I have to admit it's an appealing idea on the surface!

Vice Motherboard recently discussed the feasibility of using your Tesla car to mine cryptocurrency for you. It's definitely a fascinating idea to use the electric vehicle, especially for those who bought the car prior to January of this year getting free battery charging.

However the vice author quickly went into some of the major issues to even making this worthwhile. This discussion started when a Eco-Motoring News reported a Tesla owner hooked up 4-motherboards with 16 GPU's in their trunk to do some mining. Since these aren't available for mining Bitcoin, so people are using Ethereum to see how worthwhile this experiment could be. It's worth noting that it's difficult to see if this was indeed attempted or was just done to get people thinking or perhaps a laugh.

But assuming this was indeed tried, people have gone through with a fine tooth comb to see if this was actually worth doing. A few of the issues pointed out included

• The amount of heat put off by the GPU's would be too hot for the driver to be in the car (which would need some cooling at this point.)
• Running the rig for 1 1/2 days would be equivalent to 7 days of driving the car
• Assuming the use of decent GPU's, the mining would earn about $23/day in Ethereum (at current prices)
• On top of all of this would be the price for the mining rigs themselves

In the end the author determined that it really wasn't a feasible way to mine Ethereum, especially considering the driver would essentially have to NOT drive their car at all. Maybe over time as we get better (and cheaper) processors, if charging prices don't increase and the value of Ethereum (or other cryptocurrencies that can use these GPU's) it may be something available down the road.

A few other experimental mining setups can be found using:

• Wind power to mine Zcash
• Theoretically mining Bitcoin with solar power
• Even a hydropowered Crypto-Mining

It will be interesting to see if projects like these are actually able to become profitable, especially if crypto continues to gain acceptance.

...and for your time and attention, the obligatory kitty pic!

^{Click HERE for Full-Size Image}

Image Sources:
Car Trunk
Solar Cells