How does Autonomous Parking Impact Energy Use?2 min read
Recently, a report published by the Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT) shed light on the impact of autonomous parking and vehicle usage on energy use. The report cautions that the growth of autonomous parking and vehicles could lead to huge energy usage unless quick and substantial technological modifications are made.
The study further revealed that if autonomous vehicles were adopted on a global scale, the powerful onboard computers required to operate them might have a greenhouse gas emission equal to that of all global data centers combined.
According to the explanation provided by Rima Sabina Aouf, who published the study in Dezeen, the excessive emissions are due to the enormous amount of computer effort that is imposed on each autonomous car. The vehicles are equipped with “deep neural networks,” which enable them to continually make conclusions and inferences. In addition to that, the findings of the study state that one billion automobiles would generate 21,600 trillion inferences.
In order to put that number into perspective, all of Facebook’s data centers around the world presently create a few trillion conclusions every single day.
According to Soumya Sudhakar, one of the co-authors of the study, if we just keep the business-as-usual trends in de-carbonization and the current rate of hardware efficiency improvements, we are unlikely to be able to control the emissions resulting from the computation of autonomous vehicles.
Hence, manufacturers of autonomous vehicles can get a head start on the problem by making efforts to increase the effectiveness of their algorithms and hardware. According to the findings of the study, under a scenario in which 95 percent of the world’s vehicles are autonomous by the year 2050, the efficiency of the technology must double approximately every 1.1 years so that each autonomous vehicle consumes fewer than 1.2 KWs of energy for computational purposes.
It’s clear that the future of transport relies more on electric vehicles than on autonomous vehicles, considering how alarming the latest reports on climate change are.
Read Also: What is Autonomous Valet Parking?
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