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Why Elon Musk Doesn't Like Flying Cars (yahoo.com)
boley1 quotes Business Insider:
According to Elon Musk, the main challenges with flying cars are that they'll be noisy and generate lots of wind because of the downward force required to keep them in the air. Plus, there's an anxiety factor. "Let's just say if something is flying over your head...that is not an anxiety-reducing situation," he said. "You don't think to yourself 'Well, I feel better about today. You're thinking 'Is it going to come off and guillotine me as it comes flying past?'"
He also doesn't like them because his company, The Boring Company, wants to provide a competing transportation solution.
He also doesn't like them because people will report on that, and then people will talk about his boring company. It's extremely profitable dislike.
On the other hand, I agree with him. Adding more air traffic is inefficient at best.
On the third hand, there's probably plenty of places where tunnels won't work. That's not a reason not to build tunnels where they will work, but we still need something which handles those situations. I still like elevated PRT.
"You're right," Fisheye says. "I should have set it on 'whip' or 'chop.'"
One can hear a helicopter kilometers away. Now imagine having thousands of those in the air all the time. Unbearable unless they first pass a law to surgically make us deaf. Then it's OK.
they can barely keep out of collisions on the ground, which covers left, right, forward and backwards, if they get the added complications of up and down and crash landings from up high it will only cause more death and destruction on top of the messes the typical driver does already
Politics is Treachery, Religion is Brainwashing
If flying cars are available the defenses will be useless.
They already are, if that's what you mean by useless. It's already possible to practice flying in simulation, then get some manuals and learn how to actually start up a plane, then stroll onto an airfield someplace and steal one since so many of them have basically no security.
You won't be allowed to control a flying taxi manually, and they will be totally dependent on their computers to fly so you're not going to be trivially overriding them from inside the cockpit.
"You're right," Fisheye says. "I should have set it on 'whip' or 'chop.'"
What brand of toilet paper Elon uses should make front page of Slashdot.
Most airplanes are circumscribed to landing and taking off in special areas called airports and their use is highly regulated. That diminishes somewhat the worries people have of seeing their neighbors (who they've seen driving into trees and parked cars) attempting to master flight.
Democracy is a sheep and two wolves deciding what to have for lunch. Freedom is a well armed sheep contesting the issue
He does have a point in that anything owned and operated by the general public tends to be maintained to a lower standard than anything owned and operated in an industry which has rigorous maintenance standards and penalties for not following them, such as the airline industry...
Even with private aircraft and pilots, the pre-flight walk rounds can take more time than the flight - precisely because it is necessary to ensure some level of safety.
That is what terrifies me about the flying car concept - all the ideas are around private ownership and operation. Knowing that some people in the UK are more than willing to not maintain their cars to the level of passing a £35 governmental standard test (the MOT, once a year) and instead drive potentially unsafe cars around illegally, I don't want that situation when those cars take to the air...
Cars don't typically travel far so it would not be efficient to gain altitude.
Shoeless bandit was a teenage kid who stole several planes without any pilot training.
Yes, because when people talk about flying cars, they totally mean manual piloting.
Um...
"He's a liar whose lawyer is lying about his lying lawyer's lies."
He does have a point in that anything owned and operated by the general public tends to be maintained to a lower standard than anything owned and operated in an industry which has rigorous maintenance standards and penalties for not following them, such as the airline industry...
Nobody is trying to sell flying cars to the mass public- yet? I hope not, too. The flying cars which will actually be overhead any time soon will all belong to corporations, possibly the ride"sharing" companies, maybe taxi companies. Maybe Google, or Amazon, who knows.
Even with private aircraft and pilots, the pre-flight walk rounds can take more time than the flight - precisely because it is necessary to ensure some level of safety.
Well, it's going to be a whole lot less necessary with aircraft which resemble nothing so much as a scaled up R/C quadcopter. Presumably most of them will be at least octocopters, with at least one design which is supposedly going to be in the air immediately using a four-boom octo design. They're all solid state and have only a handful of moving parts, and wear of bearings can be measured using microphones. Batteries will be continually monitored (as in, 24x7x365) and evaluated by software so that their condition is always known. Any component which seems the least bit iffy will be swapped out (trivially) so that the aircraft can be restored to service.
