Sunnyvale, CA-based automotive software company Sonatus is aiming to accelerate the transition to software-defined vehicles (SDVs) by today announcing its Updater solution for managing over-the-air (OTA) updates to enable rapidly evolving software content. The company says that 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 pioneered by Tesla are now becoming an indispensable tool for automotive manufacturers in the fast-evolving SDV world. As the software content in vehicles has grown exponentially, the need for OTA management solutions has also evolved.

“Automotive consumers increasingly expect software updates to securely deliver new features and capabilities for their vehicles,” said Yu Fang, Co-founder and Chief Technical Officer at Sonatus. “OEMs are working to differentiate themselves and meet that demand with OTA updates but often find update management difficult, time-consuming, and expensive. 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.”

The solution is a component of the Sonatus Vehicle Platform, which is designed to allow automotive companies and their ecosystems to deliver continuous improvements in costs, capabilities, reliability, and user experience over vehicle lifespans. The platform is in mass production in over 1 million vehicles from Hyundai, Kia, and Genesis, and it is expected to improve millions of cars by 2024.

Updater addresses those needs in three key ways.

First, the solution offers a single solution for the ever-growing types of vehicle software elements in addition to ECU (electronic control unit) firmware. It can manage containers, network and storage configurations, variant coding, and data-management policies 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. It allows OEMs to perform a proactive dry run of any OTA campaign to understand its impact and make adjustments needed to streamline the process.

Lastly, as the frequency and complexity of vehicle software updates increase, OEMs will be able to quickly resolve issues when campaigns run into trouble using the solution’s fine-grained visibility and tracing capabilities to track individual processes from the cloud down to the target ECUs.

By 2025, consumers expect their vehicles to receive up to six updates a year, the company citing a Strategy Analytics (now TechInsights) and Aurora Labs 2022 Automotive Software Survey.

A recent survey 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 40% have had negative experiences having their vehicle updated at the shop, spending an average of 2 h each time their car required an update. And 86% said they would happily install updates at home, underscoring the benefit of extending all types of update capabilities over the air.

“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, at 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.”

Specifically, Updater allows automakers to manage updates securely by updating firmware, configurations, and policies from a single interface in compliance with UNECE R155/R156. The solution ensures predictable results with dry runs to predict the cost of a campaign and proactively resolve conflicts before deploying an update. It provides end-to-end traceability with detailed visibility down to the individual vehicle ECU to aid in troubleshooting and improving future campaign success.

Updater will be available for integration starting in Q2. 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 company’s platform, which provides key software building blocks to enable the transition to software-defined architectures.

The company will be exhibiting Updater and its larger platform at CES 2024 next week at the Las Vegas Convention Center. To request a meeting, visit https://www.sonatus.com/ces-2024.