Once upon a time, everybody seemed to believe autonomous vehicles (AVs) would soon be wheeling themselves merrily on every road.
That didn’t happen.
Though we still expect these things to arrive on streets eventually, how they do so won’t be straightforward, and it’s questionable whether private ownership is even a desirable aim. Shared AVs seems like a more promising approach.
Even before we get to that, here are six problems the Apple Car – and anyone else developing such vehicles – must solve.
Saving the world one car at a time
The car you drive is a giant chunk of steel, iron, plastic, aluminium, glass, rubber, precious metals and more. Not all of these materials are as readily available as they once were and the energy used in manufacturing a vehicle is an estimated 2.7MWh/car, according to the European Automobile Manufacturer’s Association (ACEA).
The industry is slowly shifting to make more use of recycled materials, but the inconvenient truth is that replacing the billion vehicles on the world’s roads with EV/Autonomous equivalents would demand more use of recycled materials and almost certainly challenge the supply of those raw commodities. Stellantis CEO Carlos Tavares recently said he doesn’t think there are enough raw materials available to replace all the cars.
What does this mean?
Just as iTunes became a subscription service, it suggests expectation of car ownership will be replaced by acceptance of a variety of models around access, including public transit, bikes, subscription, and ride-sharing schemes.
How much energy do you want to use?
Wired recently claimed Waymo Jaguar generates 1,100 gigabytes of information every hour. Multiple that by 1.4 billion (the number of cars in use worldwide) and that’s roughly 24 trillion gigabytes of data generated daily.
While some of this information is of little value, it must still be processed — with some data kept for training, as proof in case of accident, and for quality control.
Think how much energy and water the data storage centers handling this information will need. Ironically, it could mean that while the environmental impact of driving your car may be lower, the overall impact of manufacturing it and the data storage and servers upon which it relies will cast a nasty, dark shadow across that EV green glow.
Now, consider the energy used by all that street furniture as it, too, shares information and data with the traffic management system. It all adds up to energy which has to come from somewhere — but where?
In comparison, human drivers use around 24 watts of calorific energy for driving, the equivalent of eating a carrot.
How well do you want to be known?
The data lifecyle is another matter. Much of it will be low-grade information that loses relevance fast. But not all of it.
So what data should be kept?
There are limits to what isn’t retained. For example, in case of an accident, investigators will need to be able to access all…
2023-12-04 02:41:02
Article from www.computerworld.com