A new study suggests that self-driving cars could be harmful to the environment, but experts disagree.
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The MIT report says that the energy needed to run the computers needed for autonomous vehicles in the future could generate as many greenhouse gas emissions as today’s data centers. Nonsense, says Raj Rajkumar, director of the Metro21 Smart Cities Institute and professor of electrical and computer engineering at Carnegie Mellon’s College of Engineering, and a pioneer in autonomous vehicle technology.
“First of all, many of these autonomous vehicles in the time frames considered in the study will be EVs, or zero-emission vehicles,” Rajkumar told Lifewire in an email interview. “When AV electronics (sensors, computation, and communications components) consume energy, that reduces the number of miles that can be driven per charge, but the amount of emissions is still zero per vehicle.”
The MIT researchers found that 1 billion autonomous vehicles, each driving for an hour a day with a computer that draws 840 watts, would use enough energy to generate about the same amount of emissions as data centers do today. In addition, to keep emissions from autonomous vehicles from exceeding current data center emissions, each vehicle would need to use less than 1.2 kilowatts of power for computing, which would require more efficient hardware.
