Last year in September, according to some experts have predicted that Self-driving cars, will be readily available within five years, and will come with a countless sensors creating machine-to-machine data at the rate of 1GB a second. This was confirmed by Mark van Rijmenam, a big data strategist and founder of BigData-Startups.com. He believes that the array of sensors in self-driving cars will also will provide great opportunities to spot mechanical problems before they happen—and even schedule repairs.
Self-driving car from Google already is a true data creator
Rijmenam predicts that all car manufacturers are likely working on self-driving cars. Mobileye, a Dutch company that specializes in inexpensive cameras that assist self-driving cars, has raised $400 million. “The self-driving car from Google already is a true data creator,” Rijmenam said in a blog post this week. “It uses all that data to know where to drive and how fast to drive. It can even detect a new cigarette butt thrown on the ground and it then knows that a person might appear all of a sudden from behind a corner or car.” If a self-driving cars does produce 1GB per second, it would, on average, will create about 2 petabytes of data a year, according to Rijmenam. He came to that calculation based on driving 600 hours per year in a car, which translates into 2,160,000 seconds or about 2PB of data per car per year. Koslowski doesn’t agree that autonomous cars will produce 1GB of data per second. “You might have a high-end vehicle like a [BMW] 7 series or [Mercedes] S Class producing a gigabyte of data in an hour, that’s meaningful and you’d want to analyze to some extent… But it’s not 1GB per second,” he said. Koslowski also sees a day when automobile data will be uploaded into a cloud storage system that the government can use to make roads safer.
The car would be able to schedule a maintenance appointment without driver assistance
Autonomous cars that have sensors will also be able to identify mechanical problems in real-time and proactively address them. For example, a driver would be notified of a pending mechanical issue before a problem develops, and the car would be able to schedule a maintenance appointment without driver assistance, Rijmenan said. In the future, the data collected “will help car companies to quickly pinpoint the areas for upgrading and adjust the car appropriately. Time to market for new cars will be shortened,” Rijmenam wrote. Source
