Autonomous Cars Will Collect Approximately 4 TB of Data Every Hour of Driving
One Petabyte (1 PB) of Data in Less Than Seven Days
The information age is about to change, drastically and significantly, but it will be seamless and you won’t be the wiser, or will you? At present, cars have three major sensors on the vehicle:
but the self-driving cars of the future will have two major sensors (LiDAR and cameras) that will collect and gather the majority of the data, not only from the external environment of the vehicle, but also from the interior environment. We’re talking about four (4) terabytes of data per hour, and in self-driving vehicle fleets with an estimated operating cycle of twenty (20) hours per day, that’s approximately eighty (80) terabytes of data per day. You can see that this will easily accumulate to one (1) petabyte (1000 terabytes) in less than a week. Yes, you read that right — one (1 PB) petabyte in less than seven (7) days. The data being collected is primarily being used to make critical driving decisions in milliseconds of time.
Where does the data about the passenger’s preferences come into play and how is it collected? Great question. What’s going to happen is that while the car is driving its pre-planned route based on a series of factors, like traffic data, the sensors will simultaneously be collecting and transmitting data on all points-of-interest for each passenger based on their personal mobile device. The key to all this information is the uplink or synchronization between the car and the passenger’s mobile phone each and every time the passenger has used the vehicle. And all the while, once the data has been uploaded, the data from the vehicle’s information center (typcially the cloud network) will make suggestions for the passenger(s) during the duration of travel on the route.
Data Amalgamation
What’s more, what will the autonomous vehicle do with all that data? Well, it’s going to learn about the passenger’s personal preferences each and every time the car is being used, so much so that the car will eventually know all the likes and dislikes as time goes on. The critical aspect to really understand is that the ultimate goal is to make the vehicle seamlessly integrate into your life — so that whatever you’re watching on “television” in your home follows you directly into your self-driving car. Your favorite podcast, your music and food preferences, literally every like and dislike will be automatically and seamlessly integrated into the cabin environment, so that there will be no interruptions whatsoever between where you are, what you are doing and where you are going.
Data and Infrastructure
The examples and scenarios are endless. Hence the amount of data will eventually grow so large that the mobility infrastructure will need to support and sustain the vast amounts of data collected and gathered and shared daily. The plot thickens as the companies catering to your beck and call, the vast amount of retailers who are salivating to get your digital composite (the digital you, purchases, consumables, fashion, technology, entertainment, etc) will bend over backwards to reach you as you relax in what you, perhaps naively think, is a completely closed-off, shielded environment that keeps you isolated from the road as you travel to your destination or point-of-interest. The company’s are already lining up with the very same technology companies working in unison with the IoT (Internet of Things) companies to ensure they capture your attention through and through.
All the aforementioned will contribute to, if not exceed, the one petabyte of data every five (5) days or so. The question is, how will the manufacturers of autonomous vehicles use your data and where will they store all of your personal data? Disucssions of this nature are already underway at The Internet of Things Consortium where everyone is working in collaboration to address issues around big data and how it will be handled within the new infrastructure.
My name is Patrick Salem — I am an autonomous mobility professional, engineering and project manager for self-driving cars. I’ve worked in automotive autonomous mobility platform development and strategy, including platform design, systems architecture design, requirements development, commercial aircraft electronics systems development and scope of work documentation. See my other articles on Medium at AutoDriveAI and follow me on Twitter, Instagram, and LinkedIn.
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