I still don't look forward to seeing them overhead, I think that there are better solutions. But maintenance is actually the least of my concerns. I'm more worried about allowed areas, flight paths, fundamental hardware and software design issues, etc. The hardware is actually pretty simple, but that doesn't mean people won't get it wrong. The software is not simple, and there's lots of room to botch it.
"You're right," Fisheye says. "I should have set it on 'whip' or 'chop.'"
So your concept is that something statistically likely to crash and injure people would be approved by regulators, rather than manufacturers being forced to prove reliability in real-world usage conditions before being granted approval?
"He's a liar whose lawyer is lying about his lying lawyer's lies."
The assumptions involved in your post:
1) Flying cars would be allowed to just take off and land wherever they want.
They wouldn't be all that useful if they weren't allowed to take off and land from vastly more locations than airplanes currently are.
If flying cars are available the defenses will be useless.
Naw, the flying cars won't work well enough to be a security problem.
Seriously, You're absolutely correct. I expect that once the problem becomes apparent, the use of Personal Air Vehicles will be SEVERELY restricted. Might still be some usage for taxis and delivery services -- if the vehicles can be made safe enough, if they can't land on people, and can really be kept out of restricted areas including military bases, public areas, parks, etc, etc, etc.
You can't see ANYTHING from a car, You've got to get out of the goddamned contraption and walk...Edward Abbey
And property values in the flight paths of airports tend to suggest that people very much dislike close proximity to operating aircraft. Airports tend to have enough clout to avoid being shoved out into the sticks entirely(though getting an expansion to an existing airport can be deeply fraught); but selling people on "helipads on every street corner"? Have fun with that.
... it is just a matter of time before someone ships himself instead of 100kg of Amazon purchases.
My fear would be 16 year old neighbor getting his flying car permit, I see Elon's point. Howeve,r a personal drone that appears to be as safe as some of these self driving cars are on the way to becoming would get people over the fear factor.
As for the noise, at least it will be short lived, unlike the neighbor's lawn mower that I'm listening to now.
The problem with flying cars is... well they are flying. Which means they are in the air over our heads all the time. When a normal car malfunctions it is only traveling in two dimensial space and on a designated road, which means the damage is minimal given the cirumstances. When a flying car malfunctions he will not only crash into other flying cars in the same two dimensial space he will also fall in the third dimension and on other flying cars below him creating a cascading disaster and they will fall onto buildings, bridges, schools, stadiums e.t.c.
The only way flying cars will be a reality is that if they are treated exactly like airplanes, with all the pilot training, monitoring and security measures that comes with that or they will have their own "sky roads" which they follow, but in that case the point of flying cars are greatly reduced.
The real reason Elon Musk wouldn't want flying cars is because his [SECRET!] boyfriend Jeff Bezos would actually have to fly the car due to FAA regulations.
The real reason is because Elon is boring.
The assumption is that if flying cars were common, there would be vastly more locations. As they basically function like helicopters (in most conceptions - VTOL), they need only something equivalent to a helipad, not an airport. Which is much cheaper and smaller footprint than an airport.
To get to the point of allowing takeoff and landing from, say, a driveway, you'd have to have a long track record of excellent proven safety, and levels of noise reduction that current technology doesn't yet support. It's certainly conceivable in the future, but is anything but a first step for companies working on flying cars today.
I personally view flying cars as pretty much inevitable (although not around the corner) regardless of whether or not they're pursued directly at present. Namely because of delivery drones. Businesses are not going to stop pushing for them because there's such an economic case for them (not having to drive a big truck around city streets, pairing trucks with drones to not have to go down each sidestreet or stop at each location, etc), and they'll advance the technology as needed to get approval - starting small. But economics will continually push them toward making larger and larger models, and the technology to get approval for those. And eventually you'll have models large enough to carry people around, wherein the question will inherently arise, "Why, exactly, aren't they carrying people?"
"He's a liar whose lawyer is lying about his lying lawyer's lies."
I am a major skeptic about the whole flying-car idea. For many reasons, but not the same reasons as Musk.
Here, I am disagreeing with one of Musk's points out of technical nit-pickery, but I DO agree with his overall conclusion that flying cars are not the right answer to personal transportation.
I agree they will be noisy. That will never be fully solved. (And expensive and unsafe, but that's off topic.)
But, Musk's wind objection -- I just don't buy it.
