The car you buy in 2025 will include a terabyte of storage. Robo-taxis might need 11TB
- Reference: 1604469426
- News link: https://www.theregister.co.uk/2020/11/04/autonomous_car_storage_requirements/
- Source link:
The firm made that prediction in a whitepaper titled, “Storage Capacity Requirement for Autonomous Vehicles in the Next Decade,” that points out that cars are increasingly adding sensors and compute capacity that allows them to automate some or all aspects of driving.
The authors add that much of that data will be accumulated because the cars of the future won’t just use sensors to make real-time decisions but will also store data for upload at convenient moments. “This data will be used to inform everything from training artificial intelligence systems to developing new business models,” the whitepaper stated.
Revealed: How Nvidia's 'backseat driver' AI learned to read lips [1]READ MORE
To accommodate both real-time data analysis and store-and-forward-to-cloud workloads, the paper’s authors opined: “The ‘brain’ of an autonomous vehicle will demand several types of storage to accommodate the data from multiple in-car sensors.”
Initially that will mean a move from cheap and plodding memory cards and similar formats to either Universal Flash Storage (UFS) found in smartphones and/or embedded SSDs. Both UFS and SSDs have better controllers, and Counterpoint's analysts say that is a key component in automotive applications.
"Poorly designed controller architecture and/or firmware algorithms can wipe out the advantages of the most reliable NAND memory," the Paper states.
The firm says that today just eight percent of today’s cars have level 2 autonomy – the ability to handle tasks like changing lanes or overtaking without human intervention. Level 3 autonomy – automated highway driving and self-parking – will be present in almost six percent of the on-road fleet of 2025, accompanied by 3.5 percent of cars with Level 4 capabilities that don’t require a human driver and allow automated highway driving at 100 mph/h and robot lane changes, but allow instant human override of automation.
Those Level 3 and 4 cars are the ones that will need storage: 993GB of it for Level 3 and 1.175TB for Level 4, the firms says.
What if I told you that flash drives could do their own processing? [2]READ MORE
By 2030, when 11.2 percent of cars are at Level 3, 10.9 percent at Level 4 and just under one percent are entirely automated Level 5 affairs, the firm predicts that passenger cars at those Levels will have 1.4TB, 1.03TB and 942GB of storage respectively.
Robot taxis, however, will have far higher requirements – 8.6TB at Level 4 and 10.85TB at level 5 – driven by the fact that consumers will be price-sensitive and only want to pay for a terabyte, while commercial operators will be happier to pay for higher-resolution cameras that require more storage. Even with extra kit aboard, the firm says Level 5 cabs will mostly be used “on predictable routes, such as from airports to city centres” and in controlled industrial environments.
The whitepaper also ponders who will pay for moving data out of cars and into clouds and how it will happen. One scenario the Paper ponders is electric car chargers that incorporate Ethernet. While that’s technically possible, the paper points out that the data is most valuable to carmakers and consumers might balk at their Wi-Fi being flooded.
“Autonomous vehicles will, therefore, need to have advanced storage and intelligent offload systems,” the document suggests.
Beyond such software, the Paper says storage hardware makers have some work to do. And not just making kit that can survive all the vibration and temperature fluctuation that comes with life inside a vehicle: manufacturers also need to consider that memory chips are soldered, which means replacing storage could mean replacing an entire board. Carmakers would rather avoid that expense and just drop in new storage instead.
The whitepaper is offered for free download [3]here , with a requirement to enter a name, that of your employer and valid email address. ®
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[1] https://www.theregister.com/2017/01/17/lipreading_ai_nvidia_copilot_self_driving/
[2] https://www.theregister.com/2018/02/13/bringing_compute_to_flash_drives_to_unleash_in_situ_processing/
[3] https://www.counterpointresearch.com/storage-capacity-requirement-autonomous-vehicles/
[4] https://whitepapers.theregister.com/
"993GB of it for Level 3 and 1.175TB for Level 4"
They must be very pleased that they can predict to an accuracy of 1GB (0.1%) the storage requirements of these cars.
Are they trying to persuade manufacturers to stop selling off-the-shelf 1TB drives, and start selling 993GB and 1.175T drives to match the cars requirements? Or maybe the level 3 cars can use the spare 7GB for storing music?
Re: "993GB of it for Level 3 and 1.175TB for Level 4"
Or maybe the level 3 cars can use the spare 7GB for storing music telemetry data?
FTFY.
"Passenger cars on sale in 2025 will ship with a terabyte of storage"
Whose? Not mine, because I will not be buying a car with any degree of autonomy more sophisticated than a parking sensor.
Good luck with that. Your current car almost certainly has anti lock brakes that stop the car skidding if you hit the brakes too hard and might even have Electronic Stability Control. Advanced Emergency Braking is already mandatory on some vehicles and going to be mandatory on all cars pretty soon. Think about the airbags too: they are autonomous except for being able to disable the passenger one if a baby carrier is present. Cars have dozens of autonomous systems.
Re: Good luck with that.
That's a different sort of Autonomy. Nothing to do with what the article is talking about. 2025 is only a little more than 4 years away and the issues of genuinely autonomous vehicles on ordinary roads are not solved yet. Ships, trains, aircraft and even trams are easier problems. Aircraft and ships can be autonomous. I'm a bit baffled why people are talking about cars, trucks and taxis when most trains have drivers.
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100 mph per hour, a staggering rate of acceleration?
Well, as long as I can charge my car over USB3 LudicrousSpeed (or whatever it is by then) I really couldn't care less ...
(Joke ... or is it?)
2025?
I hadn't really planned on living that long.
They forgot to mention that they will want this information to sell to advertisers to fling ads at you, the onboard GPS telemetry says you visited a garden centre, then a hardware store. And before you know it you would be getting ads on your phone and PC for landscape gardening companies.
Will anyone make drives smaller than that by then?
OK, exaggerating a bit, but that doesn't seem to be a particularly large amount of storage the way things are going now.
But where about inside the vehicle will this storage live?
What we really need to know is... will it be a boot drive?
A rhetorical question?
"The White Paper also ponders who will pay for moving data out of cars and into clouds..."
Are you serious?
The users of said machines will pay. The benefits might go to the car makers but they will have no intention of putting their hands in their pockets. After all they are the ones who will set the rules and will make sure that any cost is picked up by the punters. Business as usual. Take all you can give nothing back.