OTA platform gives greater control over automotive fleets

Excelfore has announced that it is demonstrating its eSync system with ZF at the CES 2018 exhibition held in Las Vegas, Nevada, January 9-12, 2018.

The demonstrations are taking place in the Excelfore demonstration suite at the Westgate Resort, and at the ZF booth (Tech East, LVCC North Hall Booth 8717). They showcase how the eSync over-the-air (OTA) platform for updates and diagnostic data retrieval gives operators greater control over their automotive fleets, providing secure mechanisms for continuous improvements in fleet efficiency.

Major fleet operators increasingly build upon OEM-provided vehicles to meet their own specifications. The eSync platform has a vital role to play at the very heart of this business model, by handling OTA updates and data retrieval for the many electronic devices in modern fleet vehicles, and providing a single mechanism to handle multiple vehicle types across an entire fleet.

The demonstrations at CES showcase how a fleet operator can use the eSync OTA system to perform updates on the various models that comprise a fleet of many thousands of vehicles. In the demo, the operator can review and improve the efficiency and performance of particular vehicle models within the fleet, and can use the same OTA process for predicting and resolving potential security issues before they become problems.

“The eSync system provides a superior pipeline to reach all the electronic devices in modern connected vehicles,” said Shrinath Acharya, chief executive officer of Excelfore. “ZF is a leading worldwide supplier of automotive components and systems. Our work together shows a highly pertinent example of just how powerful this capability to reach the end devices in the vehicle can be, feeding real world data in to predictive analytics and machine learning to enable automakers and fleet operators to drive continuous improvement cycles in their vehicles.”

The eSync system and the eSync Alliance

The eSync system is a cloud platform for secure transactions with the electronic end devices in a vehicle. It can deliver and update software and firmware over-the-air, and can collect diagnostics and telematics data from end devices in the vehicle.

Modern connected cars may incorporate dozens, or even hundreds, of software-driven sensors and controllers. Automakers and fleet operators increasingly seek the ability to update software over-the-air, to avoid recall and service costs, to provide security patches, to improve vehicle performance and efficiency, and even to add new features or enhancements. However, to date, most solutions that are available to serve the automotive market are single-company proprietary offerings.

The eSync Alliance, a global initiative consisting of multiple automotive suppliers, specifically addresses this by creating a community of companies that cooperate to provide standardized and interoperable OTA and diagnostic-data solutions.