Some vehicles have their own modem and are online whenever they have signal. Others only ever talk to the owner's phone, over Bluetooth. A firmware update has to reach both, and the manufacturer should not have to run two processes to get it there.
What the manufacturer does
A rollout starts in the OEM Suite, in three steps.
- Upload the firmware file and its version, against a part of your catalogue.
- Target the part and the vehicle type it applies to: the control unit, the cockpit, or whatever else you defined.
- Switch the rollout on.
From there we host the file and serve it to every eligible vehicle. The rollout is the same whichever way the file travels. Only the last step to the vehicle differs.
Two paths to the vehicle
A vehicle with its own modem fetches the file from our API, over its own connection. That path works out of the box and is part of the package.
A vehicle without a modem gets the file from the owner's app, which carries it to the vehicle over Bluetooth. That path runs in the brand's own app, with the vehicle's Bluetooth protocol built in, and comes with enterprise.
The second path matters more than it looks. It reaches vehicles that have no connection of their own, through a phone the owner already carries.
We never flash
We are the distribution layer. We host the file and deliver it. Applying it is the control unit's job, done the way its maker built it to. We never flash a control unit ourselves.
That split is on purpose. The part that knows how to update itself safely is the part itself. Our job is to get the right file to the right vehicles, and to show you where it has landed.
In the OEM Suite you see how many vehicles have applied the update, and which ones. The rollout is confirmed per vehicle, so you know where it stands without anyone plugging in a cable.
For a manufacturer with a mixed range, some models with a modem and some without, that means one place to publish firmware for all of them, and one view of which vehicles have it.
How firmware fits with the receivers and the vehicle record is on the vehicle data page. To see a rollout from upload to applied, talk to our team.