Chery deployed digital car keys across 20 production vehicle models, supporting every major industry standard and every mainstream mobile wallet ecosystem. To date, more than 3 million digital keys have been issued across the platform.
Chery approached digital car keys as a platform capability from day one — not a flagship demo, not a limited rollout.
The goal was clear: support the entire vehicle lineup, every mainstream mobile ecosystem, and every major digital-key standard without locking the platform to a single hardware vendor.
The challenge was never whether a phone could unlock a car.
It was whether vehicle hardware, mobile wallets, wireless protocols, security standards, assembly-line provisioning, and OTA operations could all operate together at production scale. If any layer failed to integrate, digital keys would remain a prototype feature instead of a deployable platform capability.
Chery chose the most demanding path from the start: no phased rollout, no flagship-only deployment. Every vehicle model would support every major standard and every mainstream phone ecosystem at launch.
CCC, ICCOA, and ICCE each define different PKI structures, cryptography models, applets, and certification flows.
Apple Wallet requires CCC and MFi certification. Android OEM wallets align around ICCOA and ICCE. Meanwhile, proprietary BLE-based vehicle access systems still coexist across the industry.
Supporting the full mobile ecosystem means operating all of these in parallel — even though their trust chains, key systems, and provisioning models do not naturally interoperate.
NFC enables tap-to-unlock. BLE handles discovery, wake-up, and data transport. UWB enables secure ranging and passive entry.
Each radio introduces its own integration model across the vehicle and the phone. In production, all three must behave as one seamless vehicle access experience.
Digital keys only become a production feature when they work across the entire mobile ecosystem — not only on selected devices.
Apple operates its own security domain and MFi certification pipeline. Android OEMs maintain independent wallet stacks and onboarding requirements.
Production deployment therefore requires parallel integration across multiple mobile ecosystems at the same time.
Different vehicle programs use different SE chips, MCUs, ECUs, and Tier 1 suppliers, each with independent OTA cadences.
A per-model integration approach would never scale across the lineup. Digital keys had to become a reusable platform capability instead of a vehicle-by-vehicle project.
CCC and ICCOA rely on certificate-chain trust models, while ICCE relies on symmetric-key architecture.
OnBoard™ unified both into a single security infrastructure:
New standards extend the existing infrastructure instead of introducing parallel security stacks.
OnBoard™ delivered onboarding into Apple Wallet and mainstream Android OEM wallets in parallel, including SE applets, SDK integration, and certification support for CCC, ICCOA, and ICCE.
Apple required MFi certification, while each Android OEM maintained its own onboarding process and wallet architecture.
By operating both tracks simultaneously, Chery avoided certification-driven engineering bottlenecks and reduced rollout complexity across the vehicle lineup.
Different vehicle models shipped with different SE chips and different combinations of supported standards.
OnBoard™ developed applets independently per standard and built a reusable cross-chip integration model on top:
Digital-key updates were integrated into the existing vehicle OTA pipeline through the SEMS offline path (SCP11-C), rather than managed as standalone deployments.
Digital-key capability ultimately has to be provisioned into every vehicle leaving the production line.
SEMS manages security domains, applets, certificates, and key injection directly on the in-vehicle SE at manufacturing cadence.
Every provisioning operation is traceable and auditable.
This production-layer integration is what transformed digital keys from an engineering feature into a mass-production vehicle capability across the entire Chery lineup.
The Chery digital car key platform now operates in steady state across 20 production vehicle models, with more than 3 million digital key credentials issued to date.
Standards support, mobile OEM onboarding, wireless integration, and security infrastructure are consolidated at the platform layer — allowing new vehicle programs to inherit the capability instead of rebuilding it from zero.
