Halfway Through the 2030 Self-Driving Car Bet

In March 2022, software developers Jeff Atwood and John Carmack made a $10k charity bet on the following proposition:

By January 1st, 2030, completely autonomous self-driving cars meeting SAE J3016 level 5 will be commercially available for passenger use in major cities.

Carmack bet that we would have level 5 cars by 2030. This means cars that are fully autonomous and able to drive everywhere in all conditions.

Atwood bet against, writing:

To be clear, I am betting against because I think everyone is underestimating how difficult fully autonomous driving really is. I am by no means against self driving vehicles in any way!

Four years later, just over halfway through the bet, it looks like Atwood has a good chance of winning.

The Blackout

Driverless taxis currently operate at SAE level 4. Their service is restricted to specific areas within certain cities and they aren't fully autonomous. Whenever a Waymo robotaxi gets into a situation it can't figure out, the car requests "remote assistance", where a human call center agent advises the vehicle on how to proceed. There are roughly 40 cars to every human assistant. Half of these remote workers are located in the Philippines.

In December, a power outage in San Francisco caused Waymo's fleet of robotaxis to stop mid-traffic for hours, blocking roads and obstructing emergency vehicles. Waymo's post mortem indicated that while their cars can navigate through disabled traffic lights, they sometimes request confirmation before proceeding. During the power outage there was a backlog of confirmation requests which left many cars frozen in place.

This problem could have been much worse if there had been more driverless taxis on the road—there are currently only about 800 to 1,000 Waymos in operation in San Francisco.

"Edge Cases"

Self-driving vehicles continue to fail in numerous other ways.

Last September in Phoenix, Waymos got stuck in flooded streets. Of course, some human drivers may do this as well, but you can warn people about dangerous levels of flooding and most are able to avoid problem areas. Because of the nature of machine learning, you can't just tell the robotaxis to watch out for flooding. Waymo's solution was to temporarily suspend service of all cars in the Phoenix area.

In December, a Waymo drove into an active crime scene in LA. Several police cruisers had their lights flashing, police had weapons drawn, and officers were yelling at the Waymo to leave the area as it slowly drove within a few feet of a suspect who was lying on the ground.

In January, a Waymo drove down the light rail tracks in Phoenix while a light rail car was approaching. And in March, in two separate instances in Austin, a Waymo stopped within railroad crossing gates, just a few feet away from a passing train.

Last month in Austin, a Waymo got stuck after trying to make a u-turn and ended up blocking an ambulance that was responding to a mass shooting.

The cars have also gotten stuck driving in circles, taken unexplained detours into parking garages, and trapped passengers inside.

These types of situations are often referred to as "edge cases". An edge case is a set of extreme conditions which can cause unexpected failure in a system. This isn't a very fitting description though, since obeying police officers and not driving on train tracks are fundamental driving requirements. So is understanding what a school bus is.

School Bus Failures

Waymo has been struggling for months now trying to get its cars to stop illegally passing school buses that have a flashing stop sign extended.

The National Highway Traffic Safety Administration launched a probe into Waymo last October after one of its cars passed a stopped school bus in Atlanta. Waymo issued a recall and stated that it had repaired affected vehicles in November. But the problem persisted and as of early December there had been 20 similar incidents at the Austin Independent School District. The school district hosted a half-day event in mid-December to try to help Waymo collect data to fix the issue. But by mid-January at least four more school-bus-passing incidents had taken place. And another incident occurred in March.

There is also an open investigation for a separate incident in which a Waymo struck a child near an elementary school in January.

If a human driver continued to rack up repeat offenses of not stopping for school buses, their license would be suspended. This hasn't happened yet for Waymo, perhaps because people believe these cars will eventually be safer than humans.

Safety

Waymo claims to be "already making roads safer." Their data show a reduction in injury-causing crashes and fewer airbag deployments when compared to human drivers in similar driving areas.

But even though Waymo's cars have driven more than 100 million miles, that's not enough to make statistically meaningful conclusions about fatal crash rates. According to a RAND Corporation study:

... fully autonomous vehicles would have to be driven hundreds of millions of miles and sometimes hundreds of billions of miles to demonstrate their safety in terms of fatalities and injuries.

So far, most of the miles driven by AVs have been at low speeds on urban roads in moderate climates. Waymo has only recently started offering freeway service. Occupant fatalities are more likely at higher speeds, so a new edge case on freeways could quickly negate their safety gains.

Current safety numbers ignore all of the recent close calls. The next time a Waymo goes beyond a railroad crossing gate, it could derail a train. The next time a Waymo drives past a stopped school bus, it could run over a child. The next time there's a major power outage, Waymos stuck in traffic could prevent a fire truck from getting to a fire. If an event like this occurs, it would be tragic but unsurprising.

