Over-the-Air Updates: Real Market Emergence

Over-the-Air Updates: Real Market Emergence

Publication Date: 29-Aug-2017
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**Updated August 2017**

Over-the-air (OTA) updates have significant economic advantages owing to large cost savings compared with existing manual approaches. Since our last report in 2015, there has been a real market emergence of OTA updates in cars, particularly in the telematics and infotainment space. A major mainstream automaker, General Motors (GM), is also believed to have implemented OTA core electronic control units (ECUs) updates this year. 

The real market emergence is primarily precipitated by recall and warranty costs and due to the rapid development of autonomous cars. It is clear that software-related recalls have grown rapidly in the last decade, and it has become more pronounced only in the latest model years. IHS Markit estimates that about 89% of recalls for MY 2017 are software-related, an astonishing figure considering that only 0.5% of recalls were software-related in MY 1999.

As cars become more software-defined than mechanical, the importance of OTA updates becomes more critical. In addition, many OEMs have stated that they will have fully autonomous cars ready by 2021, and this type of vehicle will require ubiquitous, incremental, high-definition map updates, as well as Ethernet electric subsystems that is capable of securely updating all ECUs in a car.

This report provides perspectives on how automotive remote software updates will develop and which segments are the most important.

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