NIO, Inc., San Jose, California, United States: NIO Firmware Over the Air (FOTA)

Total 494 words used.

NIO is the first car brand to achieve FOTA on a large scale through its development. With NIO's software development and delivery system, NIO can achieve full autonomy and control from the development end to the user end.

For automobiles, FOTA is a crucial tool for realizing car intelligence. It optimizes the vehicle's power response and timely driving quality. A FOTA release allows NIO users to obtain a new driving experience without visiting a service center. Remotely and conveniently, our users can adjust the power to improve range and change the torque ratio between the front and rear wheels.

The continuous optimization of a wide range of functions is only one of FOTA's values. Our users can give feedback to NIO immediately for any issues and suggestions in the actual use of the car, which can be optimized in FOTA later.

For NIO, the unique debug system allows the development team better to understand the user's needs for new functions. New features were added, such as a lighter color theme for the center screen, a new energy-saving mode, snow mode, etc., mostly based on user feedback. FOTA enables users to be more engaged in the design and development of the car.

By relying on the self-developed core domain controller, NIO FOTA (firmware-over-the-air) updates the 35 electronic control units (ECU) of the entire vehicle with remote firmware and updates five functional domains: power, chassis, driving assistance, infotainment, and body. FOTA profoundly changes the user's car experience. FOTA has become a way for OEMs to quickly iterate on product features, update and maintain system defects, and is now an essential feature for smart connected vehicles.

NIO is one of the few car brands to offer FOTA on a large scale through its development. It provides the advantage of continuously optimizing a wide range of functions, which is only one of FOTA's values. Our users can give feedback to NIO immediately for any issues and suggestions in the actual use of the car, which can be optimized in FOTA later.

With a simple update through FOTA, its customers experience flashy new features, even significant updates—such as the NIO Pilot system and battery power improvements—without going to a service center. These updates cover everything from the in-car infotainment features to overall improvement at the system level, including vehicle dynamics, handling, driving quality, and driving assistance. The company's FOTA infrastructure effectively allows it to improve the user experience continuously while providing rapid feedback to user input.

NIO provides a next-level driving experience to users. NIO always puts users' experience as the top priority to enjoy every road trip in a luxurious space with advanced technology, from updating better and safer driving to building a smarter in-car entertainment system. This has been a game changer in the automotive industry. More and more car companies are trying to catch up with the latest technologies and offer the capability of constant vehicle upgrades to provide the best user experience possible as NIO. 

Total 133 words used.

• NIO is the first car brand to achieve FOTA on a large scale through its development.
• FOTA is a crucial tool for realizing car intelligence. It optimizes the vehicle's power response and timely driving quality.
• A FOTA release allows NIO users to obtain a new driving experience without visiting a service center.
• FOTA Update successful rate 99%
• NIO provides a next-level driving experience to users.
• NIO makes improvements by listening to users' feedback
• NIO is one of the few car brands to offer FOTA on a large scale through its development.
• NIO FOTA provides the advantage of continuously optimizing a wide range of functions.
• The end-to-end FOTA process can be divided into three steps: download, validate, and update.
• Integrating ECUs in the vehicle FOTA process is very critical for a successful FOTA process.

Essay of up to 650 words

NIO is the first car brand to achieve FOTA on a large scale through its development. NIO is one of the few car brands to offer FOTA on a large scale through its development. NIO measures users' satisfaction by listening to their feedback and continuously making improvements. For example, due to the motor's large torque output, the vehicle is prone to skidding when starting up on snow or ice. To solve this user pain point, we released the Snow Mode with A 50/50 torque distribution of the front and rear wheels in the NIO OS 2.4.0 in December 2019. 

 As of December 8, 2020, NIO OS 2.8.0 has been delivered to 35,339 vehicles and has been updated successfully, covering four different models: two generations of the ES8, the ES6, and the EC6. These FOTA updates introduced 136 new features and 289 optimizations, bringing up to 425 improvements to NIO's fleet. Recently, NIO has tested the mapping coverage and the stability of its NOP function in 30 plus cities in China, with its fleet driving over 300,000 kilometers. With the recent update Aspen 3.0.0, NIO has pushed FOTA updates to its users over 1.3M cumulatively, releasing 199 new features and 401 enhancements.

While the update step during FOTA makes the car undrivable until all the ECUs are updated, if there is a critical or irrecoverable failure, the car is stranded or immobile until an on-field technician can come to rescue. Every FOTA rollout is rehearsed on hundreds of cars before doing a big rollout in the field for the company's more than 75,000 customer cars to ensure it is hit with these critical failures on very few vehicles. Interestingly, when Nio deployed the FOTA process in the field in 2018, its success rate was only between 60-70%; now, that's gone up to 99% and improving with each rollout. 

The whole software/firmware update process in a vehicle is very different from what we regularly see, e.g., in a smartphone update. Being a typical vehicle with many ECUs (electronic control units), the Nio ES8 has about 35 ECUs. So, the update process needs to manage updating all these ECUs to the targeted firmware and any other application-level update, requiring every FOTA rollout to plan and mitigate failures for any of these ECUs.

The end-to-end FOTA process can be divided into three steps: download, validate, and update. The download step takes care of downloading the individual update packages for all the ECUs to be updated. The validation step ensures the downloaded packages are the right ones, without any corruption or security issues. Both of these steps happen in the background, without the user even being aware, and can take a few minutes to a few days or weeks to complete, depending on the new firmware's size to be updated. After completing the download and validation steps, the user is notified about the latest software update. This is when the user is asked to schedule the update. The scheduling is critical as the car needs to be parked and not drivable for the update duration. Once the update process kicks in, it checks the conditions of each of the ECUs, flashes them, and does the post-programming step. After all, the ECUs are flashed in the specified order, the vehicle reboots and comes back up with the new flashy software, and it's ready to be drivable again.