Research out of MIT seems to suggest that self-driving vehicles may detract from the low-emissions aspirations of EVs, thanks to the high energy demands of the on-board computers used to compute self-driving data.
The MIT study found that 90% of the time, unless computational power usage is kept under 1.2 kW, the emissions of autonomous driving would dramatically exceed that of data centers. The researchers found that “1 billion autonomous vehicles, each driving for one hour per day with a computer consuming 840 watts, would consume enough energy to generate about the same amount of emissions as data centers currently do.”
