17 ms·

How much power do autonomous vehicles use? A lot

41 points by JoachimS 4y ago

mcny 4y ago
archived at https://archive.fo/QMZQw https://archive.fo/QMZQw How Much Power Do Autonomous Vehicles Use? A Lot A model of power consumption by autonomous vehicles predicts that once widely adopted, they will consume as much power worldwide as data centers do. By Bill Schweber 02.27.2023 My summary: > “1 billion autonomous vehicles, each driving for one hour per day with a computer consuming 840 W, would consume enough energy to generate about the same amount of emissions as data centers currently do.” > Well… maybe yes, maybe not. Despite the academic veneer and a detailed table explaining their model and its embedded assumptions, the inherent nature of the model has many rough estimates, sophisticated guesses and outright assumptions. I’d compare it more to a fancy “back of the envelope” assessment (Figure 2) rather than a rigorous academic analysis. Step back, and there’s the reality that any assessment of the future for a situation such as this is simply not possible. > Call me cynical, but it seems that the design reality is that system demands and thus power use often expand to the maximum the system can provide or tolerate. Remember, when transistors and ICs were devised and then went to ever-lower voltage/power, the per-function dissipation dropped by several orders of magnitude—you can’t argue with that fact. > However, coincidentally with this good news, user requirements increased at a greater rate, so now you have server racks pushing almost 10 kW each—an almost unthinkable figure just a decade ago, up from about 2.4 kW each in 2011 according to one survey (I have seen others, and those numbers are similar) (Figure 3).
- pengaru 4y ago
  >> Call me cynical, but it seems that the design reality is that system demands and thus power use often expand to the maximum the system can provide or tolerate. Remember, when transistors and ICs were devised and then went to ever-lower voltage/power, the per-function dissipation dropped by several orders of magnitude—you can’t argue with that fact. >> However, coincidentally with this good news, user requirements increased at a greater rate, so now you have server racks pushing almost 10 kW each—an almost unthinkable figure just a decade ago, up from about 2.4 kW each in 2011 according to one survey (I have seen others, and those numbers are similar) (Figure 3). https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Jevons_paradox https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Jevons_paradox
huijzer 4y ago
So the calculation is based on 0.840 kWh per day per car for an hour driving. When driving 100 km/h for an hour, a reasonably efficient car will use 5 liters of petrol. The energy in 5 liters is about 5 * 34 = 170 MJ. Hence, 47 kWh. So yes, it’s a lot of energy used by the computations, but still less than the actual force required to move the car forward. Edit: Fixed number.
- ParacelsusOfEgg 4y ago
  I believe you meant 0.84kWh, the article stated 840 Wh per day.
  - zaroth 4y ago
    So roughly 5 cents of energy to autonomously pilot a 2 ton vehicle with several human occupants through a relatively hostile and uncontrolled environment… At scale safe autonomous driving will be saving 100k lives and eliminating over a trillion of dollars in economic losses per year. This is a minuscule amount of energy expended for the results achieved by any reasonable standard!
    - JohnFen 4y ago
      I agree with your opinion, but disagree with measuring power use in terms of monetary cost. Doing it that way excludes most of the actual cost of power generation and use.
crazygringo 4y ago
> A model of power consumption by autonomous vehicles predicts that once widely adopted, they will consume as much power worldwide as data centers do. It's referring to the energy to power the brains of self-driving, not to move the vehicle. But that seems... fine? I can't tell if the article wants us to think that's a lot. Data centers and networks account for something like 1% of global electricity use. If autonomous driving saves a ton of lives then an extra 1% is well worth it. Just from productivity increases alone it may also be well worth it. But also, the "brains" will presumably become more energy-efficient over time (as electronics have generally), and the share of renewables is increasing. I don't really see a problem here.
- grey-area 4y ago
  They can also be programmed to drive in a more efficient way that humans so there is a net saving of power.
  - m463 4y ago
    I think that pretty much sums it up on many levels. I think of not just better route planning, but that one delivery driver can service 100's of customers who would otherwise make a trip themselves.
    - trompetenaccoun 4y ago
      For delivery you're right but we could have this today already. There's no reason not to put minimum wage drivers in a car and have them do this today. We have computers and mapping already, self-driving isn't needed for this at all and paying someone 100 dollars a day or whatever is guaranteed to be much cheaper than the self delivering truck - at least for now and in the foreseeable future. So why isn't it a thing? Clearly not for the lack of self-driving tech.
  - mechagodzilla 4y ago
    Do you actually have any data to back up the 'net saving of power' part?
robomartin 4y ago
