Not that I approve or disapprove Elon Musk's idea of building tunnels but this blog post seems to dismiss the entire idea just for the sake of being dismissive.
The Boring Company seems to be trying with different thoughts and ideas for making these tunnels a reality and they have been quite open to the public with these ideas. It feels to me that the author is taking advantage of this transparency and using it as a weapon for his own agenda.
The entire "demo" was a proof-of-concept that they can use as a model in order to see if it works or not, there is nothing wrong with it. It's not like they will be deploying the current idea to the general public of LA starting tomorrow.
> Some experts questioned whether the Boring Company had even succeeded at improving the cost of tunnel boring. Right now, it’s not altogether clear that it did.
Well, they are still developing the technology, aren't they?
> But this design creates congestion at the front end while promising to relieve it on the journey. Drivers will need to line up to wait their turn on the elevator.
The idea he presented in the press conference is that the tunnels would complement the current highways and public transportation system, it wouldn't be a full replacement for those.
Adding new lanes is incredibly difficult because it would require road work, blocking the entire road to traffic, and also because you are physically limited to the number of lanes that you can possibly add to the road.
The idea of tunnels is supposed to work around these limitations.
Indeed, the anti-musk meme around here is weird. The guy is making an effort to make the world better, and he's spending large amounts of his own money to do it. He's built several multi-billion dollar companies, so he's clearly not an idiot.
It's weird that after succeeding at creating two companies that tons of people predicted would fail at every turn people don't give him a little more benefit of the doubt than this.
What was the "proof of concept"? When Boring was first unveiled, it was sold not as a tunnel for cars to drive through, but a system that included "electric skates" and subway-car-like pods: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=u5V_VzRrSBI
I doubt Boring would have gotten much hype at all if Musk had admitted up front that it'd be little different than an underground highway, something which people have been using for decades.
Furthermore, complaining about front-loading congestion shows just how little the author understands about this subject. Front-loading congestion improves the rate of flow and improving the rate of flow improves overall throughput. Metered access to freeways is but one example - it doesn't completely solve congestion issues, but it is rather effective at preventing freeway traffic from coming to a standstill.
I really don't understand all the cynicism around this. It's a prototype of a bold idea, in all likelihood it will fail (like most bold new ideas), but at least they're trying something new. That's how change happens, through trial and error, not through foolproof, perfectly executed plans. For better or for worse, Elon Musk has a track record of taking difficult ideas and beating all odds to make them a reality.
If you wanna call out Elon Musk for something, call him out for his abusive management practices and erratic/abusive behavior on twitter. Calling him out for trying out bold ideas (with all the trial and error that entails) is really petty and counterproductive.
>I really don't understand all the cynicism around this. It's a prototype of a bold idea, [...]
Well, because it isn't. Tunnel boring is an established industry, it's just a new topic on HN, and apparently for Musk. People don't call him out for being bold, they are calling him out for doing bad and falling over his own hubris.
It's utter crap. It's not "affordable mass transit". It doesn't even attempt to approach the advertised speeds. It has no real ingress and egress plans for vehicles nor does it take into account congestion in the tunnel.
The whole thing is needless grandstanding around a poorly built tunnel that doesn't even fulfill 1/10th of its promises. This is why I'm cynical, and why I'm sure others are too.
> It's a prototype of a bold idea, in all likelihood it will fail (like most bold new ideas), but at least they're trying something new.
I'm fairly certain that a "tunnel [...] network that will be filled with self-driving cars that will race people in groups" has existed for quite some time in the form of subways.
If Musk really wanted to help, he could leverage this to improve and extend the current LA subway system, but he isn't. Instead he's going down the unnecessary (and probably fruitless) route of making this into a marketing campaign for the Elon Musk persona.
Compare to the trapped Thai soccer team from earlier in the year. He could have worked _with_ the existing efforts, but instead chose to do his own thing.
My issue with tunneling is that we're already failing at it. In Seattle our new tunnel is 3 years behind schedule.
The problem with infrastructure isn't coming up with crazy new ideas (like "skates"), or being able to use hot new technology (like fully-electric TBMs). Execution in the real world is entirely the trouble we have with existing solutions. It looks like he's trying to iterate on the parts of the problem we've solved already, and ignoring the parts of the problem that we don't know how to fix.
What happens when it hits a steel pipe or a giant boulder and gets stuck for a year? What happens when these tunnels cause unexpected sinkholes, and the governor orders a halt for more ground studies? What happens when you discover 500 leaks a couple years after opening? These really happened in Seattle and Boston.
