DETROIT -- Self-driving vehicles will generate unfathomable amounts of data, and companies will need to work together if they want to take advantage of new and larger sources of information, an Intel executive says.
Kathy Winter, Intel's vice president of automated driving solutions, said production-level autonomous vehicles will create massive amounts of data from onboard sensors and connected services. It will be up to manufacturers to determine which data are useful and how to share access.
"As you move to more and more vehicles on the road and smarter and smarter algorithms running them, you'll eventually see that you can't afford to store that much data locally," Winter said Thursday at the Technology in Motion conference here. "We'll get smarter about it as an industry."
Intel estimates that self-driving vehicles will generate about 4,000 gigabytes of data daily, compared with the 0.65 gigabytes the average person creates a day with connected personal devices such as smartphones and computers. Vehicle-generated data include technical information about the vehicle, crowd-sourced data from fleets -- such as sensor inputs used for traffic updates -- and personal preferences of passengers.
Autonomous vehicles used for testing are providing a window into how this data generation will work. Much of the information from these vehicles is immediately used for technology development. Most is stored on a cloud network, which can be accessed from anywhere, and is powered by massive server collections housed in data centers.
Once self-driving vehicles reach production level, manufacturers will have to prioritize the data generated to avoid overspending on storage.
"That's a learning process everyone will need to go through in the next couple of years," Winter said.
To maximize data deemed valuable, manufacturers will also need to determine how to share and access each other's findings, especially information that affects safety, Winter said. Each company is different in how it prioritizes and manages data, but there will need to be an industry standard for types of data needed to ensure passenger security.
"Right now, each manufacturer is setting up their own way to manage and set up that data," she said. "When we talk about sharing, especially safety data, each company, whether they're running their own fleet or not, values certain data more than others. It's not so much about who owns the data, it's really who needs to have access."
