Are Elon’s tunnels the future of transportation?
I remain skeptical that they will have widespread application.
11 thoughts on “The Boring Company”
Comments are closed.
Are Elon’s tunnels the future of transportation?
I remain skeptical that they will have widespread application.
Comments are closed.
The Las Vegas operation seems like a good use for small, self-driving electric vehicles– no worries about pedestrians or bicycles or wildlife or weather or non-automated traffic. Or running out of battery power. (I would assume any self-driving system should look at the fuel gauge and take itself out of service when a charge needed.) Better than subway or busses as the passenger could specify the destination, and not have to stop at every station along the route.
I never understood why the self-driving people put (wasted) so much time and effort on perfecting surface city driving, when it’s something like this, or long-distance freeway freight hauling, where automatic makes so much more sense, and could actually be properly done first. It’s almost like their hubris demanded they take on the hardest possible problem first. (The same with Google Glass. Who were the [expletive] idiots that thought putting cameras on what should have been a simple “heads-up display” was a good idea? They did the one thing that turned it from geeky to creepy.)
Gee, if they made the tunnels and vehicles large enough to carry a useful number of people, they’d have a subway.
And all the advantages of Boring Tunnels (low cost, rapid tunneling, individual cars) would be lost. But Musk was too dumb to think of that.
Or the “It’s a Small World” Disneyland ride?
A couple of years back, I got to thinking about everything Musk was doing (P2P Starship, electric cars, and Hyperloop) and realized the business case for it closes as a whole. I live in Southeast Butthole, NC, and want to go to remote Koumon Prefecture, Japan. I get in my Tesla, drive to the Hyperloop entrance in Oxford, NC (on the I-85 right of way). Once in the tunnel, my Tesla accelerates to 400mph and drives to Los Angeles while I take a nap. Then I drive to the P2P Car Transport, and fly to Tokyo, drive off to the Hyperloop entrance and whisk away to Koumon for my dinner date with sweet little Hiroko (which means “spacious girl”).
(Koumon means Butthole in Japanese.)
“… 400mph and drives to Los Angeles …”
North Carolina to LA at 400 mph is something like 7 hours; rather more than a nap. Add in an hour or so in flight, some time on the Hyperloop in Japan, and the inevitable ~1 hour waiting for your flight to leave, and the round trip is still close to a day. Hiroko had better be worth it.
By the time any of this is possible, it seems likely P2P sites would be available closer to my house than LA. One of the problems with visualizing this world is doing so in the context of our world. But for this one to work, problems like waiting for your flight to leave would also have to be solved. And it would. Saying otherwise is like saying mail order shopping wouldn’t work because you’d have to spend time waiting in a post office window queue to collect each package, recalling USPS has never delivered large packages door to door. No one anticipated FedEx being willing to deliver generators and dining room tables to your front porch. Whether this world comes into being is anybody’s guess. But it won’t be through fitting into the cracks of our world.
The article doesn’t mention cost. What was the price of these subterranean taxi rides?
As of last April, 5 – 10 dollars, depending on where you’re going, so about 2/3 the cost of a Lyft ride.
But not door-to-door. Still, pretty reasonable.
It’s in some ways similar to the conundrum raised by air travel. You can drive from NYC to LA, or you can take a plane. If you drive, you have your car at the final destination. If you take a plane, it’s much quicker, but at the cost of many other hassles.