The ‘space tax’ on your self-driving car

LiDAR costs, compute power and AI training are the “big three” usually associated with the high cost of autonomous vehicles (AVs). We rarely look up. But maybe we should.

High above the Earth, the ionosphere, a chaotic, sun-charged layer of our atmosphere, is levying an invisible tax on every self-driving car in development. If you live in Africa, South America or Southeast Asia, that tax is significantly higher.

For a car to drive itself safely, it can’t just know it’s “on Main Street”. It needs to know it’s in the center of the lane, not six inches to the left. To get that centimeter-level precision, we rely on Global Navigation Satellite Systems.

But there is a problem: The ionosphere isn’t a pane of glass; it’s more like a turbulent swimming pool. During solar storms, it becomes scintillated, causing radio signals from satellites to flicker and fade like a dying flashlight. In engineering, when a primary system is unreliable, you don’t just hope for the best; you build a backup.

Because we can’t yet perfectly predict when the ionosphere will “blank out” a signal, car manufacturers have to over-engineer the vehicle. They add ultra-high-grade inertial sensors, extra cameras and massive processing units to handle the “dead reckoning” when satellites fail. Every extra sensor is a line item on the window sticker. In regions like Enugu in Nigeria or São Paulo in Brazil, where ionospheric disturbances are a nightly occurrence, you end up with a vehicle priced far out of the reach of the local market, thereby introducing an additional space tax.

The brute-force technique that is being used by the AV industry to annul the impact of the ionosphere can’t continue since it’s not economical in the long term. The road to affordable autonomy isn’t just paved with better silicon; it’s paved with better geophysics. Instead of adding a sixth camera to catch a signal lag, manufacturers should be lobbying for and contributing to the maintenance of critical ionosphere-monitoring missions.

NASA’s Global-scale Observations of the Limb and Disk (GOLD) mission is a prime example. By providing unprecedented, real-time views of how solar activity and terrestrial weather systems collide at the ionosphere-thermosphere boundary, GOLD provides the vital “limb and disk” diagnostics needed for better understanding of the ionosphere, and by extension, navigation safety. For the AV industry, these observations shouldn’t be science projects; they are essential safety diagnostics.

However, manufacturers cannot solve this in a vacuum. The Department of Transportation should move beyond terrestrial standards and begin requiring “space weather resilience” as a certification benchmark for Level 4 and 5 autonomous systems. We need a regulatory roadmap where space weather data is integrated into the vehicle’s navigation safety protocols by mandate.

This transition requires a fundamental shift from passive data consumption to active infrastructure investment. For AV manufacturers to effectively utilize space weather data, they will be encouraged to invest in space missions that specifically align with their high-precision engineering goals — moving beyond general atmospheric research toward bespoke orbital monitoring. By backing targeted sensors designed for real-time ionospheric mapping, carmakers can ensure their navigation stacks are supported by data feeds as reliable as the roads themselves. Such investment allows the industry to “buy down” the risk of signal failure, turning space weather from a chaotic variable into a manageable engineering input.

Self-driving cars are often pitched as the ultimate terrestrial technology. In reality, they are space-age machines. Until we master the environment 300 kilometers up, and until our regulators treat space weather as core infrastructure — on par with the roads themselves, the cost of driving down here will remain stuck in orbit.

Amadi Brians Chinonso, Ph.D., is a space weather scientist and former graduate visiting fellow at NASA Goddard, NCAR and Los Alamos National Laboratory, specializing in ionospheric disturbances that affect GNSS integrity. As the founder of BrianSpace, he focuses on bridging the gap between advanced space physics and the practical needs of satellite navigation in emerging economies.

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