The Boring Company's webpage doesn't mention the possibility of any such issues, but they're not the kind that are solved by changing methods. We already have the "error". Now we need "trials" that address these errors.
It's a utility tunnel. That's been done before, for much cheaper than the $10m/mile that BoringCo spent (not including R&D, capex, or all the other costs that other boring projects include in their totals).
For better or for worse, Elon Musk has a track record of taking difficult ideas and beating all odds to make them a reality.
Citation needed. I give SpaceX credit for doing things no private company has done before, but the executive in charge of that is Gwynne Shotwell, it's COO. SpaceX accomplished nothing before she took over.
If you wanna call out Elon Musk for something, call him out for his abusive management practices and erratic/abusive behavior on twitter.
Agreed. Him forcing 100-hour weeks on SpaceX employees over Shotwell's recommendations has torpedoed their ability to hire experienced engineers.
Calling him out for trying out bold ideas (with all the trial and error that entails) is really petty and counterproductive.
People would love for Musk to try out bold ideas. The problem is that Musk is not trying out bold ideas. He's just doing things that have been done before, but with worse execution and 1000x better marketing.
I would love to see this project succeed, but it seems to me that a combination of European and Asian style hi-speed trains (TGV, ICE, Shinkansen etc) with massive tunnel projects like [1] are the way to go here.
There is a fatalism mentality when it comes to writing about big technology ambitions like this. Maybe people are just jaded and used to being let down so much. There is zero doubt in my mind that this endeavor will cost more than expected, take longer than expected, etc... but at the end of the day the effort alone is going to spur other tunneling companies to push for innovations as well. Who knows if any of these early prototypes prove useful, but it sure is clear that Elon sees a lot of room for improvement in the technology, and at this point I wouldn't bet against that.
There's fatalism about this because Elon hasn't actually proposed anything innovative. Literally everything Elon has said he wants his boring machine to do, other boring machine companies have already been doing for 2 or 3 decades.
The only remotely "innovative" thing that Elon has suggested is recovering the boring machine after tunnel digging. Even this isn't innovative--the reason most boring machines aren't recovered is because it would cost too much to extract them from the surface. Elon's proposed method of extraction (digging down from the surface) is the method the industry already uses in those situations where it is cost-effective to recover the machine.
The boring machines that BoringCo is using are used boring machines that were recovered using the "innovative" method that Elon proposed. It was cost effective to do so because they're relatively tiny, as far as boring machines go.
I don't understand why Musk is so invested in the idea of cars in tunnels. Does he really have a substantially better tunnel boring machine/tunnel boring workflow? If so, there are lots of things to use it for other than car tunnels. It's kind of like if he started making electric cars and then said, "I am launching the world's first all-electric pizza delivery service."
The O'Hare airport connector in Chicago is a better example of what cheap, fast tunneling could be used for than the car skate mechanism. This article points out how remarkable it would be if things go according to plan:
https://www.citylab.com/transportation/2018/06/for-1-billion...
I think his primary interest is around tunneling technology. If one follows his thoughts on developing extraterrestrial settlements, the need for experience in development of underground tunnels becomes obvious. That would be the best bet for inter-settlement transport infrastructure given the hazardous conditions anywhere outside our planet. From this prospective, the current project - the improvement of LA or whatever, is just an intermediary goal.
It seems like we don't need a "revolution" in tunneling costs, even a 30% reduction would be material. The incumbents here have grown fat (like ULA in rockets) on cost plus contracts, it is not like going up against General Motors, Toyota, etc. where is really competitive.
Even if the technology only works in favorable ground (can't choose exactly where it goes), ultra-low-cost tunnels could be good for other uses such as storing parked cars. Los Angeles gets around a cubic kilometer of rainfall a year and if they just had a place to store it, they would not need to import water at all.
> Los Angeles gets around a cubic kilometer of rainfall a year and if they just had a place to store it, they would not need to import water at all.
Now that's a bold idea but storing one cubic kilometer of water in an artificial reservoir seems rather complicated and I'm not really sure the technology developed by the Boring company would help greatly.
If I'm not mistaken and given a diameter of 3.8m you'd need 87 thousand kilometers of tunnels to store one cubic kilometer of water. You could circle the world more than two times with a tunnel that length.
