Electric cars are getting advanced systems with each passing year. Autonomous cars require high-end computers to understand their surroundings and ensure their riders are safe. This has led to a new breed of electric cars that are marketed not only on the basis of the miles they can cover but on their number-crunching capabilities as well.
Similarly, Aldo Baoicchi, the CEO of Canadian vehicle and scooter company Daymak, is planning to make something unique with the 2023 Spiritus, a self-driven car designed to mine cryptocurrencies when parked, reports Wired.
Many potential buyers of the concept car
As per a press release, the company has already surpassed $350 million in pre-orders and also accepting digital currencies such as Ethereum, Cardano, and Doge for payments. The company CEO believes crypto is the future.
When the Spiritus is released, “we will be in the midst of a blockchain revolution,” the executive said in the statement. “Everyone will be paying with crypto by then, and we are building these cars with that in mind,” he said.
Other carmakers are already equipping their cars with top-tier supercomputers. The computing power of these systems is so large, they could help solve complex math equations and even solve issues on the scale of national security.
Are these crypto mining cars practical?
“The idea has tremendous potential because we’re looking at not thousands, but tens of millions of supercomputers in these cars,” Keith Strier, NVIDIA’s VP of worldwide AI initiatives, told Wired. NVIDIA has been designing supercomputers for self-driven vehicles.
“In the United States or Germany it may not be as big a deal, but in a smaller country, as autonomous trucks and cars hit the road, it completely shifts the potential for computing in that country,” Strier added.
But with more computing power comes the risk of cyberattacks, experts warn. As per a study by European Union officials, AI makes autonomous vehicles “highly vulnerable” to cyber-attacks. While the idea of mining cryptocurrency while being parked sounds like a good idea, but its practicality is yet to be tested.