The real problem isn't the autonomous part (although it is an issue). Full electrification of just the US will require a doubling of our power generation and transport capacity. This isn't trivial at all. The US currently produces 1200 GW (power, not talking energy, that is not the correct conversation). For context, a typical nuclear power plant produces 1 GW. Which means that this doubling effect would be the equivalent of building 1200 new nuclear power plants. I am not saying that's what we have to do, it's a useful mental tool to be used in understanding the scale of the problem. Solar isn't going to make this happen. For starters, a solar system has to be overbuilt at a minimum of 10 times the required steady-state output. In other words, if you are after 1 GW steady state you need a minimum of 10 GW of solar. The scale is so massive that you start running into regional, weather and MTBF and other issues. The right solutions is likely a combination of lots of nuclear along with lots of solar, wind and hydro (where possible). We are going to need a serious shift in culture to be able to accomplish this, otherwise, electric cars are going to end-up requiring burning all kinds of fuels just to generate the power to keep them charged. And then you have all the battery issues. At some point you have to honestly ask for an honest accounting of what it might all lead to. I have these images in my mind of massive land areas devastated by strip-mining and other activities just to be "clean" in lands far and away from the mines. Electric cars are a good idea. We all want them. We just need to be sure we have honest discussions in order to ensure we do it right and don't create a bigger long-term mess than what we manage today. EDIT: Why do I say that energy isn't the correct conversation? Because energy allows one to fall under the fallacy of thinking that things can happen over time. That is not the case here. When you have a thousand cars plug in to charge at the same time, you need enough power to service that load. Yes, of course, the objective is to store a certain amount of energy. However, the critical path, the thing that will break systems and overload power generation and transmission is their simultaneous power requirement. The conversation has to be about power. In a place like Los Angeles you might have a million cars simultaneously connecting to the grid to charge. That imposes an instantaneous power requirement that has to be met or things go wrong very quickly. This is how the electric transition is more complicated than a lot of these hand-wavy energy estimates which conveniently ignore what needs to happen instantaneously.
- zaroth 4y ago
deleted 4y ago
[deleted]
TheDudeMan 4y ago
Ridiculous article. No mention of the tendency for computing to become more efficient as tech improves.
- ilyt 4y ago
  Or any power usage for compute for any of the current "autonomous" vehicles.
- gertlex 4y ago
  But computing applications also tend to use more or all of the available power... so by itself, tech improvements do not mean that power used will go down correspondingly. (or else thanks to processor Flops/watt improvements, we'd have most laptops running for days on their current batteries, right?) It seems we'd only expect power use to go down when autonomous driving applications are "feature complete" and stop having a use for additional compute power. In the meantime, discussions of limits based on achievable/acceptable power draw (a la phones which I would guess have been in a consistent range for years now) are more likely to be meaningful.
  - quickthrower2 4y ago
    It is not an electron app. And energy efficiency numbers people will look at when buying/comparing.
- swatcoder 4y ago
  With some exceptions, increased efficiency has historically been used to increase capabilities rather than reduce consumption. It’s by no means ridiculous to assume that this might happen here too, and in fact publishing analyses that make the assumption might be exactly what helps make conservation a priority and breaks those same assumptions.
  - Animats 4y ago
    > It’s by no means ridiculous to assume that this might happen here too, and in fact publishing analyses that make the assumption might be exactly what helps make conservation a priority and breaks those same assumptions. Power consumption has become a serious problem with auto "infotainment" systems. There are cars running Unreal Engine in the dashboard. There's a noticeable reduction in EV range. (Also a tendency to have too much electronics running while the vehicle is parked. Teslas are noted for this. There's "sentry mode", and "summon mode", and WiFi, and remote updates, and telemetry, and apps phoning home...[1] This can be a worse problem than power consumption for the electronics while driving, since most vehicles are driven a small number of hours per day.) [1] https://teslamotorsclub.com/tmc/threads/battery-drain-while-parked.209938/ https://teslamotorsclub.com/tmc/threads/battery-drain-while-...
ilyt 4y ago
> 1 billion autonomous vehicles, each driving for one hour per day with a computer consuming 840 W, Hot damn, didn't knew modern Tesla have so much computer power it could easily run VR in glorious 4k/120Hz ...or, apparently the article is full of shit and just throwing random numbers at the wall.
- dogma1138 4y ago
  NVIDIA drive Pegasus is 500W per compute unit with 2 and 4 unit configurations being the standard.
- AlotOfReading 4y ago