I never found the idea compelling because all the distances spoken of were so short that getting to and getting out would eat much of the time saved.
that and this example is a paltry little tunnel in no way useful without the required safety of a parallel tunnel and such.
the real game changer going forward is still autonomous vehicles. combined with EV technology they will disrupt both the automotive industry on a scale many do not fully imagine as well as public transport and providing freedom for people to live further apart. it will give even more people the freedom of travel
Obviously Elon likes publicity stunts like this, and the current prototype is very far off from something that can compete with traditional subways, but it's not obvious to me the idea of many "dumb" tunnels with many small to medium-sized autonomous vehicles is a bad idea.
Subways are kind of like circuit switched networks (more raw capacity), this is more like a packet switched network (more flexibility/overall efficiency). And with cheap enough tunneling it becomes horizontally scalable.
Hmm gotta agree with the authors that it pretty much looks like a subway without the actual efficiency of one. Purely from layman's perspective it doesn't seem plausible that subway could be replaced with a tunnel full of people driving their own cars. The space, the logistics, the everything. Subways and their tunnels are very much utilized to their maximum, could a tunnel full of separate cars have the same throughput of people? I'd say it's highly improbable.
But, as the article mentions Boring Company seems pivoting more to "a tunnel for rich people to drive in". That seems like a more plausible use-case. Or well just build a subway. And as another perspective as European, public transportation is pretty cool also. No need for expensive tunnels. Would probably help with the congestion too although it seems like a lost cause in the US.
How many cities in the U.S. would actually benefit from a Subway system? The density of most U.S. cities isn't high enough to support NYC or DC style metros. It's completely unrealistic to expect cities to invest in them when people are already spread out over mass expanses of suburbia. Face it, America was built around the car. Most of our cities developed long after the car was already a staple. Building tunnels for cars, to solve traffic, is very smart. There are many cities where there's little room to expand highways. A tunnel network that avoids a lot of the exhaust problems (due to restricting traffic to electric vehicles) would encourage the adoption of electric vehicles, would relieve traffic on main highways, and would be practical for most cities, without the maintenance costs of a Subway system.
I give Musk credit for at least mostly/nearly meeting his previously tweeted deadline of Dec. 10. Being sincere here, because I thought it likely it'd end up as late/unfulfilled as his estimates about self-driving, albeit tunneling is a safer goal than self-driving.
I think the author mostly makes a compelling case (especially the point about how it's effectively a subway but less efficient and for rich people) but I don't get this particular point:
>L.A.’s highways are congested. Simply putting new ones underground doesn’t really solve this problem.
I mean, more capacity should mean less congestion, shouldn't it?
>Drivers will need to line up to wait their turn on the elevator. If the tunnels were really able to deliver lightning fast commutes across Los Angeles, demand would likely be quite high.
That also doesn't make sense to me. The tunnel will be unsuccessful because it'll be too successful? People won't want to use the tunnel because too many people will use the tunnel? If Musk reaches that point he'll probably already have won.
> I mean, more capacity should mean less congestion, shouldn't it?
Somewhat counter-intuitively, the answer to that is often "no", due to induced demand[1].
> That also doesn't make sense to me. The tunnel will be unsuccessful because it'll be too successful? People won't want to use the tunnel because too many people will use the tunnel? If Musk reaches that point he'll probably already have won.
I think the point being made here is that ingress/egress imposes such a significant bottleneck that total throughput will still be low, and very few people would actually be able to benefit.
Just let the man build some tunnels.
Also, just because the demo shows a Tesla model X doesn't mean that other services like the pods are discluded, as the article states. It's simply a matter getting some 7+ seat cars and stuffing a bunch of people in them.
"A full build out of the concept could end up being a private uncontested highway system mirroring the congested public one for use only by a very rich few."
That was exactly my thought when I read about the test. I have a hard time seeing how this can scale in capacity. But getting himself out of the gridlock...now that's...something at least. Speed similar to a helicopter ride above the traffic without all the hassle of getting on and off and finding a place to land.
Yes, I think this is what people defending Elon and other would-be disruptors neglect. The criticism isn't just that certain attempts at innovation are stupid or likely to fail, but that they betray the privilege or insular perspective of the innovator.
Even if the tunnels were significantly cheaper than building new freeway lanes, a tunnel is a single lane, with single entry and exits. Ingress and egress overwhelm any gains from potential speed improvements in the tunnel.
Besides this, it doesn't matter how much improvement in traffic capacity is gained from tunnels, or lanes. Induced demand always renders improvements in capacity moot over the longer term.
Since this is the second hit piece on Elon today added to the HN frontpage I am really curious about something.
