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Could your Tesla pay for itself?

A regular long-time reader sent me a link to a very interesting story this week.

The article points out that there's a huge and ever-growing computing resource out there, sitting idle most of the time and just begging to be tapped into.

I'm talking about all the CPU power in Tesla's EVs, and perhaps the EVs made by other brands.

Modern EVs have quite sophisticated onboard computing systems that really only do anything when the vehicle is being driven. Things such as driver-assist, dynamic safety systems etc tend to require quite a few MIPs to operate in realtime but when a vehicle is parked up, they simply sit unused, perhaps for many hours at time.

So what if this computing resource could be harnessed, managed and monetised?

Creating a cluster of such computing resources shouldn't be that hard really, after all, these vehicles are also "connected" via mobile comms links and there's usually a huge battery there to power them.

Even mining crypto could be a way to offset the costs of owning an EV, if electicity costs are low enough.

The big question is "who would do this?"

Obviously Tesla themselves would be in the best position to tap into the spare processing power of the almost 5 million cars they've sold but that doesn't mean that an independent third party couldn't come up with an option either.

The best things about this form of distributed processing resource are that it would operate independent of the power grid and it could be highly resilient to local disasters due to the massive geographical spread involved.

Although the early Teslas had a disappointingly wimpy Intel Atom processor, more recent ones are based on AMD's Ryzen technology so would be roughly equivalent to a desktop or laptop PC in terms of the processing power available. On a stand-alone basis this isn't much to get excited about but when you start connecting millions of those processors into a cluster then things get a little more impressive.

Perhaps one of the first tasks that could be assigned to this itinerant network of CPUs is that of neural net processing. Right now Tesla is using NVIDIA GPU/AI silicon for the FSD training systems it's building and shortages are apparently impacting its work in this area. I wonder if they couldn't harness some of the idle CPU power in all those cars its sold to help out?

The bigger question, given that Mr Musk has a somewhat different perspective on business ethics to many of us (just ask Twitter/X creditors and staff), would Tesla even tell owners of their cars that their processors were being used in the wee small hours of the night while those vehicles were being recharged? Who's actually checking that this isn't happening already?

Perhaps Tesla owners will end up, at least in part, funding some of Tesla's computer requirements by donating power and CPU time, perhaps without even know they're doing it?

Call me a cynic -- but I'm still waiting for the Hyperloop that would connect LA and San Francisco, my Tesla Roadster and our missions to Mars that were all promised to have been delivered by Mr Musk long before now.

Oh... the story that triggered today's column can be found here: Tesla Car Computers Could Be Monetized In Other Ways — Like Amazon’s Big AWS Jackpot. (Clean Technica)

Carpe Diem folks!

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