February 5, 2015 | Bloomberg Business | Tim Higgins and Dana Hull
What does a car company of the 21st century look like? A software and tech company straight out of Silicon Valley. Bloomberg Business reports that as electric car company Tesla staffs up, it has hired more employees from Apple than any other company. Why? From Bloomberg:
As cars become more like computers, and traditional U.S. automakers struggle to attract Silicon Valley talent, Tesla’s ability to lure people from Apple gives it an edge in developing cars of the future. “It’s almost an unfair advantage,” says Adam Jonas, an auto industry analyst at Morgan Stanley. “As software goes from 10 percent of the value of the car to 60 over 10 years, that disadvantage [for traditional carmakers] will intensify.”
The fact that the next new car you buy may drive itself is just one of the many ways our ever-expanding ability to collect and process digital information is fundamentally changing how we use energy. Leigh Paterson looked at this shift in her story on unconventional ways to supply the the massive energy needs of data centers, while Jordan Wirfs-Brock visualized the data:
Jordan Wirfs-Brock / Inside Energy
View data for data center electricity, overall and as a portion of U.S. electricity use, as a spreadsheet use here.
Inside Energy will continue to report on the intersection of energy and information throughout 2015.
(P.S. For some entertaining context, The Oatmeal’s comics about what it feels like to ride in a Tesla or in Google’s self-driving car won’t disappoint.)
