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So the calculation is based on 0.840 kWh per day per car for an hour driving.

When driving 100 km/h for an hour, a reasonably efficient car will use 5 liters of petrol. The energy in 5 liters is about 5 * 34 = 170 MJ. Hence, 47 kWh.

So yes, it’s a lot of energy used by the computations, but still less than the actual force required to move the car forward.

Edit: Fixed number.

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I believe you meant 0.84kWh, the article stated 840 Wh per day.

So roughly 5 cents of energy to autonomously pilot a 2 ton vehicle with several human occupants through a relatively hostile and uncontrolled environment…

At scale safe autonomous driving will be saving 100k lives and eliminating over a trillion of dollars in economic losses per year.

This is a minuscule amount of energy expended for the results achieved by any reasonable standard!

I agree with your opinion, but disagree with measuring power use in terms of monetary cost. Doing it that way excludes most of the actual cost of power generation and use.

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