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Driverless Cars Are Giving Engineers a Fuel Economy Headache (bloomberg.com)
schwit1 shares a report from Bloomberg: Judging from General Motors' test cars and Elon Musk's predictions, the world is headed toward a future that's both driverless and all-electric. In reality, autonomy and battery power could end up being at odds. That's because self-driving technology is a huge power drain. Some of today's prototypes for fully autonomous systems consume two to four kilowatts of electricity -- the equivalent of having 50 to 100 laptops continuously running in the trunk, according to BorgWarner Inc. The supplier of vehicle propulsion systems expects the first autonomous cars -- likely robotaxis that are constantly on the road -- will be too energy-hungry to run on battery power alone. A fully autonomous subcompact car like a Honda Fit, for example, will get 54.6 miles to the gallon in 2025 in the best-case scenario, more than 5 miles below the U.S. emissions target, according to BorgWarner. A small pickup or SUV would be at 45.8 mpg, versus a target of 50. Engineers don't have much time to resolve this, as companies are planning to deploy their first fully self-driving cars in the next couple of years. One way for automakers to meet the power-hungry needs of self-driving systems will be to use gasoline-electric hybrid models rather than purely electric cars, said Mary Gustanski, chief technology officer of supplier Delphi Automotive Plc's powertrain business.
Really? These engineers didn't consider that processing power is constantly shrinking and becoming more efficient?
I feel like I'm reading an article from 30 years ago about how computers will never fit inside your home because the take up large rooms!
I run a small cluster on less than 2kW of power which would include 3 nodes with each 16 cores, 256GB RAM, 1TB in SSDs and a Tesla GPU.
Just to give you an idea, 2kW of power on your standard 12V car requires a current of 167A.
I'm not even sure what you would have to put in to get a package of 2kW, that's 2000W. Camera's take up less than 2W each, even if you need 10 of them, you're still at only 20W LIDAR take up perhaps 10W each, one for each end of the car is another 20W. Give or take another 10W for various sensors, you've got 50W. A computer unit with a decent GPU for highly parallel tasks can be done in 200W.
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Consider: Many long-haul trucks operate mostly on well maintained highways between distribution centers. Ten or more of them could be linked together scanning for issues, and communicating with each other, possibly with a lead car in the front that can react to accidents and incidents before they even pass, similar to over-sized loads on the road today. Even if not driving between distro centers, they can use existing rest-areas as stopping points where local drivers can take over in shifts.
This is calculations based on wild assumptions about what is actually required for self-driving. If Tesla is right, then they can do it with the hardware that is already shipping, so power is not an issue--they just need to finish the software. You can also look at what Nvidia just released that they're billing as being designed for self-driving cars. AMD is apparently working on a similar product.
This sounds like a typical naysayer making stuff up to get attention (and advertising hits).
A Tesla Model S has a 90 kilowatt hour battery life for it's 275 mile range. A kilowatt hour is a thousand watts, and let's assume you're going 60mph. For argument, and maths, sake we'll assume you're going above efficiency and say you'll get 240 miles out of that. That's 4 hours, so 22.5 kilowatts an hour. That's a powerdraw of 22 thousand watts in 1 hour. The new self driving chip announced by Nvidia only draws 500 watts, that's 500 watts in an hour. Or better yet, here's the empirical evidence of Tesla owners discussing their average watts/min usage: https://forums.tesla.com/forum...
Even there with more efficiency, the new Nvidia chip uses in an hour less energy than the car itself uses in 2 minutes. This article is absolute bullshit, they had 1 damned thing their job required and they didn't do it. Self driving electric cars are perfectly mathematically sounds.