Cars aren’t going away any time soon. So the ultimate green move will be combining two emerging technologies: autonomous driving and fully electric cars. Autonomy brings efficiency in driving and battery use, while electric cars drastically cut emissions, fuel costs and maintenance. Even so, a rift has developed within the automobile industry about the best way to move forward. Skeptics believe self-driving technology will have a serious impact on an electric car’s range and degrade batteries; optimists think improvements in technology will likely mitigate much of that trade-off.
The split has manifested in established automakers choosing different paths to pursue. Ford Motor Co. is planning to launch self-driving tech in 2022 but in hybrid cars first. The company’s testing found computers and sensors powering self-driving could cut the electric car’s range by more than 50%. Meanwhile, the only autonomous cars Volkswagen AG plans to build are fully electric vehicles. The company will begin field tests that same year.
At the heart of the challenge of self-driving cars is that it is hard to replicate human understanding of sight and sound. Even with the latest image-recognition technology, computers struggle to do what humans instinctively manage: understand the small but myriad changes happening on a road, in real-time. Luckily, computers can use other inputs, such as radio waves (through a radar) or lasers (through a lidar).
Lidars, which you may have seen on prototype self-driving cars, are generally considered crucial. They need to protrude outward to project lasers beyond the car body and thus “sense” surrounding obstacles even as the car moves at great speeds. But the necessary bulge limits the aerodynamic shape of the car, increasing the amount of energy needed to drive and thus lowering how far an electric car can travel on a full charge.
Moreover, on-board computers need to analyze thousands of images every second that lidars capture to help make driving decisions. Even with modern computing technology, that takes up a lot of energy. The combination of sensors and computers does drain an electric-car’s battery more quickly than if a human driver were at the wheel.