Still Loading: The Slow Roll of Automotive Over-the-Air Updates
Software-defined vehicles are stuck in the slow lane without easy, safe, and regular updates.
Over-the-air (OTA) software updates have become so routine for smartphones, computers, and other connected devices that most people give them little thought—unless you own a PC and Windows decides to update at what always seems like the most inopportune time. Modern vehicles, which are increasingly becoming defined and differentiated by software, are seeing ever more use of OTA capabilities. But legacy automakers are still largely lagging in providing regular updates that have become commonplace with consumer electronics.
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The delay in OTA can be attributed to many factors: a lack of software expertise, overly complex vehicle architectures, safety concerns, and a slow pace of change thanks in part to entrenched political cultures. Alternatively, several new-age, EV-only automakers such as Tesla, Rivian, and upstart Chinese brands regularly issue OTA updates, but they've benefitted from built-in advantages such as developing their software in-house, managing smaller fleets, and not being hardwired into a hardware-first mindset.
Clean-Sheet Software Approach
Automakers have been performing software updates since the late ’90s, starting largely with powertrain component upgrades through authorized service centers. Then in 2008 Ford became the first automaker to allow consumers to update its Sync infotainment system at a dealership or via a vehicle’s USB port using software mailed to owners or downloaded from the Sync website. Tesla sent its first OTA updates in 2012. But some 13 years later, the practice is “still new territory for most automakers,” according to Ian Riches, VP of automotive practice at the analyst firm TechInsights.
New EV automakers have been able to design their vehicles from the ground up to handle extensive OTA updates and have had the advantage of writing their own software. Tesla pioneered this approach out of necessity when it produced the Model S in just two and a half years, said Craig Carlson, the VP of firmware and electrical integration at the automaker from 2007 to 2014 and currently CTO at the Silicon Valley 3D printing startup Carbon.
“Writing our own software was a significant undertaking,” Carlson said. “It allowed us to have a clean-sheet approach to solving really, really hard problems.” He didn’t think it was such a unique approach to automotive software at first until he started interacting with other OEMs. “Several times, senior people came to visit us to see what we were doing from a software perspective, and their eyes would go wide,” added Carlson. “That we had such control of the software—it was really clear to them what an asset it was.”
Changes in Hours Instead of Months
Tesla also led the way in using a more centralized electronic vehicle architecture with fewer electronic control units, or ECUs, giving the upstart automaker more sway over its software and more flexibility in how the car operated. “It made it so that when we wanted to make changes to the way the vehicle behaved, we could do that no matter if it touched two, three, or more ECUs," Carlson said. "Instead of taking months, we could make changes in days or even hours.”
Most automakers are now moving toward using fewer ECUs to create what’s known as zone controllers. “OEMs today want to get to having five zone controllers and even try to compress that down to three or two or one with a lot of different functionality,” said Hemant Sikaria, CEO and co-founder of Sibros, which provides software services for the auto industry. But most high-volume automakers still typically use numerous separate ECUs—and different software—from third-party suppliers that make it difficult to perform OTA updates.
Compounding the problem for volume automakers is their huge number of production vehicles and different models on which hardware and software configurations vary. “Being able to perform updates reliably across all of them becomes quite difficult just because the intricate dependencies of certain updates to the hardware and software that may affect the reliability of the update,” said Yu Fang, CTO of Sonatus, an automotive-software services company. For example, Sikaria said some OEMs “code sign” every individual software image in a vehicle to ensure that it’s from a trusted source. “If you have 100,000 vehicles and each one has 30 ECUs, you're signing 3 million different software images every time you do an update,” he added.
Automakers’ Innate Cautiousness
Beyond not having complete control of their software and being hampered by overly complex vehicle architectures, an innate cautiousness among traditional automakers has led to a slow roll of regular OTA updates. “OEMs are quite concerned about the security element of a software update and being able to change the vehicle's behavior remotely,” Sikaria said.
Automakers are also extremely wary of failures and unintended consequences caused by OTA updates. “We've heard stories that an OTA update kind of breaks some vehicles and that definitely gives a lot of people pause,” Fang said. Developing the OTA updates themselves can also be complex and time-consuming. “You have to work with suppliers, make software changes, and then do exhaustive testing,” Fang said. “And you have to perform this over weeks, if not months. So, it’s a major hurdle for OEMs.”
