not only through the unilateral efforts of car companies, suppliers and technology companies, but also the measures, rules and regulations of supervision must be gradually improved in order to ensure the safety of the entire intelligent network ecosystem.
OTA recalls are regulated, are there any loopholes?
Finally, pay attention to the problem of OTA recall, in fact, this problem has been initially solved this year, on April 15, the "Notice on Carrying out Online Upgrade Filing of Automotive Software" was issued, requiring car companies to complete the filing of enterprise management capabilities, model and function filing and specific upgrade activities in turn before they can implement OTA upgrade activities.
That is to say, after the release of the new regulations on OTAs, car companies must not only improve the filing information before OTAs, but also need to publicize the content of the OTA, which must be known to users and users have the right to choose. Prior to this, there may be users who have experienced their own car without knowing it, made an OTA upgrade to change some data and features.
This provision is not intended to restrict car companies from providing normal OTA functions to car owners, but to prevent the use of OTAs to cover up vehicle defects. For example, the previous "locked power" of a brand, that is, without the user's knowledge, rewritten the data of the battery management system, so that the actual battery usage and the actual mileage declared by the official statement have a large gap; after the OTA upgrade of a brand, the car machine system tries to collect data such as consumers' personal privacy, and only the consent option, otherwise the system cannot be used normally.
Analyze the previous and current OTA development logic, before, car companies found problems /update functions, initiated OTAs, user updates and applications; now, car companies find problems / update functions, car companies record / publicity / inform users, initiate OTAs, user selective updates. Therefore, we can also find that at present, when the OTA recalls or updates the function, it adds the aspects of filing and notification, so that users have the right to know and the right to choose, which has been greatly improved than in the past, but there may still be loopholes in the follow-up, and we can only wait for the rules to be further refined according to the actual situation.