Empowers automakers to securely manage all automotive software updates with predictability and end-to-end traceability
Sonatus, a leading automotive software company accelerating the transition to software-defined vehicles (SDVs), announced Sonatus Updater, a comprehensive product for managing over-the-air (OTA) updates suited for the rapidly evolving software content in vehicles today and the future. Updater allows automotive manufacturers to manage the increasing variety of vehicle software assets from a single pane of glass, with predictability and end-to-end traceability.
Over-the-air updates have become an indispensable tool for automotive manufacturers in the fast-evolving world of software-defined vehicles. As the software content in vehicles has grown exponentially, the needs for OTA management solutions have also evolved. Sonatus Updater addresses those needs in three fundamental ways.
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First, it offers a single solution to conduct updates for the ever-growing types of vehicle software elements, in addition to electronic control unit (ECU) firmware. Updater can manage containers, network and storage configurations, variant coding, data management policies, and more, while ensuring that cross-dependencies and strict security controls are managed. Second, OTA campaigns can be unpredictable in terms of cost, complexity, and time taken. Updater allows OEMs to perform a proactive dry run of any OTA campaign to understand its impact and make adjustments needed to streamline the process. Finally, as the frequency and complexity of vehicle software updates increase, OEMs will be able to quickly resolve issues when campaigns run into trouble using Updater’s fine-grained visibility and tracing capabilities to track individual processes from the cloud down to the target ECUs.
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By 2025, consumers expect their vehicles to receive up to six updates a year1. A recent survey conducted by Wakefield Research, commissioned by Sonatus, found that car owners value updates – particularly those that deliver improvements to safety (65%), navigation (59%), and security (54%) – but they dread taking the car to the service center to be updated. Almost two in five have had negative experiences having their vehicle updated at the shop, spending an average of two hours on the errand each time their car required an update. 86% said they would happily install updates at home, underscoring the benefit of extending all types of update capabilities over the air.
“Automotive consumers increasingly expect software updates to securely deliver new features and capabilities for their vehicles. OEMs are working to differentiate themselves and meet that demand with OTA updates, but often find update management difficult, time-consuming, and expensive,” said Yu Fang, co-founder and chief technical officer, Sonatus. “Sonatus Updater is specifically designed to address the challenges automakers encounter, enabling multi-modal OTA operations with the ability to predict outcomes and trace updates throughout the process.”
Sonatus Updater allows automakers to:
- Manage updates securely: update firmware, configurations, policies, and more from a single interface in compliance with UNECE R155/R156.
- Ensure predictable results: Conduct dry runs to predict the cost of a campaign and proactively resolve conflicts before deploying an update.
- Provide end-to-end traceability: Trace campaigns with complete and detailed visibility – down to the individual vehicle ECU – to aid in troubleshooting and improving future campaign success.
“Streamlining the delivery of OTA updates benefits both OEMs and their customers: when things go smoothly with software updates, everyone wins,” said Stephen Bell, chief analyst – connectivity, Wards Intelligence. “Sonatus Updater is enabling OEMs to deliver all types of updates to their customers with greater confidence, better visibility, predictable cost, and improved security. These are game-changing capabilities that allow car owners to more easily realize the promised benefits of a software-defined vehicle: a car that keeps improving after it drives off the lot.”
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Sonatus Updater will be available for integration starting Q2 2024. With its extensive experience collaborating with OEMs and suppliers, Sonatus enables partner automakers to easily incorporate Updater into their existing software stack, or on top of the Sonatus Foundation platform, which provides key software building blocks to enable the transition to software-defined architectures.
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