[Digital Vision] It’s dizzying and confusing, how should you choose the OTA upgrade for smart cars?

The advancement of digital technology is driving the popularity of smart cars. Nowadays, buying a smarter car has become the first choice for many consumers when they change cars. Regardless of the brand of smart cars and the power form of the car, car companies will mention a common term when promoting their products - OTA upgrade.

The OTA upgrade function can be used like a mobile phone system upgrade. Through remote upgrade, the car can realize some new functions that were not available when it left the factory. In other words, a car with OTA upgrade is equivalent to "free additional configuration". This good thing is naturally very popular.

But if we take a closer look, we will find that in addition to OTA upgrades, we often see words like SOTA and FOTA. What is the difference between them? How should we choose?

OTA upgrade, the full name of which is over-the-air upgrade technology, is most commonly used in computer or mobile phone system upgrades. After entering the era of intelligence, this technology has also been applied to cars.

First, the car is connected to the server of the relevant department of the car manufacturer through the Internet. Then the car manufacturer will regularly or irregularly send an upgrade package to the vehicles that need OTA upgrades. The car will download this upgrade package to the car computer in the background, and then upgrade it at the appropriate time.

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However, there is a fundamental difference between OTA upgrades for cars and mobile phones. There are two forms of OTA upgrades for cars: one is FOTA, which means full upgrade. All software systems of the entire car, including the core system, can be upgraded via OTA, which is the so-called "true OTA" circulating on the Internet .

The other is called SOTA, which means non-core system upgrade. As the name implies, SOTA cannot make changes to the core three electric systems and the most basic vehicle control system of the car, but can only upgrade some non-core systems, such as adding some new driving assistance functions, changing the status of various aspects of the car system, etc. SOTA is also defined as "fake OTA" by some people because it cannot upgrade the core system.

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One of the reasons why smartphones are smart is that their systems can be upgraded, and the experience of using the entire phone may be completely different after the upgrade. Similarly, only cars that use FOTA upgrades and have full OTA functions can be considered truly smart cars; on the contrary, SOTA cannot be regarded as the standard for car intelligence because it cannot upgrade the core system.

So how do we ensure the basic safety of these highly electronic smart cars? This requires that the core electronic system of the car must be very stable, and stability means that there is no need for large-scale upgrades in the future.

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In fact, the current common practice in the automotive industry is to disconnect the car's core electronic system directly from the external network. This is what traditional car companies, new car companies, and other companies with traditional car manufacturing backgrounds do. This is also the fundamental reason why they choose SOTA instead of FOTA.

In contrast, FOTA means that car companies do not have to put the entire core system in place at the vehicle development stage, but can gradually improve it in subsequent use. And because the entire core system can be upgraded, it is also easy to add some new functions later, as long as the vehicle hardware supports it.

However, the FOTA mode also means that the core electronic system of the car is not stable and there are some bugs that the developers may not even be aware of. Therefore, FOTA can also be regarded as real-time DEBUG processing of the core electronic system.

Image | Pixabay