This is why most automakers start with infotainment; it’s the low-hanging fruit of automotive OTA updates. “Updating an infotainment system is very similar to updating a phone or a laptop,” Sikaria said, and making it easier is that it's normally the closest connection to the cloud compared to other ECUs in the vehicle. Automakers have an added incentive to update the infotainment system software given that the changes they make are often visible to the user. “It gives them new functionalities that they can immediately see,” Fang added.
Hardware and Not a Software Mindset
One hurdle for moving to software-defined vehicles and easy OTA updates has more to do with traditional car company bureaucracy than automotive technology. TechInsight’s Software Survey found that some 26 percent of European respondents cited “organizational structure and internal processes” as the biggest barrier. Newer automakers “all have been born in the era of software,” Sikaria said. “They've thought about this from the very beginning versus the large OEMs that have existed for decades, and for them to do the same transition means they have to really start over on software.”
Making matters worse, traditional automakers haven’t had a great track record recently when it comes to making significant changes to their software development processes. For example, VW CEO Herbert Diess lost his job in 2022 in part because of significant delays at its CARAID software development division. And last year General Motors temporarily suspended sales of its Chevrolet Blazer EV SUV due to software issues. “We disappointed these customers, and we know it,” GM CEO Mary Barra said at the time. “We are determined to get the software right, and we will.”
It doesn’t hurt to have a leader that understands technology, Sikaria said, which is what helped the likes of Tesla, Rivian, and Lucid to become trailblazers in OTA updating of their vehicles. The leaders of those companies have often been heavily involved in tech decision making, whereas the leaders of established automakers have traditionally come from the business side of the house. To catch up to the rival upstarts, several legacy brands have been liberally poaching software talent from Silicon Valley. That approach can also be fraught with challenges, however. “That’s not always a way to succeed because they don't understand how to navigate a large OEM with all the bureaucracy and politics,” Sikaria said.
OTA Updates Increasing
Despite the many hurdles, the number of OTA updates by traditional automakers has been on the rise. The analyst firm SBD found that by the beginning of 2018 there were 33 vehicle models across five brands in the U.S. able to perform OTA updates, and by the end of 2023 more than 300 models across 23 brands had the capability. Part of this growth is automakers are increasingly using OTA updates for recalls, saving car owners the time and hassle of bringing their vehicles to a dealership. OTA updates are now responsible for more than 1 in 5 automotive recalls based on analysis from the law firm DeMayo Law that examined a decade of data from NHTSA recalls. “I think that fixing urgent problems is probably a big motivation for a lot of the OTA updates,” Fang said.
But for newer, tech-forward automakers, OTA updates are more about offering new features or improving the functionality of existing ones instead of performing recalls, according to Riches. “For those who are currently more laggards than leaders, OTA is sometimes seen as a cheaper way of performing recalls,” he said. “Those behind in this area are missing many potential beneficial customer interactions.” This includes not only faster and easier recall fixes but adding features to vehicles after the sale via OTA updates. “Only fixing bugs can just highlight those bugs,” Riches said. “Offering new and improved features is a better path to a delighted customer.”
Legacy automakers have started offering OTA updates for features such as heated seats and hands-free highway driving systems. BMW offers an OTA update to activate a dashcam in some of its vehicles, and Mercedes-Benz software extras include the addition of an AMG Track Pack, for example. Over the last two years Ford has also issued several free OTA updates for its BlueCruise system. Honda recently announced it’s creating its own ASIMO operating systems and much of the software for its new 0 Series vehicles to enable more and faster OTA updates with a streamlined electronic architecture, while Hyundai Motor Group recently unveiled its new Pleos mobility software and technology platform “to achieve a software-centered mobility environment.”
Changing Software Like Tires
One solution to help unlock faster and more routine OTA updates is for the industry to coalesce around a standard such as ASAM Service-Oriented Vehicle Diagnostics (SOVD). It's a backward-compatible standard building on top of everything that the OEMs already use, and it helps create an easier and more sustainable way to update a vehicle’s capabilities from the cloud.
It also allows OEMs to work with various suppliers and not be pigeonholed into using one that may not be the best fit. “One of the concerns that we hear a lot from OEMs is vendor lock in,” Sikaria said. “They want to have a standard interface so that they can decouple and build a solution with vendors, suppliers, or in-house. I think OTA updates should become non-differentiated in the future,” he added. “It should be just like having tires on the vehicle. It doesn't matter who you get the tire from if it meets the specs.”
