How Will Connected Cars Impact the Internet?

Cars have long been considered highly innovative inventions, but in spite of the fact that this is the case the incorporation of various forms of technology have played a role in taking them to the next stage. Modern cars come packed with a wide assortment of technological features including an average of 200 sensors that collect data to help them perform better than might have been the case otherwise.

With all of that having been said and now out of the way, it is important to note that this ends up creating a vast quantity of data that might put a strain on the world wide web. Companies that are in the business of manufacturing these so called connected cars plan to upload anywhere from 50% to 70% of the data they collect directly to the internet.

It is predicted that this could result in the amount of data going into the internet increasing a thousand times over with all things having been considered and taken into account. The total amount of data will be in excess of 10 exabytes, which is concerning because of the fact that this is the sort of thing that could potentially end up breaking the internet and its surrounding and related infrastructure.

Each individual vehicle that is driven on a regular basis could end up generating hundreds of terabytes of data. The question here is where is all of this data going to end up being stored? The current maximum capacity of storage serves and the like is about 8 zettabytes.

At the rate of data collection that is predicted, this entire capacity could be exhausted in as little as 2.2 years. While there are plans to increase this upper limit to 16 zettabytes, that would only buy a couple more years of time before things start to get risky.

Car manufacturers will have to figure out how they are going to deal with this issue. The internet is a necessary utility, and it needs to remain consistent otherwise the entire world could start to suffer a series of cataclysmic events that would compound on each other.

H/T: Visualcapitalist
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by Zia Muhammad via Digital Information World