It's not just state and federal regulators' safety concerns that are preventing automotive manufacturers from producing self-driving cars for the masses. First they have to figure out how to make them more energy efficient. Opening the cargo area of a typical self-driving test vehicle usually reveals a trunk full of computers and wires needed to process petabytes of sensor data in real-time. That doesn't leave a lot of room for luggage, groceries, or anything else you usually transport in a car, not to mention the huge amounts of energy these systems suck from the batteries as they process all this information. That's why BMW I Ventures and Toyota AI Ventures has invested in Recogni, a San Jose, Calif.-based startup that is developing an artificial intelligence platform optimized for autonomous vehicles that can process information quickly while consuming very little energy.