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Elon Musk Is Really Boring (bloomberg.com)
Sometimes it is hard to tell if Elon Musk is serious about the things he says. But as for his "boring" claims, that's really happening. In a wide-range interview with Bloomberg, the billionaire talked more about his new venture, The Boring Company. The idea began on a Saturday morning a few weeks ago when Musk tweeted, "Traffic is driving me nuts. Am going to build a tunnel boring machine and just start digging..." Over the course of next few hours later, Musk added, "It shall be called 'The Boring Company,' Boring, it's what we do. I am actually going to do this. Excerpts from the story: And so, around noon on a Friday in January, an excavation crew started digging. "I was like, 'Hey, what's the biggest hole we can make by Sunday evening?'" Musk says. [...] "My other idea was to call it Tunnels R Us and to essentially troll Toys "R" Us into filing a lawsuit," he says, letting out a loud and well-articulated ha-ha-ha-ha. "Now we've decided to troll AT&T instead! We're going to call it American Tubes and Tunnels." When I ask him if the tunnel venture will be a subsidiary of SpaceX or an independent company, he responds cryptically. "Don't you read my Twitter? The Boring Company. Or TBC. To Be Continued." An aide chimes in: Yes, the Boring Company, aka To Be Continued, aka Tunnels R Us, aka American Tubes and Tunnels, aka whatever, will indeed be an independent company. Tunnel technology is older than rockets, and boring speeds are pretty much what they were 50 years ago. Musk says he hopes to build a much faster tunneling machine and use it to dig thousands of miles, eventually creating a vast underground network that includes as many as 30 levels of tunnels for cars and high-speed trains such as the Hyperloop. Musk chose the SpaceX parking lot as the site of his first dig, mostly because it was convenient and he could legally do so without city permits. The plan is to expand the current hole into a ramp designed for a large tunnel boring machine and then start digging horizontally once the machine is 50 feet or so below ground, which would make it low enough to clear gas and sewer lines and to be undetectable at the surface. 100 marks to Bloomberg for the headline, and the story which is as funny as it is insightful.
With Musk the right question is never 'will it work?" but 'will it make any sense factoring in the costs?'
In theory something like the Hyperloop is a great idea. Until you realize that the costs and dangers involved in building a several hundred mile vacuum tube, and keeping it depressurized would cost astronomical amounts of money. The test track the built for the recent pod-competition for hyperloop was less than a mile long and its still the second largest vacuum tube ever built. Took about 30 minutes to depressurize and top speeds were around 60 mph, and that's with them being pushed by an external motor unit, the pods themselves didn't even have functioning engines. The moment the external motor 'released' the pods they pretty much froze, with most of them not even making it across the finish line.
The practical difficulties in doing this on the scale and speeds that the hyperloop project has been painting (600 MPH over a distance of hundreds of miles) are so enormous especially taking into consideration the kind of safety features that'd have to be included that economically speaking the hyperloop is not going to happen in any foreseeable future barring major technological breakthroughs in vacuum technology and structural engineering. The cost-benefit ratio is simply way too poor.
Now theoretically, you can eliminate some of the technical issues such as thermal expansion by by burying the hyperloop underground, but that increases the cost even more.
Agreed. He's an eccentric man with a lot of ideas, some of which turn out to be economically feasible/profitable, while other are not so.
"It is the business of the future to be dangerous" -Alfred North Whitehead
"That is the great thing about having billionaires with the curiosity of engineers."
Yes, but a dose of realism helps. His hyperloop would require the longest tunnel ever built by a significant margin, NASA spec pressure vessels and motors that can function in a vacuum and some as yet undecided method of evacuating people from shuttle in a vacuum. The cost alone will be so astromonically high that not even Musk could afford it on his own. It would in real terms probably be equivalent in cost to the moon landings and for what? Something in theory slightly more energy efficient than an airliner but with far less capacity than a similar air route.
Undetectable at just 50ft? Hardly. there are plenty of cases of people in England loosing their homes down sinkholes that appear after some old, forgotten mine hundreds or even thousands of feet down collapses after centuries.
I find it hard to believe that in California, once you've dug 50 ft down on your own land, absolutely nothing stands in your way (other than geology) to just tunneling wherever and as far as you like.
If I happen to own some land in CA that Musk wants to tunnel under/through, can he really do so without my permission or even knowledge?
for once, I can't tell if the spelling mistake should be corrected by adding an "n" or removing an "o" to "loose".
I don't get it. I see teslas on the road almost daily here in the frozen north. I can only imagine there's more in warmer climes and where there's more luxury cars on the road. They have some of the highest customer satisfaction levels for any car. They flat out outperform the competition in many regards. He built a better mousetrap, but instead of a mousetrap it was a multi billion dollar project to launch some of the most complicated consumer hardware people can purchase into an extremely mature competitive environment.
Whether or not Tesla survives or wins in the car sector, other manufacturers have been forced to respond to the market disruption.
Calling him a failure seems like an ad hominem attack, really.