Are all these ways of OTAs understood? These 6 questions and 6 answers, be sure to clear before buying new energy vehicles
If you pay a little attention to the automotive circle, you will find that many product defect "recalls" have changed from traditional 4S shop repairs to a simple OTA.
Among them, most of the new forces of car companies are representatives.
What is more interesting is that although most of the time OTAs are for bug fixes and to achieve the "Haikou" boasted by car companies during the product warm-up period, most "smart car" owners have a completely unopposed attitude towards OTAs, and even many people can keep expectations for them.
So, what exactly is OTA technology in cars?
Why can it be convenient for car companies while enlisting users?
What is an OTA?
OTA English full name Over the air, Chinese interpreted as online upgrade, refers to the ability to update the system of the service terminal through the server and wireless network.
This feature is certainly familiar to every smartphone user, but the end object has transitioned from consumer electronics to cars.
In essence, automotive OTA is also an upgrade to software and functions, and the hardware part will not change in any way due to OTA.
To give a very simple example, the PC system has been upgraded from Windows 10 to Windows 11, and the experience has advanced but the hardware has not changed at all.
In addition, in terms of importance, the application of OTA in cars is still more critical, and for users, every OTA update will bring an improvement in experience.
For car companies, they can get on the car in advance without excessive pursuit of software vulnerabilities, and function development and vulnerability patching can be implemented by OTA, which can save a certain amount of software development time.
What is SOTA?
SOTA is a large branch of OTA, and the full name of the "S" letter is Software, which mostly refers to the application layer software in the vehicle system, including UI, APP software, functional architecture and even the new version of the Android system, etc., which can be upgraded through OTA.
Considering the comprehensiveness of automotive functions and the gradual popularization of domain controllers, the current "S" represents not limited to the car machine, including voice control function package, assisted driving system, face recognition and remote control functions, etc., can also be upgraded through SOTA.
The purpose is to make the product function performance closer to perfection, the control effect more silky, and improve the user's driving quality, of course, it is also done without modifying the hardware.
What is FOTA (Firmware Over-The-Air)?
FOTA (Firmware Over the Air) means firmware online upgrade, it is also one of the two branches of OTA, including the underlying software in each controller, the control algorithm corresponding to the high-voltage components, the comprehensive upgrade of the top-level application, etc., can be completed under the push of the car company, the main purpose is to achieve a deep automotive control system, management system and performance comprehensive improvement through upgrade.
Considering that the software update of the controller is much more complicated than the car entertainment system, at this stage, the high-voltage components that temporarily support FOTA are not particularly common, even for models with integrated domain controllers, most of the time only flash updates the software in the power domain, chassis domain, assisted driving domain and body domain controller.
Relatively basic ones such as air conditioning compressors, wiper systems, lighting controllers, etc. will not have this update ability, of course, these components do not need to be updated.
Why do some cars have to go to a 4S store to be OTA?
Generally speaking, whether you need to go to the 4S store for OTA update or the vehicle itself can complete the OTA update depends on whether the vehicle has an on-board T-Box, of course, it also depends on whether the car company has set aside an OTA interface and capability when doing software architecture.
The so-called T-Box, is the English abbreviation of Telematic BOX, literally translated as "telematic box", in the car is called the vehicle network communication terminal.
As the name implies, the function of this module is to allow the car to have the ability of Internet of Vehicles and receive software packages pushed by car companies in the background, which is the first step to remote OTA.
Of course, although some cars have T-Box, they still need to go to the 4S shop to use special computers and equipment for upgrades, which involves software architecture design.
Among them, the more common reason for not opening the OTA interface is that OTA has a certain packet loss rate and error frames, especially in the 3G and 4G era under the network connection is not so stable and reliable, so some car companies still use the traditional 4S store upgrade model for insurance purposes, of course, there are also considerations about development costs.
What is Hardware OTA?
Hardware OTA has nothing to do with the previously mentioned OTA, just a name given by car companies for the late-stage option package developed for their own products.
The most common way for this hardware OTA is to directly replace the controller or directly replace the vehicle assembly, which can complete the advancement of the experience from the most basic part, such as directly changing a motherboard + CPU + memory assembly on a computer, and the chassis power display has no changes.
However, such hardware OTAs tend to be costly, almost free of charge, and most of the time, consumers still have to pay.
For example, in April last year, Lantu launched the Qualcomm Snapdragon 8155 cockpit chip "hardware OTA" service package for FREE models, upgrading the original vehicle chip to the current industry's top SA8155P chip, which can effectively enhance the smoothness of the vehicle and the overall improvement of voice interaction, navigation, audio and video entertainment and other experiences.
As mentioned earlier, this upgrade comes with a fee, after all, the hardware cost is much higher than the software.
What are the benefits of OTAs?
The advantages of OTA application in cars are quite obvious compared to not supporting OTA models.
For example, the vehicle-machine function, after the optimization of the vehicle-machine system through OTA to the product, can bring users a smoother experience, at the same time, based on the user's feedback on various logic control improvement suggestions can also be optimized, various software versions and functional logic will also be updated, the animation transition and UI are packaged together, to give users more freshness.
The OTA update of the intelligent driving domain can improve the safety factor, for example, the recognition accuracy of the vision algorithm can be improved with the OTA update.
The update of the power and body domain can complete the upgrade of the control effect, improve the adjustment effect to improve comfort, range, motor drive efficiency, etc. As long as the algorithm software is not perfect at the factory, it can be done with the OTA at one time or step by step.
Conclusion
In fact, the importance of OTAs in automobiles has only just revealed a prototype at this point in time, and the future development space is more extensive than you and I imagine.
Considering the development direction of software-defined vehicles and software-defined driving in the future, the functions that can be OTA and the controller that can be included in OTA will also be further improved, and it is estimated that by then, OTA once, may really be equivalent to changing cars in terms of experience. Are you looking forward to this?