Just curious, how much data does a Model S consume? For example, let's say I drive my car one hour per day with the map displaying on the center console with internet music continuously streaming in the background. How much data is used in that one hour?
Quite a bit.
For the audio: suppose 128 kb/s. That's 16 kilobytes/s. There are 3600 seconds in an hour, so that's 57.6 MB/hour. But maybe the streaming data rate is much lower?
For the screen: that's pretty close to impossible to answer. Is the map displayed whole screen or half screen? With imagery on or off? North-up mode or not? How fast is the car travelling? How closely is the map zoomed? Is it traveling east-west or north-south? All these things impact how much data needs to be sent. (If full screen and you're travelling east-west you'll go through more imagery than if you're going north-south, in North-Up mode.)
In addition, we are not privy to exactly how things are represented. If lines-only maps are represented in vector form, then the data requirements are quite small. It seems to me, however, that they are sent as bitmaps. The display, according to completely unreliable Internet sources
is 1920x1200. So, suppose you have it full-screen and zoomed and the car moving in such a way as to require a half screen of new data each minute. That would be a bit more than a MB as an uncompressed bitmap, but of course the imagery I'm sure is sent compressed. So how much compression will there be? It depends on the imagery. Yes, it actually depends not just how fast you're going and in which direction, but where you are.
Now with extreme zooming and imagery turned on, I can imagine going through a half screen of data every 10 seconds or so, so about 6 times as quickly. So, uncompressed, 6 MB/minute. Probably closer to 0.5 MB/minute compressed, or 30 MB/hour.
So, very vaguely, probably no more than 100 MB/h (0.1 GB/h). But maybe more like 10 MB/h (0.01 GB/h).