Research on Traditional Car Enterprises Entering the Internet of Vehicles

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Ota, over? That? Air, air online upgrade.

This is a commonly used word in the field of smart phones. But now, it shines in the automotive field. OTA is an indispensable keyword for smart cars.

Last week, BMW Group began to promote the OTA upgrade of 750,000 vehicles worldwide in China. This online upgrade, which took more than two months, is by far the largest OTA for traditional car companies.

When Tesla and the new car-making forces lead the trend of car OTA at the speed of one iteration every month, traditional car companies are also trying to catch up with this trend. When every car company claims to be a software company, a travel company, an Internet company and a technology company, OTA becomes an unavoidable test question.

Irresistible OTA

In June 5438+10, BMW began to carry the 7th generation BMW? The model of iDrive system is upgraded by OTA. The upgraded projects include maps, mobile car map systems (Carplay and Carlife), entertainment applications including in-car screen videos, new control functions of intelligent voice assistants, and optimization of automatic parking functions, so that it can be applied to more scenes.

The upgrade started in Germany, followed by models in Europe, the United States and China. In China, more than 200,000 cars have benefited from it.

Let me clarify the concept first. When we talk about car online travel agencies, we are actually talking about SOTA and FOTA.

SOTA (Software-over-the-air) is an online software upgrade, which downloads the upgrade file from the cloud server to the vehicle through the wireless network to upgrade the software. For example, applications and map updates in the car screen belong to SOTA.

FOTA(Firmware-over-the-air), when the firmware is upgraded online, will download and update a new firmware image for the ECU that controls a certain functional module of the vehicle, which is somewhat similar to updating/reloading the system for this functional module. For example, by updating the digital key added to the vehicle, or updating the voice assistant so that it can control the lifting of the window. , also listed here.

Generally speaking, car companies are cautious about upgrading the firmware related to vehicle control, especially the power and chassis system, because once there is a problem, it will threaten the driving safety of the whole vehicle. With the online OTA upgrade, this risk will be amplified.

BMW's OTA has specially upgraded the automatic parking function involving vehicle control, which represents a great progress for traditional car companies.

Before BMW, the biggest OTA upgrade related to traditional car companies was the online upgrade of Zebra Zhixing System 2.0 by Zebra Network at the end of 20 17 and the beginning of 20 18, involving more than 400,000 SAIC passenger cars.

At that time, in this round of OTA led by Zebra, the main upgrade was the car system and software. Some concepts, such as "service to find someone", have been realized, and even led the trend of car networking in China for quite some time. However, due to Zebra's internet background and supplier status, although the upgrade function also involves the control of windows and skylights, it does not go deep into the control of vehicle control when driving.

As a car company, BMW can directly carry out OTA for lower-level functions such as automatic parking and higher safety requirements, but for hardware-related OTA, BMW has just started. In this respect, Tesla is a trendsetter.

In 20 17, Tesla temporarily unlocked the battery capacity of some low-equipped car owners through OTA, which increased the cruising range of the car to help the car owners escape from the area affected by the hurricane in time. At that time, when the news came out, the shock to the automobile industry was undoubtedly huge-before that, many automobile companies had to go to 4S stores to update their navigation maps. It is unheard of that the vehicle life is so basic, but the key performance indicators can be changed by wireless upgrade.

On 20 18, Tesla repeated this "show" in China.

Tesla was able to achieve this update because it had assembled enough batteries at the beginning of vehicle production, but according to different versions of sales, the available power was locked by software. In case of emergency or special needs of consumers in the later period, it will be unlocked through wireless upgrade.

Now it is obvious that the automobile industry has gradually accepted this way of embedding hardware first and then upgrading the vehicle after it is sold. Whether it's a new car-making force that updates the in-vehicle software version once a month on average, or a traditional luxury brand like BMW that has created an OTA scale record as soon as it gets started.

On the surface, Tesla has raised the function of the vehicle to a new height, and other car companies must follow up for the competitiveness of their products. But in fact, the driving force behind it is that consumers' expectations for cars are more and more like smart phones, hoping that it will always be new. The demands of consumers make the trend of automotive OTA unstoppable. Car companies that lack it are easily marginalized.

It's beautiful from a distance. Is it troublesome to get started?

Whether active or passive, more and more car companies are trying to build OTA-related capabilities. They regard OTA as a standard feature of new cars-or at least as a claimed standard feature. Many car companies say that the new car has OTA function, but in fact there is no online upgrade after the vehicle is sold.

For car companies, especially traditional car companies, OTA is a beautiful thing to look at and a bad thing to do. Today's consumers have long been accustomed to updating their mobile phone software every three days and upgrading their mobile phone systems every month. But for cars, this is simply unimaginable.

The complexity of the car and the industry's high concern for safety determine that it cannot be upgraded as quickly as a mobile phone. The lack of software talents, compared with the lack of ecology in the smart phone industry, also makes the function update of automobile software always "slow". If it is a traditional car company, it will also involve historical issues of hardware architecture and personnel architecture, making things more complicated.