  A modern driverless vehicle like those being deployed by Waymo and Cruise will have considerably more compute than virtually any home computer. A pretty typical setup would be something like a high spec Xeon (or equivalent), 1-2 massive GPUs (or equivalent), lots of big FPGAs/ASICs, and some beefy networking on top, duplicated for redundancy. You wouldn't have to go very far back before the 'supercomputer' moniker became appropriate.
  - BoorishBears 4y ago
    I don't think this person realizes there are AVs with active cooling for their compute (and not dinky PC gaming style active cooling, automotive cooling but for compute)
aidenn0 4y ago
So like 1.1 horse-power? That's approximately nothing for a 2t car.
- silon42 4y ago
  Wrong, that's an insane amount of extra power consumption... maybe even 10% which is a lot. In Europe, we have (IMO stupid) rules not to have rear ligts on at daytime , to save power (<10W I'd guess) when daytime running lights are used.
  - aidenn0 4y ago
    It's less than the AC uses in many cars.
- Someone 4y ago
  > That's approximately nothing for a 2t car That’s another problem with modern cars: moving two tons of metal and plastic to, oftentimes, move a single human around is a tremendous waste of energy. That an increase in energy usage is relatively small compared to an already huge waste of energy isn’t a strong argument to declare it insignificant.
Animats 4y ago
Note that the electric power consumption corresponds to about 1.1 horsepower. It's been an observation with self-driving container transporters at ports that the self-driving ones use less energy, and get about twice the tire life, than the human driven ones. The self-driving ones are dull, boring, smooth drivers. Which is just fine for container ports.
unglaublich 4y ago
They use a lot! But not because they're autonomous, but because they are 2t bulky vehicles that need to be propelled forward!
CyanLite2 4y ago
If AVs become as good as they proclaim, then overall power consumption and emissions will dramatically decline when people no longer have to buy cars to get around.
starbase 4y ago
840 watts seems high. As a point of reference, the input power connector on Tesla's new HW4 computer is rated for 10A @ 16v, or 160 watts. In fairness to the authors, HW4 was not yet released when this paper was published.
- deleted 4y ago
  [deleted]
- dogma1138 4y ago
  The early NVIDIA drive based “fully autonomous concept cars” had like 2-3kw worth of computing, Drive Pegasus which is still probably is not enough for L4/5 is 500W per unit and it seems like the minimum viable configuration is 2 of them in a vehicle. It still isn’t a lot compared to moving the car but it is quite a bit of power. For a car with 100kw/h battery pack and a range of 500km a 1kw driving computer would reduce the range by about 5% which is about as much as having the air conditioner on.
  - dx034 4y ago
    1kw for air conditioning? Seems like a lot for a car..
    - dogma1138 4y ago
      Looking at the aircon heat pumps for cars that seems about right, it might seem a lot but you are driving a metal box with huge glass windows without any insulation on a sunny day… cars get hot enough to melt plastic if parked at direct sunlight for hours.
      - dx034 4y ago
        Thanks for the info. Wouldn't it be worth insulating cars more with the shift to EV
fnordpiglet 4y ago
As a percentage of power consumed I would assume 800W is trivial compared to accelerating 7000lbs to 60mph.
- dogma1138 4y ago
  A 1000w driving computer would reduce the range of a 100kw/h vehicle with a 500km range by about 5%.
fwlr 4y ago
Self-driving is valuable, data centers are valuable, what’s the issue with them consuming power?
jillesvangurp 4y ago
It's all relative. They'll use a lot less energy than cars use today. And they won't blast out most of that energy out as heat either. Non autonomous ice cars just aren't very efficient. And because they are autonomous cars, they will get utilized a lot more meaning we need less of them. People can only drive cars that they own so much. An autonomous car can drive itself, all the time. When it is not driving, it's losing money. So, the most economical thing to do with autonomous car is to utilize the hell out of them and have them driving around people and stuff 24/7 and earning money. Basically, uber without the drivers, tips, etc. So, we gain some more energy in terms of manufacturing efficiencies because we need less vehicles to transport people and goods the same distance. And of course the vast majority of the power used for this is going to come from cheap, clean, renewable sources instead of 100% of it being fossil fuels being transformed into CO2 that is blasted into the atmosphere via the tail pipe. So yes, there is a bit of power involved. But vastly less than what we are spending on transport today. And it will be generated in a vastly cleaner way.
- Gunirus 4y ago
  Autonomous cars don't have to be electric cars and electric cars don't have to be autonomous. These are two different things. An autonomous non-ev car will blast out more heat than a non-autonomous ev.
  - jillesvangurp 4y ago
    Strictly speaking not. But ice cars are a lot more complex. And they are more expensive to operate. So, I doubt there will ever be a large market, or even any market, for autonomous ice vehicles.
    - aidenn0 4y ago
      I could travel coast-to-coast in a weekend in an autonomous ICE vehicle (35-45 hours on the road, depending on traffic), but likely not in an autonomous EV.
devnullbrain 4y ago
A talk is also available at https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=v6mUTnXEjYw https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=v6mUTnXEjYw