Yes, aircraft generate lift by displacing air downwards. Some inclined plane (either the wings, or the rotor blades) deflects air downwards, creating an equal and opposite force upwards. So yes, all flying machines "create downward wind". Some do it highly efficiently (at optimum cruising speed, a typical fixed-wing plane or even to a lesser extent a helicopter). Some do it a little less efficiently (a fixed wing plane at very low airspeed), and some do it horribly inefficiently (a helicopter or drone hovering).
The efficiency is largely a function of the craft's forward speed through the air, for a very basic Newtonian reason. F = ma.
The upward FORCE (which must counterbalance the aircraft's weight) must be matched by downwards ACCELERATION of some MASS of air. Acceleration is not velocity, it is rate of change of velocity. Therefore, lift comes from the act of imparting new or increased downward velocity on some mass of air. Absolute velocity doesn't help, only increase in velocity. Hold that thought, we'll get back to it.
An aircraft moving forward horizontally encounters a steady supply of new air that does not yet have any vertical velocity. OTOH, once an aircraft that is hovering, has imparted downward velocity on a column of air, it remains within that accelerated column as it tries to accelerate more mass downwards. The established downward velocity of the air doesn't help, only the acceleration (increase) in downward velocity of some part of that air. To solidify this concept, think of "swimming up a waterfall".
Hopefully this illustrates why hovering is highly inefficient, and cruising is much more efficient.
Enter simple economics. Any economically VIABLE system of flying vehicles spends the minimum time hovering and the maximum time cruising. This is the reason helicopters are used only for specialized tasks or by rich people, while fixed wing planes are used for general transportation. While I don't personally believe that flying cars will take off (bad pun semi-intended), if they do, simple economics dictate that they won't spend much time milling around close to their terminals hovering. They will rapidly get a move on along their course. Once they are moving en-route, their "downward wind" is over such a dispersed area that is is essentially immeasurable.
I don't know what exact means they'll use to transition from takeoff to cruise -- rotors, fixed wings, adjustable wings, whatever -- but they won't be concentrating their "downward wind" in one small place for very long. If one's vision of personal air transportation involves any significant time hovering close to the terminal, then economics dictate that it won't succeed. And downward wind during cruise is simply not a problem.
There will be some localized wind right at the terminals, but if you've ever stood nearby when a helicopter takes off, you know that it is windy very strong but very localized, and does not persist long after the helicopter moves away.
>> because of the downward force required to keep them in the air
huh! Author must be living in alternate universe...
4wdloop
The bigger question is why we have to move around so much. Why does ever journey in modern suburban life require driving? I live in a city, and can walk to restaurants, walk to work, walk to the supermarket. I accept this is not for everyone, but suburban life sits at the other end, where getting a pint of milk requires driving. Add in congestion and parking issues and it is like a real-life rube-goldberg machine for living.
Stop this obsession with single use planning zones, and the need for humans to turn up in person everywhere and much of these problems can be fixed. It's not like we fixed the time it takes to deliver mail by having a fleet of hypersonic aircraft that can deliver letters anywhere in the world in less than an hour. We just used different technological solutions instead and got far better results. Similarly, the solution to traffic congestion is to stop this ridiculous need for the inhabitants of a city to shuffle back and forth between two areas everyday. The original argument for single use planning was that it would improve quality of life. It evidently does not, because the highest real estate prices now are for quality housing in dense urban areas where people can walk around their local communities.
The fuel usage on a single person "flying car" needed to keep it off the ground is just absurd. Fighting gravity when there isn't any real need just doesn't make sense.
Alternating Current (AC) is a vile technology created by our competitor Westinghouse who has no moral compunction regarding its effects which everyone knows will curdle the milk in your cows, deflower your virgin daughters, make your polarized neutrons be little bitches and cause Furries to be less furrier. You have been warned (yay FUD).
Faith: Belief in Truth. Superstition: Belief in Falsehood.
I know of nothing on the horizon concerning anti gravity research so IMHO there is no real progress on a personal-fly-from-home. Noise, air disturbances, broken windows from flying objects, all this is what flying cars would be all about if they ever get built. Physics sometimes is a wet blanket.
Ehm, how is a "flying car" - which, in the current incarnations that actually are able to fly, really means a roadable airplane, including the requirements to have a pilot license and flight training - different from renting/stealing a Cessna from the nearest general aviation airport and smashing it somewhere?
The entire point of the IS calling for use of cars was because *anyone* can drive one and they are trivial to obtain. Neither of which is true when it comes to anything flying.
