Even electric self-driving cars may have a climate change problem

The future energy required to run just the computers on a global fleet of autonomous vehicles could generate as much greenhouse gas emissions as all the data centers in the world today.

That finding, announced by researchers from MIT on Friday, is based on a statistical model that calculated the energy outputs a fleet of 1 billion autonomous electric vehicles would generate if they ran one hour per day. The resulting number roughly translated to 0.3 percent of the world’s greenhouse gas emissions.