Use Autonomous Car Computers When They Are Parked

Electric vehicle batteries will some day be used for load-balancing the electric power grid. While parked the EVs can feed electric power into a household or the grid while demand spikes. Machine learning systems will be able to predict future driving patterns and let a battery drain partially when the electric power is needed elsewhere. But picture the computing power in the parked autonomous EV. Seems like a waste when cars are parked for most of the day.

Each autonomous car will probably have more computing power than a tricked out desktop computer of today. Even fleet cars will be idle most of the day and night because outside of commuting hours most cars are parked. If the cars are EVs plugged into the wall they can just as easily also have their computer network plugged in. So then their CPUs could be made available for other uses.

To what use could we put hundreds of millions of networked autonomous vehicle computers aside from driving? The Folding@home protein folding distributed computing project comes to mind. Another protein folding project: Rosetta@home for disease research. Many other distributed computing projects for astronomy, astrophysics, molecular biology, mathematics, cryptography, and other fields of science could be done in networked car computers.

Update: One objection raised in comments is security. One way to handle that: Download code written in a virtual machine's opcodes (rather like Java) with no IO primitives in it. The code can do simulation calculations and have a way to say "I'm done" and nothing else.

Another objection raised: autonomous vehicles supposedly won't be parked much. But look at roads. How many cars are on them at midnight? Or at 6 AM? By contrast, how many cars on the road at 9 PM or 5 PM? There are huge spikes in percentage of vehicles moving. Travel times are very unevenly distributed.