A new MIT study 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.”
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I'm curious what the assumptions were in that - sounds like they computed a raw energy number and then applied an emissions factor; did they base the emissions factor on the grid, gas engine emissions, a combo, some other way?
(brb reading link)
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840 Watt ?
The Tesla FSD computer, the most advanced autonomous system on the road at the moment, uses 75 Watt only.
en.wikichip.org/wiki/tesla_(ca
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Far from being an expert but for ex AWS claim they will be water positive + carbon neutral by - I don’t remember… which should mean an autonomous vehicle using AWS as an infrastructure provider would have 0 environmental impact?
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So it has better GHG emissions than the fossil fuel transportation it replaces.
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840w is quite a bit of actual power draw about 2 decent gaming machines or 8 to 16 laptops.
This feels abnormally high and have a feeling that the news article has cherry picked figures to fit their narrative.
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