Unnoticed Pollution Caused By Autonomous Cars

But the computers that are needed to run these self-driving cars can become a serious threat to our planet. MIT researchers explored the potential energy consumption of self-driving cars if they are widely adopted. For instance, people might travel more in autonomous cars since they can multitask while on the road, giving a boost to emissions. In one such scenario – autonomous car adoption was considered as 95% worldwide by 2050, where computational workload doubled every year. The developers would need to create reusable hardware for autonomous cars in order to be sustainable and drive the costs.