The widespread adoption of self-driving cars will create a major bump in carbon emissions without changes to their design, a study from the Massachusetts Institute of Technology has found.
The study found that with a mass global takeup of autonomous vehicles, the powerful onboard computers needed to run them could generate as many greenhouse gas emissions as all the data centres in operation today.
These data centres currently produce around 0.14 gigatonnes of greenhouse gas emissions per year, equivalent to the entire output of Argentina or around 0.3 per cent of global emissions, according to the researchers.
A similar amount would be generated by one billion autonomous vehicles ? fewer than the number of cars in the world today ? each driving one hour per day with a computer consuming 840 watts of power. With growing adoption, these emissions could spiral unless computing power is made more efficient at a significantly faster pace, determined the study, which used statistical modelling to test several possible future scenarios and found this to be true in over 90 per cent of cases.
Emissions from self-driving cars could become "enormous problem"
"If we just keep the business-as-usual trends in decarbonisation and the current rate of hardware efficiency improvements, it doesn't seem like it is going to be enough to constrain the emissions from computing onboard autonomous vehicles," said Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT) graduate student Soum...