41 points by JoachimS 4y ago

mcny 4y ago

archived at https://archive.fo/QMZQw https://archive.fo/QMZQw How Much Power Do Autonomous Vehicles Use? A Lot A model of power consumption by autonomous vehicles predicts that once widely adopted, they will consume as much power worldwide as data centers do. By Bill Schweber 02.27.2023 My summary: > “1 billion autonomous vehicles, each driving for one hour per day with a computer consuming 840 W, would consume enough energy to generate about the same amount of emissions as data centers currently do.” > Well… maybe yes, maybe not. Despite the academic veneer and a detailed table explaining their model and its embedded assumptions, the inherent nature of the model has many rough estimates, sophisticated guesses and outright assumptions. I’d compare it more to a fancy “back of the envelope” assessment (Figure 2) rather than a rigorous academic analysis. Step back, and there’s the reality that any assessment of the future for a situation such as this is simply not possible. > Call me cynical, but it seems that the design reality is that system demands and thus power use often expand to the maximum the system can provide or tolerate. Remember, when transistors and ICs were devised and then went to ever-lower voltage/power, the per-function dissipation dropped by several orders of magnitude—you can’t argue with that fact. > However, coincidentally with this good news, user requirements increased at a greater rate, so now you have server racks pushing almost 10 kW each—an almost unthinkable figure just a decade ago, up from about 2.4 kW each in 2011 according to one survey (I have seen others, and those numbers are similar) (Figure 3).

pengaru 4y ago
>> Call me cynical, but it seems that the design reality is that system demands and thus power use often expand to the maximum the system can provide or tolerate. Remember, when transistors and ICs were devised and then went to ever-lower voltage/power, the per-function dissipation dropped by several orders of magnitude—you can’t argue with that fact. >> However, coincidentally with this good news, user requirements increased at a greater rate, so now you have server racks pushing almost 10 kW each—an almost unthinkable figure just a decade ago, up from about 2.4 kW each in 2011 according to one survey (I have seen others, and those numbers are similar) (Figure 3). https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Jevons_paradox https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Jevons_paradox

huijzer 4y ago

So the calculation is based on 0.840 kWh per day per car for an hour driving. When driving 100 km/h for an hour, a reasonably efficient car will use 5 liters of petrol. The energy in 5 liters is about 5 * 34 = 170 MJ. Hence, 47 kWh. So yes, it’s a lot of energy used by the computations, but still less than the actual force required to move the car forward. Edit: Fixed number.