What on Earth did Elon do to attract the ire of the far left? Because obviously both articles were written by people who are evidently into far left ideology according to their Twitter feeds.
I suppose everybody else either don't really give a crap about his experiments or think they are useless but pretty cool (hello, personal flamethrower), across these circles SpaceX is considered to be pretty rad, and while Tesla might not be perfect I'm pretty sure they are one of the trailblazers towards a future of self driving electric cars.
So can anyone explain to me - and I mean this genuinely - why the raging hate from this particular part of the ideological spectrum?
Yes. Boringco's final cost per person and km isn't known yet, but it's not obviously a major win compared to good current practice, such as what you can read about here: https://tunnelbuilder.com/metrosur/edition2pdf/page2.pdf
From memory, the important points:
1. They want to have the drill work continuously. Apparently current technology winds up drilling less than half the time, partially because the drills stop when putting in the wall sections that make up the tunnel.
2. Switch the drill and the waste train (that takes the dirt from the drill) to electric using batteries that the train brings in. This reduces the construction of pipes and infrastructure in the tunnel during construction.
3. Work to speed up the drill head by using the materials scientists from SpaceX.
4. Make bricks out of the waster material on-site. Right now disposing of the waste material is a big headache/cost.
The real joke is people who can't recognize how early stages of development look like. That's because the details are usually hidden from view by business people who insist it is embarassing. It is not. This is how real world r&d looks like.
[+] [-] sweden|7 years ago|reply
The Boring Company seems to be trying with different thoughts and ideas for making these tunnels a reality and they have been quite open to the public with these ideas. It feels to me that the author is taking advantage of this transparency and using it as a weapon for his own agenda.
The entire "demo" was a proof-of-concept that they can use as a model in order to see if it works or not, there is nothing wrong with it. It's not like they will be deploying the current idea to the general public of LA starting tomorrow.
> Some experts questioned whether the Boring Company had even succeeded at improving the cost of tunnel boring. Right now, it’s not altogether clear that it did.
Well, they are still developing the technology, aren't they?
> But this design creates congestion at the front end while promising to relieve it on the journey. Drivers will need to line up to wait their turn on the elevator.
The idea he presented in the press conference is that the tunnels would complement the current highways and public transportation system, it wouldn't be a full replacement for those.
Adding new lanes is incredibly difficult because it would require road work, blocking the entire road to traffic, and also because you are physically limited to the number of lanes that you can possibly add to the road.
The idea of tunnels is supposed to work around these limitations.
[+] [-] darawk|7 years ago|reply
It's weird that after succeeding at creating two companies that tons of people predicted would fail at every turn people don't give him a little more benefit of the doubt than this.
[+] [-] danso|7 years ago|reply
I doubt Boring would have gotten much hype at all if Musk had admitted up front that it'd be little different than an underground highway, something which people have been using for decades.
[+] [-] mhermher|7 years ago|reply
What did we see besides a bunch of smoke and mirrors?
This is a solved problem. The obstacles to better public transit are political and economic, not technological.
[+] [-] solatic|7 years ago|reply
[+] [-] dahfizz|7 years ago|reply
[+] [-] satiani|7 years ago|reply
If you wanna call out Elon Musk for something, call him out for his abusive management practices and erratic/abusive behavior on twitter. Calling him out for trying out bold ideas (with all the trial and error that entails) is really petty and counterproductive.
[+] [-] bildung|7 years ago|reply
Well, because it isn't. Tunnel boring is an established industry, it's just a new topic on HN, and apparently for Musk. People don't call him out for being bold, they are calling him out for doing bad and falling over his own hubris.
[+] [-] wcarron|7 years ago|reply
It's utter crap. It's not "affordable mass transit". It doesn't even attempt to approach the advertised speeds. It has no real ingress and egress plans for vehicles nor does it take into account congestion in the tunnel.
The whole thing is needless grandstanding around a poorly built tunnel that doesn't even fulfill 1/10th of its promises. This is why I'm cynical, and why I'm sure others are too.
[+] [-] ysavir|7 years ago|reply
I'm fairly certain that a "tunnel [...] network that will be filled with self-driving cars that will race people in groups" has existed for quite some time in the form of subways.
If Musk really wanted to help, he could leverage this to improve and extend the current LA subway system, but he isn't. Instead he's going down the unnecessary (and probably fruitless) route of making this into a marketing campaign for the Elon Musk persona.
Compare to the trapped Thai soccer team from earlier in the year. He could have worked _with_ the existing efforts, but instead chose to do his own thing.