I somehow don't see this happening again since 9/11 - could that be because it is simply too complex, costly, risky and inefficient at actually causing mayhem?
But the terrorism bogeyman is so convenient for getting eyeballs and clicks ...
Flying cars won't be allowed to reach "Terrorist Threat" levels, public safety concerns will shut this down hard long before then. People trying to land on the highway during rush hour, people trying to land at their house and getting the address wrong, drunk flyers, kids joyriding past your house windows at 120, people flying 10 feet off the ground at highway speeds because it's the only way they remember the route.
I'll give you 2 but not 1 as the subject is "flying cars", which is to say ubiquitous transportation. If they aren't "taking off and landing wherever they want" then they aren't flying cars. & if not, what is the point?
Besides which, even with automated pilots, there's still the issue of noise. I have close friends that live near St Tropez where the over-use of helicopters by those rich enough to afford their use has already produced a reaction in the neighbouring communities, restricting their use. Flying cars would be outlawed in all urban centres before ever becoming a thing.
Democracy is a sheep and two wolves deciding what to have for lunch. Freedom is a well armed sheep contesting the issue
How much time did he end up doing? I never heard, just that he crash landed and got busted.
John McAfee 'It was like that time I hired that Bangkok prostitute; to do my taxes, while I fucked my accountant'
Now that you mention it, these flying cars are sounding better and better. I'm starting to reconsider.
I bet you could put the turbine/gensets, batteries, controllers and motors from a large one into a little one. Build custom 5 blade 3d printed titanium impellers, start pulling some Gs.
John McAfee 'It was like that time I hired that Bangkok prostitute; to do my taxes, while I fucked my accountant'
Everybody seems to think energy is free. Flying cars use so much more energy it is amazing that it never comes up; instead there is nothing but talk of other problems involved. Those problems are nothing, getting past the physics and cost are the insurmountable problems. Just look how people deal with gas going up in price and their car's millage... that is just pushing you along the surface, it doesn't lift you. Then there is the waste energy given off as HEAT-- when you consume massive amounts of "free" energy the waste heat for everybody who now can have a normal car would be enough to boil the oceans.
Airplanes now cram as much as possible in to get a return on operating costs and do it over long distances.
Democracy Now! - uncensored, anti-establishment news
What % of test failures are lack of maintenance and what % are illegal tunes?
Some 'tunes' are idiotic and dangerous, (e.g spring cuts, camber, blown alcohol on the street), but are still 'different' than 'lack of brakes' etc.
John McAfee 'It was like that time I hired that Bangkok prostitute; to do my taxes, while I fucked my accountant'
Flying cars aren't going to become more practical. Cars, with all those amenities cannot fly. You want an air conditioner? Too bad. It will make the flying car too heavy. A flying car isn't really a flying car at all. It doesn't make sense because your optimizing the vehicle for two different things. Honestly the noise and wind issue is the least of my concerns.
By that, I assume you mean that his investment in his new Boring Company means he has a vested interest in preventing flying cars: they're never going to use his tunnels.
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The tunnel is actually plausible. Tunnel boring can be done for about $10,000 per foot. So a 20 mile stretch from San Jose to Palo Alto, with a tube in each direction, would cost roughly $2B, which is affordable. For a 10% ROI, it would need to generate about $600k per day in tolls. If the toll was $10 each way, that would be 30,000 round trips. Since it could draw traffic from both US-101 and I-280, that is plausible.
Flying cars for mass transportation, with existing tech, are a fantasy.
Helicopters do in fact guillotine people from time to time. If your neighbors are landing one in their driveway while you walk past, you really should be worried enough about it to keep a close eye on it and be careful.
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so we've had prop and jet propelled flying cars, buses and trucks for over a century. Also spacecraft, which are even scarier when they crash on land
So you're predicting the batteries will be monitored for approximately the first 7 years?
I don't know why it's common to say the numbers in this order, probably because it started out as just "24x7" as an abbreviation of "twenty-four hours a day, seven days a week". But 7 years ought to cover it. How long do you think they're going to keep using the same batteries in a shared aircraft, anyway?
"You're right," Fisheye says. "I should have set it on 'whip' or 'chop.'"
They tend to be things like silly-looking airplanes with folding wings, strap-on mini-helicopters, and oversized drone-like craft. Flying cars are what we see in Blade Runner, Back to the Future, The Fifth Element, etc. I.e., devices that meet the following requirements:
1) Almost completely quiet; at worst, a humming sound.
