Power Consumption of Autonomous Vehicles

A 12-page paper from a team at MIT and published in IEEE Micro looked at the energy consumption required to support the processing power of autonomous vehicles (Figure 1). I suspect that for designers of autonomous vehicles, their greater immediate concern is the heat load that the processing system adds to the vehicle. The authors conclude that there would have to be a sharp drop in processing-system power consumption by the vehicle “smarts” to reduce aggregate power use significantly and give some suggested numbers. What’s your view on the power-consumption scenario of autonomous vehicles? Related contentPowering the autonomous carAutonomous Vehicles, Autonomous BugsCan you use supercaps to power electric vehicles?