TopSpeed

recent-coronal-mass-ejection-could-slow-the-development-of-self-driving-vehicles

On August 31st, the sun spewed a massive coronal mass ejection (CME) that dwarfed the Earth and on September 3rd, it came close enough to Earth to connect with our magnetosphere and cause an Aurora to appear. So what in the world does this have to do with cars? Well, let's have a look. In 1859, a huge CME – the last one since, by the way – caused a geomagnetic storm that then caused telegraph systems to fail, shock their operators, and even work while unplugged. Fortunately in those days, they didn't rely on all of the high-tech things that we do. Autonomous cars are all the rage lately, as we continue to cover the advances that [Google->ar127227] and [Cadillac->ke18] are making in this area. Autonomous cars actually use one of the technologies that Mike Hapgood, a pace weather scientist near Oxford England, says will be hugely affected by a geomagnetic storm of large proportion – GPS. Imagine if a moderate portion of the cars on the road are using autonomous technology us