750,000 BMWs upgraded in unison, traditional car companies' OTA dare to play like this?

Written by｜? Xiong Yuxiang? Edit｜Routing Agency

OTA, Over?the?Air, online upgrade in the air.

It's a term commonly used in the smartphone space. But today, it's making a splash in the automotive space. ota is an indispensable keyword for smart cars.

Last week, the BMW Group's OTA upgrade for 750,000 vehicles worldwide*** began to be pushed out in China. The online upgrade, which took more than 2 months, is the largest OTA by a traditional car company to date.

While Tesla and the new car makers are leading the trend of automotive OTAs with one iteration a month, traditional car companies are trying to catch up with the trend. As every car company claims to be a software company, a mobility company, an internet company, and a tech company, OTA has become an exam question that can't be bypassed.

The unstoppable OTA

In October of this year, BMW began to carry out OTA upgrades for models equipped with the 7th generation of BMW?iDrive system. The upgrades include maps, cell phone car mapping systems (Carplay and Carlife), entertainment apps including video in the car screen, new control functions for the intelligent voice assistant, and optimization of the auto-parking function so that it can be applied to more scenarios.

The upgrade started in Germany, with models in Europe, the US, and China following suit. In China, more than 200,000 vehicles benefited.

Let's clear up the concept first. When we're talking about automotive OTA, we're really talking about SOTA vs. FOTA.

SOTA, or Software-over-the-air, upgrades the software online by downloading the upgrade file from a cloud server to the vehicle via a wireless network. For example, updates to apps and maps in the car's screen are SOTA.

And FOTA, or Firmware-over-the-air, Firmware Online Upgrade, downloads and brushes in a new firmware image for the ECU that controls one of the vehicle's functional modules, somewhat like updating/reinstalling a system for that functional module. For example, updating to add a digital key to the vehicle that wasn't there, or updating the voice assistant to be able to control the windows up and down, etc., are also included in this category.

Generally speaking, car companies are cautious about firmware upgrades that involve vehicle controls, especially power and chassis systems, because if something goes wrong, it will threaten the safety of the entire vehicle. This risk is magnified by the online OTA upgrade.

BMW's OTA, which specifically upgraded the auto-parking function that involves vehicle control, represents another big step forward for traditional car companies in OTA.

Before BMW, the largest OTA upgrade related to traditional car companies was the Zebra Network's online upgrade of the Zebra Intelligent System 2.0 in late 2017 and early 2018, involving more than 400,000 vehicles from SAIC Passenger Cars.

At that time, the round of OTA led by Zebra, mainly upgraded the car system and software, some such as the concept of "service to find a person" to implement the concept of even in quite a period of time to lead the trend of the domestic car networking. However, due to Zebra's Internet origins and supplier status, although the upgrade function also involves the control of windows and sunroofs, but does not go deeper into the control of the vehicle control level when driving.

BMW, as a car company, can directly conduct OTA for auto-parking, which is a lower-level function with higher safety requirements, but for hardware-related OTA, BMW has just started. Tesla, on the other hand, is a trend-setting veteran in this regard.

In 2017, Tesla temporarily unlocked the battery capacity on its vehicles via OTA for a portion of owners of lower-specification models, increasing the range of their vehicles to help them escape in time from areas that would be affected by hurricanes. At the time, when the news came out, the shock to the automotive industry was undoubtedly huge - before that, many car companies had to travel to 4S stores to even update their navigation maps. It was unheard of that such a basic but critical performance indicator as vehicle range could be changed through a wireless upgrade.

Tesla repeated this kind of "showmanship" in China in 2018

Tesla was able to make this update possible because its vehicles were built with a full capacity of batteries in the early stages of production, but depending on the version being sold, the amount of power available was locked in by software. . It's unlocked by a wireless update later on, in the event of an emergency or when a consumer has a special need.

Today, it's clear that the automotive industry has grown to accept this approach of pre-built hardware that is upgraded after the vehicle goes on sale. Whether it's the new car makers who are averaging a vehicle software version update once a month, or the traditional luxury brands like BMW who are setting records for OTA scale right out of the gate.

On the surface, it's Tesla that's taking vehicle feature upgrades to a whole new level, and other car companies have to follow suit for the sake of product competitiveness. But in fact, the driving force behind is the consumer's expectations of the car is more and more like a smartphone, I hope it is often used often new. Consumer demand for automobile OTA trend is unstoppable. And the lack of it car companies, will easily fall into marginalization.

It's nice to see from afar? Getting started is troublesome

Either actively or passively, more and more car companies are trying to build OTA-related capabilities. They're treating OTA as a standard feature on new cars - or, at least, claimed to be. There are a number of car companies that say new cars have OTA capabilities, but in reality, not a single online upgrade is performed after the vehicle is sold.

For car companies, especially traditional ones, OTA is one of those things that looks good and looks bad. Consumers today have long been accustomed to three-day updates to their cell phone software, as well as monthly upgrades to their phone systems. But for cars, this is simply unthinkable.

The complexity of the car and the industry's intense focus on safety dictate that it can't be upgraded as quickly as a cell phone. The lack of software talent relative to the smartphone industry, the lack of ecological, but also let the car software function update is always "half a beat". If it is a traditional car company, then it also involves the hardware structure and personnel structure of the historical legacy of the problem, so that things become more complex.

