[semi-extrinsic]

To clarify, I mean indirectly the power consumption. I guess this will become an important point of discussion soon-ish, as we get more and more electric cars and ML stuff in them.

My view is, if your car uses electrons, and some of those are for compute, and you just offload the compute to the cloud, you haven't actually reduced the total electricity consumption.

Similarly here, the total "footprint" of the car is increased by adding this feature.

[WrtCdEvrydy]

To be honest, there are open source ALPR (https://github.com/openalpr/openalpr) that could probably run lower framerates even on modern i7 processors (http://doc.openalpr.com/getting_started.html#hardware-requir..., https://docs.google.com/spreadsheets/d/1FNwEuJAgZ1LyM2GGd7VR...)

[rejschaap]

Whether the car uses electrons or fossil fuels is pretty irrelevant, right?

[speedgoose]

I think the comparison with an electric car is to illustrate that this cloud solution is a waste of energy.