lmao. EV ram is the new ICE catalytic converter
this post was submitted on 20 Jan 2026
69 points (96.0% liked)
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A modern ICE car would have both.
It's not so much that the cars use ddr5, I doubt they do. The problem is slop generators have booked the manufacturing capacity of the fabs for the next while meaning other chips can't be produced or produced at a smaller volume.
OP is hinting at stealing it.
Then I wish op the best. As long as they steal from the rich.
I don’t know if it’s DDR5. Probably soldered onto a custom board. Here’s an article that says the average now is 90 GB RAM+NAND: https://www.micron.com/about/blog/applications/automotive/new-research-shows-cars-need-more-memory-than-a-rocket
Combining RAM and NAND (flash) into one stat is really annoying as they are nothing alike. I'm assuming almost all of that is NAND, with 2 or 4GB of it being RAM.
RAM+NAND is really useless, like I can say my old laptop is 128.5GB RAM+NAND and it has 512MB ram with 128GB SSD
According to this reverse engineering effort, Tesla MCUs have 4GB of DDR4 onboard.
That is just the MCU, mind you, and I'm not sure what exactly it's responsible for besides media, but besides whatever AI nonsense they use for self-driving which might have a good chunk of RAM onboard, it seems likely to me that most other computerized components are just using SOC (system-on-chip) processors with integrated onboard memory, not dedicated DDR. I am not an expert though, and may be wrong.
New new form of stealing people’s catalytic converters
The verge Vergecast podcast did a piece on RAM, and it’s well worth a listen. They talk about all sorts of RAM related things, the RAM in a Cybertruck being one of them. Sorry, I don’t remember the details but I remember it being lower than I thought; 8GB, maybe 16gb. Give it a listen.
8gb is much more than i would expect.
Like wth would the car's shitty computer even be doing to use 8gb? They aren't playing games or running local big machine learning models. Highly doubt that even the crappiest spyware would be able to benefit from so many resources
Self driving?
Downvotes aside, all swasticars have the built in capability for their "self driving" and that processing is performed locally on an onboard computer with ram.
ah, i think you got me - in my mind object detection and depth perception can use this much
infotainment is effectively a pc. How much ram would you expect in a pc running all that? Everything else probably isn't much, but that system will have a lot. Often the backseat has sysems which need more.
If it’s running Linux, you can get away with just 2 GB.
depends on your applications. Some are fine on 1gb. Some run short on 8gb. I'm under NDA so I can't say more.
Can't imagine playing multiple video streams in HD requires a lot of ram. Highly doubt they're playing in 4k or something
It would be embedded. Not on sticks.
It costs more to carefully cut the memory ICs off a motherboard and repackage them than to just buy RAM.
In rare cases it can be done (like how Chinese shops resolder GDDR to make 48GB RTX 4090s), but I don’t see EV RAM being worth it.
But to answer your question… some self driving systems or even infotainment systems do have a somewhat substantial amount of RAM.
Pro tip: go for the motor. Or the battery, if you can swing it.