If we look at the deployment of AI capabilities in cars, we see companies like AITO (Huawei), Li Auto, XPENG, NIO, Tesla, GM, Ford, Mercedes (ID6), BMW, VW and Toyota adding massive amounts of processing power to their new cars for a variety of reasons (it looks like the Chinese are the most aggressive overall). And once we move to Advanced Driver Assistance Systems (ADAS) to include autonomous driving, even more capacity will be needed, but when it comes to horsepower for an autonomous car, not so much. I mean we don’t talk about horsepower in elevators, and autonomous cars will function very much like horizontal elevators but use voice control instead of buttons.
Let’s talk about TOPS (Trillions of Operations Per Second) and why it will replace horsepower as a way to differentiate future cars.
The TOPS Race
The recent Microsoft Copilot effort where AI was added to PCs set a floor for processing power at 40 TOPS, but cars need far more because they increasingly want things to operate automatically. As a result, companies like Li Auto, XPENG, and Mercedes ship their most advanced cars with 500 TOPS, Ford and Toyota with only 40 TOPS, and NIO, which tops them all, is shipping with 1,000 TOPS. Even Tesla only has 240 TOPS in its cars.
More TOPS mean more automated functions.
The Functions that Performance Enhances
In electric cars, the motors are capable of making changes thousands of times a second while gas cars can only make changes a couple of times a second. This means the more processing power you have, the better traction control you have (racing, driving on slippery surfaces, reacting to external events etc.), which means with enough processing power, electric cars should be vastly more capable and far safer than their gas counterparts because they can adjust and react faster and many more times in a very short period.
In addition, more TOPS mean better sound in the car and better sound outside of the car because the processing power can better adjust for external noise and make more realistic external sounds (which buyers appear to prefer in electrics that are otherwise very quiet outside but a bit noisy, due to road noise, inside). You can also run Automatic Noise Cancellation more effectively at automotive cabin scale to overcome the noise in either car type. This makes for better conversations, the ability to sleep in the car more easily (as long as you aren’t driving), which is particularly useful for young children or pets and an overall enhanced experience.
This processing power can also do a better job of both identifying and potentially self-correcting problems depending on the implementation. Rather than getting a check engine light, you would be told what was broken rather than getting blasted on a forum because you don’t know that you need a code reader to figure out what broke (I just watched this happen on a car forum).
Other capabilities would include real-time translation if you were listening to a station while driving near or over a foreign border or talking to a border control agent. Imagine having the ability to determine early that you are impaired medically or by substance abuse long before you have an accident or experience a critical medical event. Imagine having a car that could have an interesting conversation with you on almost any topic. And imagine a car that would, regardless of whether it or you are driving, could avoid over 90% of the accidents out there, and approach avoiding 100% as the technology advanced.
Wrapping Up:
As we move to ever more intelligent transportation, TOPS will increasingly become more important than horsepower. In fact, you can see that today when you watch a race between a more powerful gas car and an electric car, particularly in the rain. This is because the electric car identifies and adjusts for slippage not only more quickly but more often, allowing it to put the power down, while a gas car will struggle for traction. Horsepower without traction is worthless.
So, from performance to experience, TOPS will become a more powerful differentiator because it will allow you to use the horsepower you have and provide a safer, more reliable and far less annoying experience.
The future of car performance is TOPS.