ParacelsusOfEgg 4y ago
I believe you meant 0.84kWh, the article stated 840 Wh per day.
- zaroth 4y ago
  So roughly 5 cents of energy to autonomously pilot a 2 ton vehicle with several human occupants through a relatively hostile and uncontrolled environment… At scale safe autonomous driving will be saving 100k lives and eliminating over a trillion of dollars in economic losses per year. This is a minuscule amount of energy expended for the results achieved by any reasonable standard!
  - JohnFen 4y ago
    I agree with your opinion, but disagree with measuring power use in terms of monetary cost. Doing it that way excludes most of the actual cost of power generation and use.

crazygringo 4y ago

> A model of power consumption by autonomous vehicles predicts that once widely adopted, they will consume as much power worldwide as data centers do. It's referring to the energy to power the brains of self-driving, not to move the vehicle. But that seems... fine? I can't tell if the article wants us to think that's a lot. Data centers and networks account for something like 1% of global electricity use. If autonomous driving saves a ton of lives then an extra 1% is well worth it. Just from productivity increases alone it may also be well worth it. But also, the "brains" will presumably become more energy-efficient over time (as electronics have generally), and the share of renewables is increasing. I don't really see a problem here.

grey-area 4y ago
They can also be programmed to drive in a more efficient way that humans so there is a net saving of power.
- m463 4y ago
  I think that pretty much sums it up on many levels. I think of not just better route planning, but that one delivery driver can service 100's of customers who would otherwise make a trip themselves.
  - trompetenaccoun 4y ago
    For delivery you're right but we could have this today already. There's no reason not to put minimum wage drivers in a car and have them do this today. We have computers and mapping already, self-driving isn't needed for this at all and paying someone 100 dollars a day or whatever is guaranteed to be much cheaper than the self delivering truck - at least for now and in the foreseeable future. So why isn't it a thing? Clearly not for the lack of self-driving tech.
- mechagodzilla 4y ago
  Do you actually have any data to back up the 'net saving of power' part?

robomartin 4y ago

The real problem isn't the autonomous part (although it is an issue). Full electrification of just the US will require a doubling of our power generation and transport capacity. This isn't trivial at all. The US currently produces 1200 GW (power, not talking energy, that is not the correct conversation). For context, a typical nuclear power plant produces 1 GW. Which means that this doubling effect would be the equivalent of building 1200 new nuclear power plants. I am not saying that's what we have to do, it's a useful mental tool to be used in understanding the scale of the problem. Solar isn't going to make this happen. For starters, a solar system has to be overbuilt at a minimum of 10 times the required steady-state output. In other words, if you are after 1 GW steady state you need a minimum of 10 GW of solar. The scale is so massive that you start running into regional, weather and MTBF and other issues. The right solutions is likely a combination of lots of nuclear along with lots of solar, wind and hydro (where possible). We are going to need a serious shift in culture to be able to accomplish this, otherwise, electric cars are going to end-up requiring burning all kinds of fuels just to generate the power to keep them charged. And then you have all the battery issues. At some point you have to honestly ask for an honest accounting of what it might all lead to. I have these images in my mind of massive land areas devastated by strip-mining and other activities just to be "clean" in lands far and away from the mines. Electric cars are a good idea. We all want them. We just need to be sure we have honest discussions in order to ensure we do it right and don't create a bigger long-term mess than what we manage today. EDIT: Why do I say that energy isn't the correct conversation? Because energy allows one to fall under the fallacy of thinking that things can happen over time. That is not the case here. When you have a thousand cars plug in to charge at the same time, you need enough power to service that load. Yes, of course, the objective is to store a certain amount of energy. However, the critical path, the thing that will break systems and overload power generation and transmission is their simultaneous power requirement. The conversation has to be about power. In a place like Los Angeles you might have a million cars simultaneously connecting to the grid to charge. That imposes an instantaneous power requirement that has to be met or things go wrong very quickly. This is how the electric transition is more complicated than a lot of these hand-wavy energy estimates which conveniently ignore what needs to happen instantaneously.

