ATS Advanced Telematic Systems Launch “ATS Garage”—a SaaS Platform for Automotive-Grade OTA

Founded in 2013, ATS Advanced Telematic Systems has been a leader of open source OTA solutions built from the ground up for automotive applications. ATS is renowned for its work in open source, seeking to revolutionize industry approaches to OTA through its work with GENIVI and Automotive Grade Linux. The pioneering OTA Plus solution was introduced to enable remote life cycle management of connected vehicles, addressing safety and security concerns, diagnostics, maintenance, and user convenience, in a scalable and easily integrated approach. ATS is now complementing its OTA Plus solution with the addition of ATS Garage, a SaaS platform initially focusing on OTA, designed to provide smaller players and recent startups with an affordable but automotive-focused OTA solution, condensing many of the advantages of OTA Plus into a convenient, off-the-shelf solution. 

The traditional approach to software distribution taken by most OEMs has been plagued by poor security and slow implementation, which resulted in many connected cars being vulnerable to cyber-attacks. Furthermore, it exposed OEMs to greater recall costs, as software issues required physical recalls to the garage, due to the absence of any secure remote management of cars already on the road. Finally, the effective use of OTA in parallel consumer electronics and even relative automotive newcomer, Tesla, resulted in typical connected cars falling short of consumer expectations. Many OTA providers, such as Redbend and Movimento, can and have assisted OEMs in better managing the lifecycle of their vehicles; but this often comes at high fixed setup costs, pricing out smaller players with a lower number of connected vehicles to maintain. Also, M&A activity around OTA tied many OTA providers to existing Tier One suppliers and semiconductor vendors, compromising the independence of their offering.

The ATS Garage solution is targeted towards OEM autonomous vehicle labs and new mobility startups, delivering access to an off-the-shelf, fully automated OTA service at a low cost. This SaaS platform enables flexible campaign management for numerous connected vehicles, with users retaining the ability to adapt their solution with interface compatible alternatives, thanks to ATS’s hallmark use of open source standards. ATS Garage can be easily installed and evaluated within 10 minutes, and incorporates its own user interface. With a pricing strategy that offers free access for up to 20 vehicles, with a fee of EU0.99/vehicle/month, ATS Garage will provide smaller automotive players with access to critical OTA services that is convenient and low cost, but which retains the all-important automotive focus, which is reflected in secure architectures and automotive-grade provisioning. 

In a recent report, ADAS Supplier Ecosystem: Semiconductor Vendors, Tier One Suppliers, Hardware and Software Developers (AN-2224), ABI Research analyzed the roles of various players across the ADAS ecosystem, and assessed the market readiness for the transition to autonomous vehicles at each point in the supply chain. One of the key trends identified was the need for smart mobility newcomers and even OEM-led autonomous ventures to industrialize their current products, which are currently geared towards prototype testing, rather than sustainable rollout on a large scale. Certainly, these small-scale trials played an important role in identifying corner cases, measuring human interaction with autonomous systems, and building consumer confidence. However, vendors wishing to eventually transition away from building and testing prototypes to supplying autonomous vehicles for a profitable commercial operation—either through their own MaaS solution or supplying an autonomous fleet operator—must consider the sustainability of their approach from the outset.

For reasons outlined above, OTA management will be a key requirement to ensure the safety, security, and relevance of autonomous vehicles. ATS Garage will enable new mobility companies who may be small now, but have ambitions to play a significant role in the future of mobility, to factor in OTA at a much earlier point in its product development. Furthermore, the ease of scalability from ATS Garage to OTA Plus will allow vendors to experiment with OTA management on a smaller scale, learn the value that the technology brings at this early stage, and then retain these capacities as the autonomous vehicle market grows.

This is true of OEMs, as well as new startups that develop and manufacture their own pods. An OEM can often have a number of different autonomous vehicle labs across the globe, particularly if they are looking to cater to the idiosyncratic mobility needs of separate regions. In these cases, the labs will only have access to a handful of prototypes, and will, therefore, have their needs best met by an off-the-shelf solution like ATS Garage—again, retaining the possibility to scale up as autonomous transport becomes a commercial reality.

ATS Garage comes to market at a time when new mobility companies are expanding, both in number and influence, with autonomous pod/developers such as Navya and Easymile being joined by a host of new OEM smart mobility sub brands, such as BMW i and VW’s MOIA. These vendors are often described in terms of their size, but are perhaps better defined in terms of their innovation and potential to revolutionize personal mobility. Such players are well-placed to engage with ATS Garage’s open and agile approach.