2) Able to hover and maneuver effortlessly.
3) Able to take off and land anywhere effortlessly.
4) Affordable.
I would add a fifth requirement:
5) Fully computer-controlled - most people do not have what it takes to pilot ships in three dimensions.
The problem is that we do not have the technology to meet these requirements. The first three, in particular, require access to energy densities well beyond anything that we can muster these days. Either that, or antigravity technology. We are not going to have flying cars any time soon, if ever. We are going to have expensive, noisy and generally stupid-looking contraptions that will, at the very best, occupy a very small niche. If the Segway was obviously ridiculous and stupid when it came out, such devices will be only more so.
Seriously, if you keep the bloody things below say 500 meters above terrain and keep them out of controlled airspace, you may not need ATC. They can just negotiate right of way with each other. .. In principle anyway. ... Might even work.
You can't see ANYTHING from a car, You've got to get out of the goddamned contraption and walk...Edward Abbey
Flying cars aren't going to become more practical...
Yeah, but flying-car projects are attracting investors, which flies even if their cars don't. That said, there is a niche for fuel efficient flying vehicles that can take off and land vertically. Lithium Aviation's all electric prototype suggests they might fill that niche profitably. And there may be others who can do the same, or even carve out their own niche. Capitalism doesn't have to make sense, just money.
About private aircraft, it is not completely true.
In France, we have certified aircraft and ultralight.
The requirements are much more drastic on certified aircraft : the exam is more difficult, there are medical checkups, sustained activity requirements, scheduled and exceptional maintenance done by certified mechanics, etc...
With ultralight, anything goes. Once you and your plane have a license, you are good to go for the rest of your lives. No more question asked, except for the radio equipment. Maintainance, is entirely on your own.
In the end, despite the major differences, the rate of accident is similar. The reason : ultralight pilots don't want to die, so when something must be done, they do it. And because they are fully responsible for they own safety, when in doubt, they go check themselves instead of relying on some rubber stamped certificate. Putting one's life on the line is a pretty good motivator.
The tunnel is actually plausible. Tunnel boring can be done for about $10,000 per foot. So a 20 mile stretch from San Jose to Palo Alto, with a tube in each direction, would cost roughly $2B, which is affordable. For a 10% ROI, it would need to generate about $600k per day in tolls. If the toll was $10 each way, that would be 30,000 round trips. Since it could draw traffic from both US-101 and I-280, that is plausible.
Flying cars for mass transportation, with existing tech, are a fantasy.
Talk about knowing your facts! Impressed. I too think flying cars for the masses are a fantasy. They do attract investors, though. There's probably a niche market for flying cars in a tax bracket higher than I'll ever see.
Rei, you quite visibly do not live in close proximity with or under the flightpath of a helipad that is used daily (150m). The acoustic pollution of anything large enough to transport people will quickly render their daily use so obnoxious that neighbours will band together and outlaw them (as is coming to pass in the south of France around St Tropez). Small drones delivering packages do not have the same weight & noise constraints.
Democracy is a sheep and two wolves deciding what to have for lunch. Freedom is a well armed sheep contesting the issue
I remember, quite a while ago, reading in Popular Science magazine about the "Moller Air Car", which was another experimental project that claimed to be on the way to selling people personal flying machines, easy enough to pilot so you basically just used a joystick to tell it which direction to go.
That idea seems to have crashed and burned, so to speak.
I think the big challenge with any of these things is going to be getting the FAA to approve their use by the general public. I mean, let's face it. They couldn't even let people fly little drones as a hobby for very long before deciding they needed regulation, and set up a system to register them.
The air traffic controllers have a pretty full plate keeping tracking of all the commercial aircraft in the air and which flight patterns all of them are supposed to be on. I don't think they're looking forward to having to do the same job, on a much larger scale, for all the people operating personal air cars at lower altitudes.
It would be great to have flying cars that pretty much fly themselves safely and efficiently. But we're not there yet, and I think they'd require a more "hands off" type of government than we've got in place today.
I am sorry for your humor-impaired state, and wish you a speedy recovery as your robot body searches for valuable minerals on the plains of Europa.
Just cruising through this digital world at 33 1/3 rpm...
Musk uses Scott toilet paper so it must be the best because he is obviously a genius although I have no idea why.
I love stacking my barbecues in the shed at the end of summer - you can't beat a bit of grill on grill action.
