"Electricity is the first half, intelligence is the second half", this sentence has become an industry consensus in the process of transformation of the automobile industry. Therefore, in the process of the accelerated development of new energy vehicle , intelligence is also deeply bound to it and accelerated its implementation, and the OTA upgrade capability that best represents automotive intelligence can also be clearly divided into the upper and lower half.
In fact, OTA is not a new technology. It has been maturely used on mobile devices such as computers and mobile phones many years ago. OTA is used much later in the automotive industry, but it is developing rapidly. At present, automotive OTA upgrades are mainly divided into two categories: FOTA and SOTA. FOTA focuses on the upgrade of underlying firmware, such as optimization of driving, power system, etc., while SOTA prefers application-level software upgrades, such as car computer UI, car computer operating system, etc.
Obviously, the whole vehicle FOTA is taking OTA to a new level of development. Let’s give an example to illustrate FOTA and SOTA. SOTA is equivalent to upgrading iOS from 15.1 to 15.2, while FOTA is upgraded from Apple iOS 15 to iOS 16 compared to this year. Therefore, to a certain extent, FOTA can be said to be a watershed between traditional cars and smart cars.
Which is stronger in the OTA track of new car manufacturing forces or traditional car companies?
Currently, there are two different ways in the OTA upgrade field. One is that according to the different vehicle configuration, the car company will prepare upgrade packages with different development version numbers when pushing. Although the version numbers of the upgrade package received by the car owner are the same, the development version numbers are actually inconsistent; the other way is that the car company pushes a unified upgrade package for all its models. After the vehicle receives the upgrade package, it can identify the hardware support situation by itself, so as to perform selective upgrades.
Among them, most companies mainly use the second OTA upgrade method, mainly "Wei Xiaoli Zero", a new car-making force. The first method is mostly traditional car companies, especially independent brand companies. There are quite a few differences in the process from development to push.
Compared with traditional car companies, the advantage of new car-making forces such as Zero Racing is that they make full use of the advantages of electrification architecture. The core components are controlled by software, and the matching degree with OTA technology is higher, so a larger scope of OTA upgrades can be achieved. This can be seen in the performance of LeBoard C11 and BYD Han in OTA upgrades.
Leap Racing or BYD Whose OTA upgrade is more touching?
The new energy vehicle market is becoming increasingly inclined, and car companies must continuously improve the intelligence of their cars in the process of rounds of OTA upgrades. In this regard, new car manufacturing forces such as NIO, Ideal, , Xiaopeng , and Zero Ray are obviously at the forefront of the industry. Taking Zero Run as an example, its Zero Run C11 just ushered in its fifth round of OTA upgrade in November this year. Judging from the upgrade content, this OTA upgrade has two characteristics.
On the one hand, the Zero Racing C11 keeps up with the current intelligent trend of major auto companies, upgrades and optimizes autonomous driving, intelligent networking, and smart cockpits. It has added a number of assisted driving functions such as ALC automatic lane change assist function and HWA high-speed assisted driving function. The former can turn on the left/right turn signal when the vehicle speed is met. After the system judges the road environment, the driver can enter the corresponding lane; the latter can realize the functions of lane centering, adaptive cruise and automatic lane change assist under high-speed conditions. For novices and those who need to commute frequently, the addition of these two functions can effectively slow down driving fatigue and help driving safety.
On the other hand, Zero-Play C11 has also made several targeted optimizations for users' daily car use pain points. For example, in scenarios such as the user forgot to close the window and leave the car, forget to lock the car (the driver leaves the vehicle, closes the door and there is no one in the main driver's seat, if the vehicle does not lock the car after 3 minutes), this upgrade has added a reminder function for Zero Run APP to ensure the safety of parking; for cars in cold winter environments, this upgrade optimizes the automatic opening conditions for steering wheel heating, seat heating and seat ventilation. When the outdoor temperature = 5℃ or the indoor temperature = 10℃, the steering wheel automatic heating function, the co-pilot and rear seat automatic heating function will be automatically turned on, so that the car can always be kept at a suitable temperature.
Compared with the new forces in car manufacturing, BYD has become the best in the new energy vehicle market in China. Its 200,000-level pure electric SUV Song PLUS EV has rarely upgraded since its launch. The latest OTA was in July this year, but many users found that there was no obvious gap between them and before they were upgraded. This is a bit of an upgrade for the sake of upgrading.
undoubtedly, the Zero-Play C11 is a more in-depth all-round OTA upgrade, because under the overall self-developed strategy, Zero-Play had already considered the possibility of subsequent OTA upgrades from the chassis and parts at the beginning of vehicle development. Always be user-centered and constantly upgrade and improve, this is the meaning of OTA upgrade, and it is also the biggest difference between smart cars like Zero-Performance C11 and traditional cars.
