If you ask some people, electric cars that can drive themselves around the city will be the savior of the world. They will cut traffic accidents because there’s no way an autonomous vehicle can break down, and its electric motors will drastically reduce emissions of our travels. But, it turns out, there are a ton of ways in which the self-driving part of these miracle vehicles could be really horrible for the planet.
According to a team of researchers at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, there are a few different ways that self-driving cars can be bad for the environment. In first place, as reported by DeZeenthere is all the energy needed to power the computers that run these machines.
An article titled Data centers on wheels: Emissions from on-board computing in autonomous vehicles was recently published by the Institute of Electrical and Electronics Engineers. In the paper, MIT scientists investigated the amount of energy needed to run the on-board computers that power self-driving cars.
The researchers calculated that one billion self-driving cars worldwide would produce about 0.14 gigatonnes of greenhouse gas emissions per year if each drove for one hour each day. For context, there is estimated at 1,450 millionn cars around the world today, so if everyone switched to a self-driving car emissions would be much higher. DeZeen reports:
“With increasing adoption, these emissions could expire unless computing power becomes more efficient at a significantly faster rate, determined the study, which used statistical models to test several possible future scenarios and found that this was true in more than 90% of cases.”
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To reach this conclusion, the MIT team looked at the possible number of self-driving cars in the world, the power used to run the cars’ computers, and the amount of greenhouse gases emitted per unit of electricity required.
The researchers built their model around four variables: the number of vehicles in the global fleet, the power of each computer in each vehicle, the hours driven by each vehicle and the amount of greenhouse gases emitted per unit of electricity produced. DeZeen adds:
“The high emissions are the result of the enormous computing workload of each autonomous vehicle. The researchers’ modeling assumes that the vehicles use an algorithm similar to what is popular today: a multi-task learning deep neural network, called well because it can perform many tasks at the same time.
“The study gives the example of an autonomous vehicle with 10 deep neural networks processing images from 10 cameras. If it drove for an hour a day, this vehicle would make 21.6 million inferences per day, in which the algorithm apply logical rules to analyze new information.”
Obviously, the big caveat with this research is that these emissions will decrease as more countries are involved switch to cleaner means of generating electricity. But as wind and solar plants slowly come online, we will still depend on coal and gas plants to keep our autonomous electric vehicles running for now. well, unless the fusion energy quickly disengages.
But in reality, there is much more to this problem than the energy needed to run a self-driving car. This is because there is a theory that the widespread adoption of self-driving cars will cause people to use their cars more than they do now, reducing the number of journeys made by cleaner means of travel such as the train. According to Fast Company:
“A 160-year-old theory of human behavior suggests that it will force people to drive far more than they otherwise would, generating emissions as they go. Importantly, this will be true even if AVs they are also electric vehicles, which run on electricity instead of gasoline.
“Although electric vehicles emit no tailpipe emissions, they still produce greenhouse gases through the generation of electricity needed to charge their batteries, as well as from their manufacturing processes.”
This pattern, the site argues, is one that can be traced back through the decades. When coal-fired power plants became more efficient, it didn’t reduce our global emissions, and instead we made more power from coal. It’s the same story on our roads, if you widen a road to facilitate traffic you’ll just end up causing even more traffic.
We as people always want to use what we have to the extremes. So yes, if you have a supposedly clean self-driving car, you will increasingly use it instead of taking the train, bus, or even bike for shorter trips that don’t require it.
