Many of us have yet to see an autonomous vehicle driving down the road, but it will be here faster than we can image. The car of tomorrow is connected, data-rich and autonomous. As 5G networks come online, sensors improve and compute and memory become faster and cheaper, the amount of data a vehicle will generate is expected to be 40 terabytes of data every day. This will make the autonomous vehicle the ultimate edge computing device.

Last week at Mobile World Congress Americas in San Francisco, Micron Technology hosted a panel discussion with automotive industry experts where they discussed the future of the connected car and the role of both the cloud and the edge in delivering the full promise of autonomous driving (FYI – Cars are now big at wireless trade shows. See Connected Vehicle Summit at MWC).

Experts from Micron, NVIDIA, Microsoft and Qualcomm discussed what 5G, cloud, IoT and edge analytics will mean for next-generation compute models and the automobile.

Micron claims to be the #1 memory supplier to the automotive industry and notes that its technology will be required to access the massive streams of data from vehicles. This data must be processed and analyzed, both in the car and in the cloud. Think about going down the road at 70 MPH in an autonomous vehicle. You need to have safe, secure and highly-responsive solutions, relying on split second decisions powered by enormous amounts of data. To quickly analyze the data necessary for future autonomous vehicles, higher bandwidth memory and storage solutions are required.

Smart, connected vehicles are the poster child for edge computing and IoT.

Some intriguing quotes from the discussion:

• “In last seven years 5839 patents have been granted for autonomous vehicle technology.” – Steve Brown, Moderator and Futurist

• “There is a proactive side of autonomous driving that can’t be fulfilled at the edge.” Doug Seven, Head of Connected Vehicle Platform, Microsoft

• “The thin client model won’t work for automobiles. You won’t have connectivity all the time.” – Steve Pawlowski, Vice President Advanced Computing Solutions, Micron

• “Once you have enough autonomous vehicles, the humans are the danger.” – Tim Wong, Director of Technical Program Management for Autonomous Vehicles, NVIDIA

The entire panel discussion can be found in the video below.

Disclaimer: The author of this post has a paid consulting relationship with Micron Technology.