As cars increasingly become another “thing” in the internet of things, an ocean of data will inundate companies, pose engineering challenges, and provide opportunities for manufacturers.
A single autonomous car, with all of its sensors, cameras, and LiDAR, could generate as much as 100 gigbatyes of data every second, said Barclays analyst Brian Johnson, in a note published Wednesday.
Extrapolating this, Johnson said: Assuming the entire US fleet of vehicles (260mn vehicles) has a similar data generation, it would create an ocean of data. To put it in context, one hour’s worth of raw data across the entire US fleet would be ~5,800 exabytes in size.
To visualize this, Johnson noted that Amazon recently launched a service where refrigerated semi trucks carry 100 petabytes of data from clients to Amazon storage centers.