Before OTA appeared, the function upgrade of traditional vehicles was wired. The user drives the car directly to the 4S shop and brushes the new data to different automobile ECU with the wire harness. However, after the appearance of OTA, car companies have to face jobs that they were not good at or even started before.

To realize OTA, car companies must first have an OTA cloud platform, which is responsible for releasing upgrade data, upgrading instructions and monitoring vehicle upgrade status. On the vehicle side, OTA needs a new special function software to receive and detect the upgrade package, which is usually called "OTA? Manager "(OTA manager).

After receiving the upgrade data, it is necessary to send the upgrade data to different ECU through the central gateway, which is like the router of the automobile internal network.

An important background is that the data formats and standards between different ECU are not exactly the same, and the central gateway should accurately distribute and "translate" to prevent errors. It can be said that OTA is difficult to realize without a strong and stable central gateway (which is why Weilai listed the intelligent gateway as one of the six self-developed technologies).

At the same time, with the increasing data volume of OTA upgrade, the data transmission bus in the car also needs to be updated. After all, no user wants to lie down for a day as soon as his car is upgraded.

For car companies, especially traditional car companies, to achieve complete OTA actually means that the electronic and electrical architecture and talent structure need to be systematically updated.

BMW, which took the first step, made preparations for this by enabling more expensive car Ethernet on newer models, and set up a new digital department in June 5438+10, integrating more than 7,000 IT talents around the world. However, not every traditional car company has the financial resources and courage like BMW.

In 20 19, BMW set up a special digital agency in China.

In automotive OTA, security is placed in a very high position, especially FOTA, which will rewrite ECU data directly. If the security work is not done well in the OTA process, and the upgrade data is invaded, tampered with or just eavesdropped, once the power system and chassis control system of the vehicle are involved, it may lead to the result of car crash and death.

The lack of relevant professionals, the drag of traditional electronic and electrical architecture, and the incalculable consequences after safety accidents have made many traditional car companies "want to touch and retract their hands" when facing OTA.

It is precisely because traditional car companies have experienced transformation pains in front of OTA that they have also given birth to specific suppliers in this field. For example, Elaraby, which only received $65,438+million in financing last month, provides OTA solutions for car companies, and its partners are many domestic first-line independent brands and joint venture brands.

Not just an upgrade.

Although the current car companies, especially traditional car companies, have just started on OTA exam questions, their attitude is inevitably awkward. However, it is foreseeable that more and more car companies will gradually establish their own OTA talent teams and business departments. Because OTA is not just a function point, it is actually breaking the inherent barrier between car companies and users.

A typical result is that through OTA, the relationship between car companies and users will be flatter and more direct, and car companies will face users directly and respond to users' needs quickly (whether actively or passively). As a link, OTA will become an important foundation for establishing a closed loop of data-experience update between car companies and consumers.

The best thing to do in this respect is undoubtedly Tesla-Tesla's automatic driving assistance function is provided to consumers as a standard. In the past eight years, OTA has experienced at least 12 iterations, mainly in the form of optimization by R&D team through user usage data and feedback, so that autonomous driving can be better and more people can use it.

In this process, more and more Tesla users use Autopilot, and Autopilot has become more and more powerful. The continuous improvement of the two makes autonomous driving a trump card for Tesla.

Tesla early OTA upgrade

Furthermore, OTA's imagination is not only to build stronger competitiveness in the benign interaction with consumers. At the same time, it is also opening up new business models to better realize its competitiveness.

In addition to the well-known FSD function that is still increasing in price, OTA can be opened later. In the middle of this year, Tesla also launched the service of OTA unlocking acceleration capability in China. Users can remotely upgrade the vehicle acceleration performance by paying 1.4 million yuan online, and the acceleration time of 100 km/h is increased from 4.6 seconds to 4. 1 s.

Weilai 20 19 introduced NIO. After-installation upgrade service of Pilot advanced assisted driving function, can NIO be enabled after paying OTA upgrade for car owners who have not purchased this function? A pilot.

In April this year, Weimar also discovered the wonderful use of OTA? -They launched a paid theme skin service for car engines for 499. In fact, users can buy them for less than the price in 20 yuan, and they can be updated at a fairly fast speed. Although the application of OTA is very lightweight, it is still a meaningful exploration of its value.

Finally, return to traditional car companies. At present, OTA iteration has just begun, but the attempt on OTA payment service is still blank. However, routing agencies still believe that traditional car companies will eventually become "Internet-based", because the new generation of consumers who participate in the automobile market increasingly regard cars as smart terminals, and cars that cannot be upgraded online will of course become less and less accepted and welcomed.

Therefore, when we witness the rise of automotive OTA, we are actually witnessing the profound changes in the relationship between car companies and users.

This article comes from car home, the author of the car manufacturer, and does not represent car home's position.