I didn’t work up the gumption to go look at Elon’s tunnel last night, but Megan Geuss did. Most seem to have been less than whelmed.
[Update a few minutes later]
Elizabeth Lopatto took a ride, too.
[Afternoon update]
Gizmodo has a round up of pans:
Hopefully Musk and his engineers will be able to make the ride feel less like a dirt road sometime in the future, especially if they want to build this concept in Chicago, as they promised in a high-profile press conference with the mayor back in June.
But even if they make the ride more pleasant, where does that leave this transportation concept more broadly? There are plenty of underground highways in America. But they haven’t offered a very futuristic alternative. They’ve only delivered more single-family cars—which appears to be exactly what Elon Musk is putting in the pipeline.
Elon Musk has done some very impressive things with SpaceX and Tesla. But his futuristic Loop transportation system leaves a lot to be desired. Namely, the futuristic part.
Seems like the roll out was premature.
[Thursday-morning update]
Over at Popular Mechanics, a less critical review.
[Bumped]
Planes trains and automobiles were all quite bumpy and uncomfortable when they were first introduced, too. technology always improves over time.
Yeah, the comments that there was a bumpy-ish ride on the first demo seem pretty stupid.
The second photo in Elizabeth Lapatto’s Verge story says it all. The “track” looks about like a typical small-town sidewalk after forty years of wear, subsidence, and tree-root damage, or what you get if you hire a bunch of high-school drop outs out of rehab to pour a sidewalk. But it looks great in their 3-D CAD models.
You can have fast, and you can have bumpy, but you can’t have both.
You also aren’t going to have a fast transportation system if you have one lane and grandma gets to determine the speed.
one lane and grandma gets to determine the speed.
They aren’t going to be HOV lanes. A system like this, unless it’s intended to be a waste of a lot of money, is going to be automated, with two tubes. Being automated, they don’t have to worry about operator reaction times and inattentiveness.
These articles appear to be written by recent Journolism School graduates who expect to experience something like the Hollywood/Playstation fantasies they grew up with, so are nit-picking every minor detail wrong with a prototype.
It is appealing that this form of mass transportation has a focus on the individual, if the prototype is supposed to represent what is implemented. Very nice to sit in your own car, or with a few people.
No need for worrying about a slowpoke gumming everything up when all the cars in the system have autopilot. This is also a great environment for autopilot that might be accessible to cars with autopilot as an add-on.
When the vehicles get spit out, they can take you the last mile to your destination or let you out to walk.
There is a lot of potential here as long as musk doesnt get all proprietary. It is funny that after all the hyperlink hoopla and contests for vehicles, they said, “Nope! We going with Teslas.”
“The “track” looks about like a typical small-town sidewalk after forty years of wear, subsidence, and tree-root damage, or what you get if you hire a bunch of high-school drop outs out of rehab to pour a sidewalk.”
The article says Musk addressed that, claiming the sidewalk machine was having problems. At this point in time I’m willing to take that at face value. First public demo, remember?
The PM article buries the lede, but at least has it:
Current tunneling technology runs about $2 billion a mile, and even at such cost, you can expect to dig that measly mile in a year. The state of this art is horrendous.
… And by boring and reinforcing the tunnel simultaneously, Musk thinks their custom machine can work 15 times faster than existing boring machines. And do it much cheaper—the 1.14-mile Hawthorne test tunnel cost $10 million.
Although to be fair, the Channel Tunnel is 31.35mi took 6 years to complete and cost 13 billion GBP (2015 numbers), so about 1/2 billion per mile. Understandably Californians may be underwhelmed, considering they are paying $122 million per mile for the high speed train.
What the heck?
OK, I like that it’s for personal cars. I like that a lot. I’m also very willing to give benefit of the doubt on the bumpy issue, because that’s surely easy to remedy in future.
However, the guidewheel concept stinks! The requirement for autonomy and EV does too, just not quite as much due to having at least a plausible reason.
If you’ve got an autonomous vehicle, surely it can guise itself accurately enough (with some help) not to need those. A painted guideline should do it. A further help would be angling the vertical face of the curve about 20 degrees off vertical (away from the car) so that the tires, if they brush it, won’t bind and pull.
To me, this looks all too much like a Tesla gimmick; look at this great new tunnel that’s for Teslas.
On a related note, I’m extremely impressed with the lower cost and higher speed of boring they seem to have achieved. That would be a game-changer.
It has to be electric to avoid CO and CO2 build up in the tunnel.
Regular tunnels somehow manage to avoid EV-only requirements.
I mean, I assume this tunnel must have some kind of active ventilation.
No reason to assume that. It’s a very crude design. It simplifies things if it’s not provided.
Regarding IC engines and ventilation needs, I was thinking of the original concept of electric sleds. The IC engines wouldn’t be a factor, because they would not be running while in the tunnel. This wouldn’t require autonomous vehicles, either.
Elon thought that sleds were weight inefficient when you could use the propulsion of the vehicle itself.
Plus, requiring an electric car to use the system just so happens to increase demand for electric cars, but I’m sure that wasn’t at all a factor in the decision…
“On a related note, I’m extremely impressed with the lower cost and higher speed of boring they seem to have achieved. That would be a game-changer.” This. It doesn’t matter if Elon Musk’s actual plan doesn’t work. The large decrease in the cost of tunneling would be a big deal for everything from sewer lines to subways and everything in between.