[+] [-] ken|7 years ago|reply
The problem with infrastructure isn't coming up with crazy new ideas (like "skates"), or being able to use hot new technology (like fully-electric TBMs). Execution in the real world is entirely the trouble we have with existing solutions. It looks like he's trying to iterate on the parts of the problem we've solved already, and ignoring the parts of the problem that we don't know how to fix.
What happens when it hits a steel pipe or a giant boulder and gets stuck for a year? What happens when these tunnels cause unexpected sinkholes, and the governor orders a halt for more ground studies? What happens when you discover 500 leaks a couple years after opening? These really happened in Seattle and Boston.
The Boring Company's webpage doesn't mention the possibility of any such issues, but they're not the kind that are solved by changing methods. We already have the "error". Now we need "trials" that address these errors.
[+] [-] gamblor956|7 years ago|reply
It's a utility tunnel. That's been done before, for much cheaper than the $10m/mile that BoringCo spent (not including R&D, capex, or all the other costs that other boring projects include in their totals).
For better or for worse, Elon Musk has a track record of taking difficult ideas and beating all odds to make them a reality.
Citation needed. I give SpaceX credit for doing things no private company has done before, but the executive in charge of that is Gwynne Shotwell, it's COO. SpaceX accomplished nothing before she took over.
If you wanna call out Elon Musk for something, call him out for his abusive management practices and erratic/abusive behavior on twitter.
Agreed. Him forcing 100-hour weeks on SpaceX employees over Shotwell's recommendations has torpedoed their ability to hire experienced engineers.
Calling him out for trying out bold ideas (with all the trial and error that entails) is really petty and counterproductive.
People would love for Musk to try out bold ideas. The problem is that Musk is not trying out bold ideas. He's just doing things that have been done before, but with worse execution and 1000x better marketing.
[+] [-] donquichotte|7 years ago|reply
[1] https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gotthard_Base_Tunnel
[+] [-] Antonio123123|7 years ago|reply
[+] [-] pseudometa|7 years ago|reply
[+] [-] gamblor956|7 years ago|reply
The only remotely "innovative" thing that Elon has suggested is recovering the boring machine after tunnel digging. Even this isn't innovative--the reason most boring machines aren't recovered is because it would cost too much to extract them from the surface. Elon's proposed method of extraction (digging down from the surface) is the method the industry already uses in those situations where it is cost-effective to recover the machine.
The boring machines that BoringCo is using are used boring machines that were recovered using the "innovative" method that Elon proposed. It was cost effective to do so because they're relatively tiny, as far as boring machines go.
[+] [-] lewis500|7 years ago|reply
The O'Hare airport connector in Chicago is a better example of what cheap, fast tunneling could be used for than the car skate mechanism. This article points out how remarkable it would be if things go according to plan: https://www.citylab.com/transportation/2018/06/for-1-billion...
[+] [-] userulluipeste|7 years ago|reply
[+] [-] PaulHoule|7 years ago|reply
It seems like we don't need a "revolution" in tunneling costs, even a 30% reduction would be material. The incumbents here have grown fat (like ULA in rockets) on cost plus contracts, it is not like going up against General Motors, Toyota, etc. where is really competitive.
Even if the technology only works in favorable ground (can't choose exactly where it goes), ultra-low-cost tunnels could be good for other uses such as storing parked cars. Los Angeles gets around a cubic kilometer of rainfall a year and if they just had a place to store it, they would not need to import water at all.
[+] [-] simias|7 years ago|reply
Now that's a bold idea but storing one cubic kilometer of water in an artificial reservoir seems rather complicated and I'm not really sure the technology developed by the Boring company would help greatly.
If I'm not mistaken and given a diameter of 3.8m you'd need 87 thousand kilometers of tunnels to store one cubic kilometer of water. You could circle the world more than two times with a tunnel that length.
[+] [-] jonathankoren|7 years ago|reply
He used an existing used machine.
It took him 18 months to go 6000 feet, a distance the established tunnelers do in 8.
He said it cost $10 million, but that’s really unclear if that’s accurate given how SpaceX was heavily involved.
There’s literally nothing new here except for a hole in the ground.
[+] [-] Shivetya|7 years ago|reply
that and this example is a paltry little tunnel in no way useful without the required safety of a parallel tunnel and such.
the real game changer going forward is still autonomous vehicles. combined with EV technology they will disrupt both the automotive industry on a scale many do not fully imagine as well as public transport and providing freedom for people to live further apart. it will give even more people the freedom of travel
[+] [-] notable_user|7 years ago|reply
And Boring Company plans on using parallel tunnels, for safety and for increased capacity (two directions of travel).
