26 Exabytes of data just to cart people around?!

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“1 Gigabyte per second, imagine the amount of data that will create every year: On average, Americans drive 600 hours per year in their car. That equals 2,160,000 seconds or approximately 2 Petabyte of data per car per year.” – by Mark van Rijmenam via Big Data Startups.

The 1GB per second number comes from the specifications of the self-driving Google car cited in Mark’s post. Think about that for a second. What happens if the self-driving car becomes mainstream? Even more likely, let’s think about taxi cabs.  There are 13,000 taxi cabs in New York City alone. If the self-driving car became the NYC cab (assuming a conservative 600 hours per year of driving), NYC cabs alone would generate an additional 26,000 Petabytes or 26 Exabytes of data just to cart people around!

This is yet another example of the internet of things, Machine to Machine (M2M communications), whatever you want to call it, and it’s potential impact on data growth. What’s also important to consider is the infrastructure needed to make advancements like self-driving cars a reality.  The network, the compute power, and the storage have to come from somewhere be it Google’s massive data centers and growing network infrastructure, or someone else’s.

This begs the question…do you trust technology enough to get you where you want to go…literally?