Smart Car OTA Industry Report, 2024-2025

Smart Car OTA Industry Report, 2024-2025

Automotive OTA research: With the arrival of the national mandatory OTA standards, OEMs are accelerating their pace in compliance and full life cycle operations

The rising OTA installations facilitate rapid adoption of new intelligent technologies such as AI foundation models and NOA in vehicles.

From January to September 2024, 11.083 million passenger cars carried OTA function in China, a year-on-year surge of 37.9%; the installation rate hit 71.7%, up about 17.3 percentage points year on year. With an increasing number of intelligent vehicles, the installation rate of OTA in passenger cars in China is expected to reach more than 90% by 2030.

With the increase in OTA installations, OTA updates occur frequently. Compared with 2023, OTA updates for vehicles in 2024 become far more frequent. Some OEMs conduct OTA updates monthly with a wider coverage. Moreover, OTA updates in 2024 involve much more intelligent driving functions.

Most OEMs have regarded intelligence as an important selling point of their cars. Thanks to OTA technology, new intelligent technologies from OEMs can be installed into cars faster. For example, many models launched in 2024 enable new intelligent driving functions such as NOA and AEB via OTA updates, and they will continue to be optimized and improved.

OTA updates speed up and hardware OTA updates further improve user experience.

In addition to the ever-increasing range of hardware covered by OTA updates, the hardware, network and other configurations of new models have been improved, and OTA dual-partition technology has been applied. The OTA technical performance of new models also becomes ever better, which is specifically reflected in multiple aspects such as update speed, optional update time, and failsafe in update.

For example, in terms of OTA update speed, multiple OEMs have clearly required faster OTA updates in new architectures or new models.

Xiaomi SU7, launched on market in 2024, adopts innovative streaming update technology, which can be downloaded and installed at the same time. It can update the whole cockpit system in 3 minutes and the entire car in 30 minutes. OTA dual-zone backup and flashing is not only faster, but also safer and more reliable.

In October 2024, Chery announced that it would join hands with Huawei to build an intelligent base. The base will adopt the new-generation electrical architecture Mars Architecture, feature Gigabit Ethernet and 1000TOPS computing power, and enable vehicle OTA update within 25 minutes and the one-time success rate of 99.9%.

In addition to the improvement and evolution of software technology, faster OTA updates also require hardware with better parameters, such as higher-compute chips, HPC, shorter wire harnesses, higher bandwidth, and faster communication download speed. Therefore, to improve user experience and OTA updates, some OEMs have proposed hardware update plans for old models.

In November 2024, Xpeng officially launched a crowdfunding campaign for chip renewal for old car owners. The original car chip Qualcomm 820A was updated to Qualcomm 8295 which is also used in Xpeng P7+ and Xpeng X9, and the RAM was increased from 8G to 16G. The chip upgrade not only improves boot speed and system fluency, but also offers the latest AI Dimensity system to old models such as Xpeng P7 via OTA update.

Regulatory policies and standards are increasingly improving, and there is an urgent need for OTA update compliance.

On August 1, 2024, the Ministry of Industry and Information Technology of China issued the Notice on Further Strengthening the Administration of Access, Recall and Online Software Update of Intelligent Connected Vehicles (Draft for Comments), which aims to further reinforce the management of the access, recall and online software update (OTA) of intelligent connected vehicles equipped with combined driving assistance systems.

The draft suggests strengthening the supervision and administration of OTA updates, and standardizing the application modes and technical parameters of OTA updates. For automotive software update systems, it requires that information such as the name and storage location of electronic control systems that involve OTA, and OTA software version compilation rule files should be sorted out and filed; during OTA update, traceability management of software should be supported.

This also means that when the notice is officially implemented, OTA registration supervision will be more perfect and comprehensive, posing new requirements to OEMs and making compliance more important.

On August 23, 2024, the national mandatory standard GB 44496-2024 ""General Technical Requirements for Software Update of Vehicles"" was officially released. It requires that starting from January 1, 2026, all newly launched models must meet this standard; starting from January 1, 2028, all existing models must also comply with this standard.

In addition to the national standard, multiple regulations and standards such as Software Update Management System (SUMS) required by UN WP.29 R156 and ISO24089 have been also gradually implemented, making OEMs demand OTA technical compliance more urgently. In this regard, automotive OTA suppliers such as ABUP and CAROTA have also stepped up their efforts on OTA update compliance.

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