[+] [-] tlrobinson|7 years ago|reply
Subways are kind of like circuit switched networks (more raw capacity), this is more like a packet switched network (more flexibility/overall efficiency). And with cheap enough tunneling it becomes horizontally scalable.
[+] [-] tekkk|7 years ago|reply
But, as the article mentions Boring Company seems pivoting more to "a tunnel for rich people to drive in". That seems like a more plausible use-case. Or well just build a subway. And as another perspective as European, public transportation is pretty cool also. No need for expensive tunnels. Would probably help with the congestion too although it seems like a lost cause in the US.
[+] [-] chrisco255|7 years ago|reply
[+] [-] danso|7 years ago|reply
[0] https://twitter.com/elonmusk/status/1054164543922823168?lang...
[+] [-] simias|7 years ago|reply
>L.A.’s highways are congested. Simply putting new ones underground doesn’t really solve this problem.
I mean, more capacity should mean less congestion, shouldn't it?
>Drivers will need to line up to wait their turn on the elevator. If the tunnels were really able to deliver lightning fast commutes across Los Angeles, demand would likely be quite high.
That also doesn't make sense to me. The tunnel will be unsuccessful because it'll be too successful? People won't want to use the tunnel because too many people will use the tunnel? If Musk reaches that point he'll probably already have won.
[+] [-] alexhutcheson|7 years ago|reply
Somewhat counter-intuitively, the answer to that is often "no", due to induced demand[1].
> That also doesn't make sense to me. The tunnel will be unsuccessful because it'll be too successful? People won't want to use the tunnel because too many people will use the tunnel? If Musk reaches that point he'll probably already have won.
I think the point being made here is that ingress/egress imposes such a significant bottleneck that total throughput will still be low, and very few people would actually be able to benefit.
[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Induced_demand
[+] [-] vegetish|7 years ago|reply
[+] [-] dleslie|7 years ago|reply
The author missed a solid opportunity to make a Stonecutters joke.
[+] [-] lawlessone|7 years ago|reply
[+] [-] mpweiher|7 years ago|reply
That was exactly my thought when I read about the test. I have a hard time seeing how this can scale in capacity. But getting himself out of the gridlock...now that's...something at least. Speed similar to a helicopter ride above the traffic without all the hassle of getting on and off and finding a place to land.
Not sure it's a good thing.
[+] [-] Buldak|7 years ago|reply
[+] [-] anonymfus|7 years ago|reply
[+] [-] creeble|7 years ago|reply
Even if the tunnels were significantly cheaper than building new freeway lanes, a tunnel is a single lane, with single entry and exits. Ingress and egress overwhelm any gains from potential speed improvements in the tunnel.
Besides this, it doesn't matter how much improvement in traffic capacity is gained from tunnels, or lanes. Induced demand always renders improvements in capacity moot over the longer term.
[+] [-] mindcrash|7 years ago|reply
What on Earth did Elon do to attract the ire of the far left? Because obviously both articles were written by people who are evidently into far left ideology according to their Twitter feeds.
I suppose everybody else either don't really give a crap about his experiments or think they are useless but pretty cool (hello, personal flamethrower), across these circles SpaceX is considered to be pretty rad, and while Tesla might not be perfect I'm pretty sure they are one of the trailblazers towards a future of self driving electric cars.
So can anyone explain to me - and I mean this genuinely - why the raging hate from this particular part of the ideological spectrum?
Thanks.
[+] [-] celerrimus|7 years ago|reply
Real breakthrough!!
[+] [-] DanCarvajal|7 years ago|reply
[+] [-] bryanlarsen|7 years ago|reply
The innovation is the assertion that such small tunnels are sufficient and safe for mass transit.
[+] [-] Arnt|7 years ago|reply
[+] [-] larkost|7 years ago|reply
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=AwX9G38vdCE
From memory, the important points: 1. They want to have the drill work continuously. Apparently current technology winds up drilling less than half the time, partially because the drills stop when putting in the wall sections that make up the tunnel. 2. Switch the drill and the waste train (that takes the dirt from the drill) to electric using batteries that the train brings in. This reduces the construction of pipes and infrastructure in the tunnel during construction. 3. Work to speed up the drill head by using the materials scientists from SpaceX. 4. Make bricks out of the waster material on-site. Right now disposing of the waste material is a big headache/cost.
[+] [-] lmilcin|7 years ago|reply