Before OTA, traditional vehicles were wired for feature upgrades. Users drove their vehicles directly to a 4S store and used a wiring harness to swipe new data into a different car's ECU. But with the advent of OTA, car companies have to deal with work they weren't good at or even never embarked on before.

To realize OTA, car companies first need to have a cloud platform for OTA, which is responsible for upgrading data, upgrading commands, and monitoring the vehicle upgrade status. On the vehicle side, OTA requires a new specialized functional software to receive and detect upgrade packages, which is usually called "OTA?Manager".

After the upgrade data is received, it needs to be sent to the different ECUs through a centralized gateway that acts as a router for the car's internal network.

An important background is that the data formats and standards between different ECUs in a car are not all the same, so the central gateway has to accurately distribute and "translate" to prevent errors. It can be said that without a strong and stable central gateway, OTA will be difficult to realize (which is why when Azera advertises its six self-developed technologies, it lists the smart gateway as one of them).

At the same time, as the amount of data upgraded by OTA gets bigger and bigger, the data transmission bus in the car needs to be updated - after all, no user wants their car to have to lie down for a day as soon as it's upgraded.

All of the above for the car companies, especially the traditional car companies, to realize the complete OTA, in fact, means that the electrical and electronic architecture and talent structure needs to be systematically updated.

BMW has taken the first steps to prepare for this by enabling higher-cost in-car Ethernet in all of its newer models, and by creating a new digitalization department in October of this year that integrates more than 7,000 IT professionals from around the world. However, not every traditional car company has the financial strength and boldness of BMW.

In 2019, BMW set up a digitalization agency in China specifically to lead the joy

In the OTA of automobiles, security is placed on an extremely high level, especially FOTA that will directly rewrite the ECU data.If security is not done properly during the OTA process, and the upgraded data is intruded, tampered with, or just buggy, once it involves the vehicle's powertrain and chassis control systems, it could result in a car crash.

The lack of relevant professionals, the drag of the traditional electronic and electrical architecture, and the consequences of the safety accidents that are difficult to estimate once they occur, have made many traditional car companies in the face of OTA, "want to touch and retract the hand".

Because of the transition pains of traditional car companies in the face of OTA, it has also spawned specific suppliers in this field. For example, just last month received $10 million in financing Airabi, the service provided is to build OTA solutions for car companies, and its partners are not lack of domestic first-tier brands and joint venture brands.

More than just upgrading

While today's car companies, especially the traditional ones, are just starting out on the OTA test, their posture is not immune to the writhing. But it can be predicted that more and more car companies, will successively establish their own OTA talent team and business units. Because OTA is not just a function point, in fact, it is breaking down the inherent barrier between car companies and users.

A typical result is that, through OTA, the relationship between the car company and the user will be flatter and more direct, the car company will directly face the user, the user needs to respond quickly (whether active or passive). As a link, OTA will become an important credential to establish a closed loop of data-experience updates between car companies and consumers.

The best in this regard is undoubtedly Tesla - Tesla's Autopilot function is offered to consumers as a standard feature, and in 8 years, it has gone through at least 12 versions of iterations through OTA, and the main form of this is to optimize by the R&D team through the user's data and feedback, making Autopilot better. The main form of optimization is through user data and feedback, optimized by the R&D team to make Autopilot work better and more people use it.

In the process, more and more Tesla users are using Autopilot, and Autopilot is becoming more and more powerful. The two continue to enhance each other, making Autopilot a trump card for Tesla.

Tesla's early OTA upgrades

Taking it a step further, OTA's imaginative power is not just about building stronger competitiveness in healthy interactions with consumers. At the same time, it is also pioneering new business models to better realize competitiveness.

In addition to the well-known and still rising FSD function can be opened after the fact through OTA, in the middle of this year, Tesla also launched the OTA unlock acceleration capability in China. Users pay 14,000 yuan online to remotely upgrade the acceleration performance of the vehicle, and the acceleration time of 100 kilometers per hour is improved from 4.6 seconds to 4.1 seconds.

Williams, on the other hand, launched an aftermarket upgrade service for its NIO?Pilot advanced assisted driving feature in 2019, and owners who hadn't originally shopped for this feature can enable NIO?Pilot after paying for an OTA upgrade.

In April of this year, Wilmar also discovered the wonders of OTA? -- they launched a set of pay-for-themed skins for the car, priced at 499. users can actually acquire them for less than $20, and they can be updated at a fairly rapid rate. While this is a lightweight application of OTAs, it's still not a bad way to explore their value in a meaningful way.

Finally, it comes back to the traditional car company side. At present, their iterative steps through OTA have just begun, and their attempts at OTA paid services are still blank. However, we still believe that traditional car companies will eventually be "Internetized", because the new generation of consumers participating in the automotive market will increasingly see the car as an intelligent terminal, and a car that cannot be upgraded online will of course be less and less accepted and welcomed.

So when we witness the rise of automotive OTAs, we're actually witnessing a profound change in the relationship between car companies and their users.

This article comes from the author of Automotive Home Car, and does not represent the viewpoint position of Automotive Home.