Can you guess which automaker has the most sophisticated over-the-air software update capability in the United States market as of 2024? The answer is Ford Motor Company, whose #OTA capability as demonstrated on the Mustang Mach-E exceeds every other automaker selling vehicles with the capability in the United States today. While #Tesla and #Rivian update their vehicles more frequently and with more content overall, Ford’s ability to update the car while the vehicle is in use represents a novel capability that we’ve seen no other automaker employ on the road in the United States – and they’re quickly catching up in cadence, too, thanks to broad availability of their capability across all brands and powertrains. Ford made an active design choice to equip vehicle electronics with “A/B” partitioning, allowing software updates to be installed silently, then “switched over” to the newly updated partition without an interruption to the vehicle’s functionality. Laying the technology foundation that Ford has is a crucial step in enabling the long-term vision of the software-defined vehicle, and we’re now seeing the fruits of sizeable investments in development tools, organizational changes, and architecture overhauls give the company the opportunity to meet or even leapfrog the agility of their #EV competition. For more information on this ranking and methodology, refer to our quarterly OTA and Software-Delivered Features Guide, which also tracks every known software update pushed by every automaker in the United States, Europe, and China: https://lnkd.in/gq5ce2TK
Alex Oyler : Thanks for the comprehensive post about the OTA capabilities and rankings across the NA OEMs. My question is, despite the technological capability, does it makes sense to update vehicle software while the vehicle in use. Personally - for me the risks outweigh the benefits. What would be the compelling use-case where we would need to update the SW while driving? Let me know your thoughts on the same.
Remco Timmer
6mo
Hi Alex thanks for sharing, Great insight on Ford’s Mach E unique differentiation. Are you going to publish a global view as well? Would love to see how the Chinese OEMs score in comparison.
John McDermid
6mo
Does the ranking include how they ensure and assure safety?
Andrew Bullen
6mo
Not surprised to see Ford so successful they have been leaders in using BlackBerry QNX it's nice to see the advantages paying off for Ford Motor Company
Jason R.
6mo
Too bad Ford Motor Company is not sending the updates (at least not to Lightning owners), Alex Oyler. You should visit some of the Lightning forums and Facebook groups to see how far Ford is MISSING the mark with sending updates to vehicles. From my own personal experience, my truck was built in September and was sold to me in April without any updates. It currently is updated to an OTA software release that was sent to trucks in FEBRUARY OF 2023. There are at least hundreds, if not a few thousand, of us waiting for our trucks to have the capability promised.
Tushar Vashi
6mo
WOW !! Ford is beating Tesla in this important technology. I was fortunate to part of the team that delivered first set of OTA in 2021/2022.
John Vangelov
6mo
Really great to see the efforts that were put into ensuring a robust background update capability being recognized. The challenges of being able to update electrical systems that include both internal combustion engines with their batteries at various states of charge, along with electric vehicles with high voltage batteries capable of maintaining the low voltage system through an update is one of the great aspects of the capability. As you know Alex Oyler, I enjoy diving into the depths of the ‘how’… but ultimately this solution started by focusing on the customer experience, and it was delivered by an AMAZING team at Ford Motor Company. So proud to see this effort being recognized!
Very interesting, thank you. Simply to be sure here we don't talk about hot or rapid patch at runtime or do we but only OTA? Say differently system is not partially patched while it runs with no op interruption and no need for warm or cold reset? Ask since I see classic and robust A/B patching. Thank you.
Director - North America
6moP.S. - Shoutout to the awesome team at SBD Automotive that put in a ton of sweat equity in making sure we're using the most accurate, up-to-date data in these rankings every quarter: 👏 Tahjeeb, Fatemeh, Harshan, Joe, Amit, Simon, Archisman and David