Self-driving EVs may have climate problem
The amount of energy required to run just the computers on a global fleet of autonomous vehicles could generate as much greenhouse gas emissions as all the data centres in the world today.
The finding, announced by researchers from MIT yesterday, is based on a statistical model that calculated the energy outputs a fleet of 1 billion autonomous electric vehicles would generate if they ran for one hour per day. The resulting number roughly translated to 0.3% of the world’s greenhouse gas emissions.
For self-driving cars to drive autonomously, they require large amounts of computing power to run sophisticated algorithms and onboard camera systems.
While the findings are only projections, Soumya Sudhakar, a lead MIT researcher on the study, said the results should make selfdriving car researchers and makers realise that ‘‘business as usual’’ was not enough, and that computing efficiency should be at the forefront of their minds.
Major auto manufacturers, from Tesla to GE, have made big bets on self-driving cars fuelling the future. But they have been plagued with safety concerns, technological challenges and delays.
The MIT researchers built a model to calculate how much emissions the computers on board a fleet of fully electric autonomous vehicles would generate. It estimated roughly 1 billion vehicles in a global fleet, along with each car’s computer using roughly 840 watts of power, the average hours the cars were driven, and the carbon intensity of the electricity powering each computer.
The equation was difficult to calculate, because it’s still uncertain how self-driving vehicles could change driving habits.
For instance, some research says self-driving cars will lead to longer drive times, because people will be able to multi-task. Others say drive times will decrease, because the vehicles’ computers will find the quickest ways to destinations.
The researchers also found that to keep computer-generated emissions from spiralling out of control in the coming decades, each autonomous vehicle would need to consume less than 1.2 kilowatts of energy for computing, which would require hardware to double in efficiency roughly every 1.1 years – a ‘‘significantly faster pace’’ than what is being done currently.
In some scenarios, the scientists also found that selfdriving companies would need to make their computer hardware double in efficiency roughly every year for a global fleet to not blow past these emissions estimates by 2050.
Scientists could develop specialised hardware, but Sudhakar said that because vehicles often had 10- to 20-year lifespans, any current hardware upgrades might not be ‘‘futureproof’’ to run new algorithms.