zaroth 4y ago

deleted 4y ago

[deleted]

TheDudeMan 4y ago

Ridiculous article. No mention of the tendency for computing to become more efficient as tech improves.

ilyt 4y ago
Or any power usage for compute for any of the current "autonomous" vehicles.
gertlex 4y ago
But computing applications also tend to use more or all of the available power... so by itself, tech improvements do not mean that power used will go down correspondingly. (or else thanks to processor Flops/watt improvements, we'd have most laptops running for days on their current batteries, right?) It seems we'd only expect power use to go down when autonomous driving applications are "feature complete" and stop having a use for additional compute power. In the meantime, discussions of limits based on achievable/acceptable power draw (a la phones which I would guess have been in a consistent range for years now) are more likely to be meaningful.
- quickthrower2 4y ago
  It is not an electron app. And energy efficiency numbers people will look at when buying/comparing.
swatcoder 4y ago
With some exceptions, increased efficiency has historically been used to increase capabilities rather than reduce consumption. It’s by no means ridiculous to assume that this might happen here too, and in fact publishing analyses that make the assumption might be exactly what helps make conservation a priority and breaks those same assumptions.
- Animats 4y ago
  > It’s by no means ridiculous to assume that this might happen here too, and in fact publishing analyses that make the assumption might be exactly what helps make conservation a priority and breaks those same assumptions. Power consumption has become a serious problem with auto "infotainment" systems. There are cars running Unreal Engine in the dashboard. There's a noticeable reduction in EV range. (Also a tendency to have too much electronics running while the vehicle is parked. Teslas are noted for this. There's "sentry mode", and "summon mode", and WiFi, and remote updates, and telemetry, and apps phoning home...[1] This can be a worse problem than power consumption for the electronics while driving, since most vehicles are driven a small number of hours per day.) [1] https://teslamotorsclub.com/tmc/threads/battery-drain-while-parked.209938/ https://teslamotorsclub.com/tmc/threads/battery-drain-while-...

ilyt 4y ago

> 1 billion autonomous vehicles, each driving for one hour per day with a computer consuming 840 W, Hot damn, didn't knew modern Tesla have so much computer power it could easily run VR in glorious 4k/120Hz ...or, apparently the article is full of shit and just throwing random numbers at the wall.

dogma1138 4y ago
NVIDIA drive Pegasus is 500W per compute unit with 2 and 4 unit configurations being the standard.
AlotOfReading 4y ago
A modern driverless vehicle like those being deployed by Waymo and Cruise will have considerably more compute than virtually any home computer. A pretty typical setup would be something like a high spec Xeon (or equivalent), 1-2 massive GPUs (or equivalent), lots of big FPGAs/ASICs, and some beefy networking on top, duplicated for redundancy. You wouldn't have to go very far back before the 'supercomputer' moniker became appropriate.
- BoorishBears 4y ago
  I don't think this person realizes there are AVs with active cooling for their compute (and not dinky PC gaming style active cooling, automotive cooling but for compute)

aidenn0 4y ago

So like 1.1 horse-power? That's approximately nothing for a 2t car.

silon42 4y ago
Wrong, that's an insane amount of extra power consumption... maybe even 10% which is a lot. In Europe, we have (IMO stupid) rules not to have rear ligts on at daytime , to save power (<10W I'd guess) when daytime running lights are used.
- aidenn0 4y ago
  It's less than the AC uses in many cars.
Someone 4y ago
> That's approximately nothing for a 2t car That’s another problem with modern cars: moving two tons of metal and plastic to, oftentimes, move a single human around is a tremendous waste of energy. That an increase in energy usage is relatively small compared to an already huge waste of energy isn’t a strong argument to declare it insignificant.

