A cloud of Tesla’s, or a massive compute farm?

At this point it’s generally accepted that in a very real sense every Tesla is really a computer that just happens to be attached to a vehicle. And, particularly if you consider the new Full Self Driving chipset that’s a part of all newer models, it’s an extremely powerful computer.

Tesla’s numbers for the new Full Self Driving chipset claim 144 trillion operations per second (TOPS), for example, which is in the same league as dedicated systems from NVIDIA. (It’s also a relatively efficient system, with the FSD chipset drawing a purported 72 watts). When self-driving, this compute power is fully engaged of course (and I suspect even when self-driving is turned off it’s still being used to help feed into the ongoing training of the primary algorithms).

But for most drivers, the time spent on the road is still a fraction of a day. An hour or two, give or take? The rest of the time this computing resource is sitting idle, effectively wasted. How long will it be before Tesla decides to make use of it?

Because at some level, this should be considered a massive cloud-computing resource, particularly once you consider all Teslas as an aggregate entity.

By the end of 2019 we should have approximately a half-million Tesla’s in the wild, the bulk of which are fitted with some self-driving hardware. And although some of the large compute-cloud services like AWS probably feature several million computers, the potential compute power of this Tesla Cloud is still significant.

Of course the FSD chipsets aren’t really general purpose computers and don’t have a standard framework to run arbitrary code on (yet, as far as we know), but clearly the opportunity is there.

The communication between nodes of this cloud would also be an issue since bandwidth is fairly limited. Best-case is when it’s in your garage, connected to a good WiFi signal, and with a high speed network connection behind that WiFi. But that’s still significantly slower than the fast backbones you’ve got connecting servers in the AWS cloud, for example.

Still, this doesn’t make the system unusable, it merely restricts it to problems that have a high ratio of compute power needed to the data that needs to be transferred in and out.

(It would actually be a perfect platform for cryptocurrency mining, where very little data needs to be transferred relative to the amount of computing necessary. There have already been stories of people putting Bitcoin mining hardware into the back of their car and taking advantage of the free charging offered by their office complex to power the rigs. But as far as I know nobody has managed to hack directly into the Tesla FSD computer to do the mining instead. And then there’s the concern about Teslas infected with undetected zombie viruses that are surreptitiously mining bitcoins without the owner’s knowledge…)

Or maybe the system could be analyzing camera/radar data from the day’s commute, effectively pre-processing before sending useful information back to the mothership’s self-driving dataset. Conceivably the system could even run simulations against this data… Can a Tesla conceivably be learning how to drive better even while it’s parked in the garage?

Meanwhile, could Teslas that are driving on the same stretch of road, near or adjacent to each other, share compute resources too? Toss a few CPU cycles to the car that’s attempting to navigate a tricky exit ramp while the other cars are dealing with relatively straightforward highway driving?

(There is, of course, an even more obvious low-hanging fruit here — the sharing of sensor data between nearby cars. If a Tesla that’s ten cars ahead of me notices a road hazard, I should know about it well ahead of time).

Finally, if Tesla does eventually decide to turn on this massive cloud computer, it will be interesting to see who can access it and when? Will they just use it for their own purposes? (Has anybody looked through Tesla’s terms and conditions for any language that might acknowledge this sort of use?)

Or will Tesla allow owners to monetize their onboard computers in the same way that Elon has proposed they’ll be able to monetize their cars more generally as a ride-sharing service? And would the framework that allows Tesla owners to sell CPU cycles to the highest bidder actually be an easy first step towards this broader goal?

If nothing else, perhaps Tesla will give you a discount on the purchase of the FSD upgrade if you agree to let them take over your car’s computer at night. You’d be paying for the electricty in this scenario, but it would be easy enough to determine where the break-even point would be. If your battery is generally being charged via Solar, for example, I suspect this would be an easy decision.

For now this is all purely speculation, of course. But given how Tesla seems to do a very good job of considering all aspects of the systems it designs, I’d be surprised if this hasn’t already been sketched out on a whiteboard somewhere within the company.