AVs also introduce unique dangers. Remote assistance is a potential attack vector. Waymo's remote human assistants aren't able to directly control vehicles, which limits risk. But other companies like Tesla allow remote control. Will malicious actors ever be able to hack the remote assist functionality? Or the over-the-air software updates?

The Future

I'm skeptical that level 5 self-driving cars will be available by 2030. There are currently too many unhandled situations that require remote assistance. Waymo is under multiple federal investigations. And a particularly bad accident could cause a major setback. It's hard to picture how we could possibly get to fully autonomous vehicles in less than four years.

Reading the Rails Credential File Directly

Maybe you've got a lightweight Rack application or Ruby script where you want to be able to read sensitive data from your encrypted Rails credentials without having to load an entire Rails app. Rails.application.credentials won't be available. But if you've got ActiveSupport installed, you can use ActiveSupport::EncryptedConfiguration:

require 'active_support/encrypted_configuration'

credentials = ActiveSupport::EncryptedConfiguration.new(
  config_path: 'config/credentials/development.yml.enc',
  key_path: 'config/credentials/development.key',
  env_key: 'RAILS_MASTER_KEY',
  raise_if_missing_key: true
)

credentials.config
# => {key_one: "abc", key_two: "def"}

credentials.key_one
# => "abc"

Both key_path and env_key are required parameters, but only one will be used depending upon where you store your decryption key. The env_key is used if present, otherwise the key_path is used. When Rails loads credentials, it first looks for an ENV variable called "RAILS_MASTER_KEY" before looking for an env-specific file at "config/credentials/#{environment}.key" or master file at "config/master.key".

EV Adoption

Electric vehicle adoption has been growing for years. But EVs still make up only a fraction of new car purchases.

In their book Abundance, Ezra Klein and Derek Thompson argue that one step toward building a cleaner economy is to electrify everything. And to do that, we need to persuade people to choose clean alternatives when the time comes to replace their car or other large appliances:

People need to want these alternatives. That means the alternatives need to be excellent, which in many cases they now are. Electric cars accelerate faster and run quieter than cars powered by combustion engines. Induction stoves boil water in a fraction of the time it takes those little licks of fire. Because these advantages are not universally known—and because new technologies are more expensive than mature ones—subsidies need to be generous, and advertising needs to be everywhere.

A similar argument was made in this xkcd comic:

It's not hard to find opinion pieces that explain why EVs are an "obvious upgrade" because they are "quieter, cleaner, more efficient and easier to maintain".

But the idea that people aren't buying EVs because of a failure to communicate how quiet, clean, and fast they are is silly.

The main reasons people are reluctant to purchase EVs have been reported on for years and remain consistent:

• Charging stations are limited
• Charging time takes longer than pumping gas
• Range tends to be low
• Upfront costs are high

These reasons are practical and rational. They're about time and money and whether a car can meet one's driving needs. Apartment dwellers may not have consistent access to a charging location at home. Drivers with longer commutes as well as those from single-car households are less likely to purchase EVs.

It's often argued that even though EVs are expensive to purchase they save money in the long run because energy costs are low and EVs require less maintenance (e.g. no oil changes). But their economic advantage also depends on the cost of gas, electricity prices, public charging costs, and depreciation. Head-to-head comparisons reveal that sometimes a hybrid is still the cheaper option, even when generous EV tax credits were available.

Range is impacted by towing and by cold temperature. As Consumer Reports notes:

We found that cold weather saps about 25 percent of range when cruising at 70 mph compared with the same conditions in mild weather. In the past, we found that short trips in the cold with frequent stops and the need to reheat the cabin saps 50 percent of the range.

These may not be huge concerns for drivers with short commutes, but they are serious impediments to full adoption. In How to Avoid a Climate Disaster, Bill Gates (who loves his electric vehicle) writes about the challenges to long-haul trucking:

According to a 2017 study by two mechanical engineers at Carnegie Mellon University, an electric cargo truck capable of going 600 miles on a single charge would need so many batteries that it would have to carry 25 percent less cargo. And a truck with a 900-mile range is out of the question: It would need so many batteries that it could hardly carry any cargo at all.
 
Keep in mind that a typical truck running on diesel can go more than 1,000 miles without refueling. So to electrify America's fleet of trucks, freight companies would have to shift to vehicles that carry less cargo, stop to recharge more often, spend hours of time recharging, and somehow travel long stretches of highway where there are no recharging stations. It's just not going to happen anytime soon. Although electricity is a good option when you need to cover short distances, it's not a practical solution for heavy, long-haul trucks.

This is also why electric aircraft won't be replacing fossil-fuel-powered jets in the near future. The energy density of batteries is too low.

I've been driving a hybrid for over a decade now and it's great. When I bought it, everything was an improvement over my previous car—lower emissions, better fuel economy, longer range, shorter fueling time, and more cargo space. It's kind of a bummer that a transition to an all-electric car wouldn't be a slam dunk in the same way. It's not an obvious upgrade.