Animats 4y ago

Note that the electric power consumption corresponds to about 1.1 horsepower. It's been an observation with self-driving container transporters at ports that the self-driving ones use less energy, and get about twice the tire life, than the human driven ones. The self-driving ones are dull, boring, smooth drivers. Which is just fine for container ports.

unglaublich 4y ago

They use a lot! But not because they're autonomous, but because they are 2t bulky vehicles that need to be propelled forward!

CyanLite2 4y ago

If AVs become as good as they proclaim, then overall power consumption and emissions will dramatically decline when people no longer have to buy cars to get around.

starbase 4y ago

840 watts seems high. As a point of reference, the input power connector on Tesla's new HW4 computer is rated for 10A @ 16v, or 160 watts. In fairness to the authors, HW4 was not yet released when this paper was published.

deleted 4y ago
[deleted]
dogma1138 4y ago
The early NVIDIA drive based “fully autonomous concept cars” had like 2-3kw worth of computing, Drive Pegasus which is still probably is not enough for L4/5 is 500W per unit and it seems like the minimum viable configuration is 2 of them in a vehicle. It still isn’t a lot compared to moving the car but it is quite a bit of power. For a car with 100kw/h battery pack and a range of 500km a 1kw driving computer would reduce the range by about 5% which is about as much as having the air conditioner on.
- dx034 4y ago
  1kw for air conditioning? Seems like a lot for a car..
  - dogma1138 4y ago
    Looking at the aircon heat pumps for cars that seems about right, it might seem a lot but you are driving a metal box with huge glass windows without any insulation on a sunny day… cars get hot enough to melt plastic if parked at direct sunlight for hours.
    - dx034 4y ago
      Thanks for the info. Wouldn't it be worth insulating cars more with the shift to EV

fnordpiglet 4y ago

As a percentage of power consumed I would assume 800W is trivial compared to accelerating 7000lbs to 60mph.

dogma1138 4y ago
A 1000w driving computer would reduce the range of a 100kw/h vehicle with a 500km range by about 5%.

fwlr 4y ago

Self-driving is valuable, data centers are valuable, what’s the issue with them consuming power?

jillesvangurp 4y ago

It's all relative. They'll use a lot less energy than cars use today. And they won't blast out most of that energy out as heat either. Non autonomous ice cars just aren't very efficient. And because they are autonomous cars, they will get utilized a lot more meaning we need less of them. People can only drive cars that they own so much. An autonomous car can drive itself, all the time. When it is not driving, it's losing money. So, the most economical thing to do with autonomous car is to utilize the hell out of them and have them driving around people and stuff 24/7 and earning money. Basically, uber without the drivers, tips, etc. So, we gain some more energy in terms of manufacturing efficiencies because we need less vehicles to transport people and goods the same distance. And of course the vast majority of the power used for this is going to come from cheap, clean, renewable sources instead of 100% of it being fossil fuels being transformed into CO2 that is blasted into the atmosphere via the tail pipe. So yes, there is a bit of power involved. But vastly less than what we are spending on transport today. And it will be generated in a vastly cleaner way.

Gunirus 4y ago
Autonomous cars don't have to be electric cars and electric cars don't have to be autonomous. These are two different things. An autonomous non-ev car will blast out more heat than a non-autonomous ev.
- jillesvangurp 4y ago
  Strictly speaking not. But ice cars are a lot more complex. And they are more expensive to operate. So, I doubt there will ever be a large market, or even any market, for autonomous ice vehicles.
  - aidenn0 4y ago
    I could travel coast-to-coast in a weekend in an autonomous ICE vehicle (35-45 hours on the road, depending on traffic), but likely not in an autonomous EV.

devnullbrain 4y ago

A talk is also available at https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=v6mUTnXEjYw https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=v6mUTnXEjYw