Richest man in the world
“It is the best of times & it is the worst of times..”, borrowing a quote from Charles Dicken’s book, A Tale of Two Cities. With the covid-19 pandemic occupying our thoughts most of 2020 to the US capitol riots happening early this year & Elon Musk becoming the richest individual in the world with a net worth of more than USD185 Billion , we are living in strange times, good & bad times indeed. (Updated: Elon Musk’s net worth is now USD292 Billion in October). Businesses & whole industries were wiped off in a short period & new IoT services & business models becoming mainstream, thanks & no thanks to the numerous lockdown implemented by governments around the world due to the pandemic. We have seen hyper-acceleration of organizations & individuals adopting digital products & services at a much faster rate & indirectly accelerating the creation of Trillionaires maybe within the next decade (or maybe the next few years).
Tesla Motors, one of the more successful IoT company’s stocks, have risen 743% over the course of 2020. With the imminent release of full-self driving level 5 — the industry standard for a software that requires no human intervention — this year, will open up a host of interesting applications for EV’s. Electric cars or vehicles are not new, having appeared as early as the late 19th century. Ironically, the cost & popularity of the gasoline car that was mass produced, killed the electric car rather than technical immaturity. A Model T in 1912 cost around $650 apiece — an electric alternative cost almost three times that, at around $1,750 (data from https://interestingengineering.com/a-brief-history-and-evolution-of-electric-cars) So we are now back at the full cycle of evolution, where an EV car company has overtaken a traditional car company as the world’s most valuable automotive company!
To most people one of the benefits of owning an EV car is getting a “Green” credential & playing our part in reducing global pollution & carbon footprint. Nevertheless, there’s was much debate that even though EV’s are 0% emission when in use, the carbon footprint & the use of rare earth metals used in it’s production, offsets this. The cutting edge technologies that goes into making EV’s viable & cost effective are also powering new IoT applications & solutions.
Robo taxis: Disrupting the disrupters
One of the vision for EV’s is, an owner can rent out their vehicles whenever they are idle or not used. It will drive you to work & instead of parking itself, will pick-up another passenger from nearby to other places & come back in time to pick you up for lunch. Auto-sanitization using UVC leds can also be added to your EV if you’re worried about hygiene. Your car’s value appreciates rather than depreciates & will generate income while it is not used (by you). What about insurance, legal issues, regulations etc.? No problem, your EV will have it’s own e-wallet and digital ledger that will transfer ownership over blockchain using smart contracts when in used by another passenger during the trip & transfers ownership back to you later! Other use cases includes parcel & food deliveries (maybe picking-up groceries while you’re at work)
At the heart of self-driving EV’s coming out soon, are powerful AI-chips optimized for running machine learning (ML) algorithms especially for visual data coming from the car surroundings. Tesla recently designed & developed their own chips called FSD (or Full Self-Driving Chip) that can run at more than 70 TOPS (Trillions Operations per second) to overcome perceived limitation with off-the-self AI SOC’s (system-on-chip) designed for overall multiple AI tasks. https://en.wikichip.org/wiki/tesla_(car_company)/fsd_chip. In comparison, the latest Qualcomm Snapdragon 888 runs at 26 TOPS. With so much computing or AI power, probably owners can connect their EV cars to the cloud for bitcoin mining to solving computational intensive tasks to leasing out the computing power to an AI-cloud service, while waiting for the traffic lights to turn green.
Mobile Power Plants & Telco Towers
In most cases, EVs can charge when demand on the grid is low and electricity is cheap, and then offer the stored energy to power up your house or back into the grid when connected to a vehicle-to-grid network. Though at the moment, the current EV batteries capacities are not able to power-up a whole modern household completely, it can probably power up dozen of houses in poorer countries or bringing power & 5G “towers” to remote areas or even be used to carry drones, supplies during emergencies. Since where ever there are cars, there will be people that will need 5G coverage. With 5G networks needing 10–20 times more towers than 4G, Telcos might subsidize EV ownership in return to use them for dynamic 5G network towers to deliver digital services, further accelerating the roll out for 5G.
In a nutshell, a fully self-driving EV will not only enable & replace gasoline vehicles, but have the potential to deliver IoT, AI & 5G services all across the globe & create new business models & monetization for individuals & also organizations. Internet access, along with electricity & water will become basic utilities for the masses, creating economic value everywhere. It might not be too far fetched that future EV designs might be like “transformers”, made up of cutting-edge building blocks of different technologies & services that can transform & adapt to deliver different digital services powered by IoT! IoT for You…
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