For years, major car companies have been working to add autonomous features to vehicles on the path to fully automated driving (think lane departure warnings, exterior cameras, and smart cruise control). Tesla in particular is betting big on the technology; Elon Musk has said the company will be “worth basically zero” if it can’t get a handle on self-driving features.
Recent fatal crashes involving self-driving Teslas have heightened safety concerns around autonomous driving, but a new study(Opens in a new window) by the Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT) identifies a new risk: carbon emissions from the computing power.
A global fleet of autonomous vehicles could exceed the carbon emissions of all data centers today, which already make up a staggering 0.3% of global emissions. This means autonomous vehicles would essentially duplicate the energy the world currently consumes to run websites, streaming services, data storage, and all the other functions of the internet.
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