SAIC conducts world's largest OTA upgrade for 250,000 Internet vehicles

Shanghai (Gasgoo)- "Since the world's first Internet SUV Roewe RX5 was born 15 months ago, a total of 250,000 Internet vehicles of SAIC are driving on the road and changing the car travel." On October 13, the vice president and general manager of SAIC, Wang Xiaoqiu shared this figure with the public excitedly in Hangzhou Yunqi Assembly.

Looking through the development history of SAIC Internet car, it can be described as rapid development. In July 2016, SAIC and Alibaba jointly built the Internet SUV Roewe RX5, which opened a new category of cars; In November 2016, SAIC launched the first plug-in hybrid Internet SUV Roewe eRX5; In February 2017, SAIC launched the first Internet car Roewe i6 ; In April 2017 SAIC launched the first plug-in hybrid ei6 sedan; In June 2017 SAIC launched the first Internet pure electric SUV Roewe ERX5. More and more SAIC models boast car internet features.

According to Wang Xiaoqiu, SAIC will also launch more Internet models in the future, through rapid iteration upgrade to ensure the vitality of the Internet car. At the same time, he said, car software, interactive experience, data services, autonomous driving and other light assets will become the focus of intelligent driving development in the future.

Network cars need the support of large data, whose processing will require the cloud support. A large number of SAIC's Internet cars are relying on Alibaba's AliOS cloud. Over the past year, SAIC has carried out five airborne cloud upgrades (OTA) for various networking models. That is to say, users can achieve some automatic upgrade of the network function without the need of going to 4S shop.

Wang Xiaoqiu said that SAIC would carry out the sixth free OTA upgrade for 250 thousand vehicles, which will be the world's largest cloud upgrade.

According to the staff, these upgrades will be completed at the end of this year, and the upgraded vehicles will be added more features such as social contact, self-driving travel.

"8 years ago, China became the world's largest auto market. If any technical innovation can not be operated in Chinese auto market, then there is no chance for other market, because innovation depends on a huge market scale," Wang Xiaoqiu said.