Self-driving EVs use way more energy than you’d think – Popular Science, 2023/01/13
Truly self-driving cars are still at least a few years down the road—but if the day does come when the software becomes a de facto means of navigation, a new study indicates it’s going to need to be much more energy efficient. If not, autopilot features could ostensibly neutralize any self-driving electric vehicles’ environmental benefits. According to a new study from researchers at MIT, statistical modeling indicates the potential energy consumption needed to power a near-future global fleet of autopiloted EVs would generate as much greenhouse gas as all of the world’s current data centers combined.
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MIT notes that semi-autonomous vehicles already rely on popular algorithms such as a “multitask deep neural network” to navigate travel using numerous high-resolution cameras feeding constant, real-time information to its system. In one situation, researchers estimated that if an autonomous vehicle used 10 deep neural networks analyzing imagery from 10 cameras while driving just a single hour, it would generate 21.6 million inferences per day. Extrapolate that for 1 billion vehicles, and you get… 21.6 quadrillion inferences.
Normal human processing while driving is much more energy efficient than all of these machines and computers needed to process the information necessary for autopilot capabilities. If some people are so concerned about burning energy and the climate, why even undertake this? Answer… money.
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