For a 10% ROI, it would need to generate about $600k per day in tolls.
It would need to generate $600k per day in profit, so you have to account for operating and maintenance costs on top of that.
It does not matter, cars are involved in hundreds of thousands of minor accidents every year. Once you put the word flying into anything so the word minor disappears from the accident, no such thing as a minor flying accident, just how many died and how many survived and do that over a metropolitan area and add how many innocent bystanders died. The more flying vehicles the greater the number of accidents, done and finished.
Underground automated transport corridor, makes by far the most sense and is bound to be the future model. Most people wont ever bother with ownership, just call up a service via mobile at it comes right to your location and takes you were you want to go and the goes off to pick up some one else, all available 24/7, no drivers, secured in a control space underground (the hugely reduced number of private vehicles will drive up their price, the impact of hugely reduced production levels carrying large development costs).
Chaos - everything, everywhere, everywhen
That's still not the same thing as "whereever they want". We don't generally allow cars to drive on the sidewalk: we're unlikely to ever get into a situation where we'd allow flying cars to "land" where people loiter or walk.
And actually that's a really good analogy, because if we really did let cars drive whereever they want, we'd also get anxious. Imagine walking on a sidewalk and having to worry that a 75mph Tesla is going to appear out of nowhere and ketchup us. We don't have that fear because we know we're somewhere Teslas are literally banned from driving (save for very specific designated access routes to drive ways where the driver must give us right of way and where we can clearly see the vehicle and have ample warning.)
Why feel anxious about flying cars but not normal cars? I don't see why we should.
You are not alone. This is not normal. None of this is normal.
If the toll was $10 each way,
Holy crap! Who the F would pay $10 each way on a toll? It costs me $20 to fill my little Honda up with fuel, your proposed toll would cost me an entire week's would of fuel in one day's worth of tolls.
$10 a trip toll would never fly, no one would pay that much to commute one way to work each day.
"That's the way to do it" - Punch
People who don't want to spend an extra hour+ in stop and go traffic would be my guess.
I think you still have it the wrong way around. Neither hydrogen powered cars nor flying cars are new ideas.
No they aren't new ideas but they also aren't feasible ideas. Particularly flying cars.
When Elon Musk decided to get into the car business, he was already against hydrogen powered and flying cars and went the electric way.
That's because both hydrogen cars and flying cars have (so far) irreducible problems limiting their market potential. Hydrogen cars has a fueling infrastructure problem we are in no danger of solving as well as some fuel storage problems that are similarly challenging. Flying cars aren't a thing because we lack A) a power source with an adequate power/weight ratio, B) the control systems to use them safely, C) the infrastructure to make them practical. It's not that we can't make either one but that we can't make one with sufficient economic utility to make it worth the bother.
By comparison electric cars are now good enough that they are selling in meaningful numbers. EVs have some technical hurdles yet to overcome but there is reasonable grounds to believe these will be conquered in the near future and the vehicles are already good enough for many people in their current form. The same cannot be said of hydrogen power and flying cars.
Musk makes a very good point when he says that to get a 3 dimensional traffic system it is a lot more practical to dig than to try to fly, particularly in large cities where there would be the most need for a 3 dimensional traffic system. That's why we have subways. We know how to build tunnels and there is no science fiction technology required to make it happen. Like the other problems Musk has been working on at Tesla and SpaceX it's really more of a cost reduction problem than one of inventing new technology.
Like 9-11 and Peal Harbor, that might work. Once.
Confucius say, "Find worm in apple - bad. Find half a worm - worse."
Does that ring any bells?
Need coffee...
Confucius say, "Find worm in apple - bad. Find half a worm - worse."
Like 9-11 and Peal Harbor, that might work. Once.
Once per airfield, for several repetitions, before anything substantive is done — if history is any indication.
"You're right," Fisheye says. "I should have set it on 'whip' or 'chop.'"
"Let's just say if something is flying over your head...that is not an anxiety-reducing situation,"
However, riding in a narrow, sealed, and windowless capsule inside a sealed steel tunnel whizzing around under ground at nearly the speed of sound is nothing but relaxing, eh Elon?
Show me on the 1st Amendment bobblehead where the moderator touched you...
Holy crap! Who the F would pay $10 each way on a toll?
It depends. How far does this tunnel take me? If it will get me not just down the same route as the 280 but also get me under the mountains so I don't have to take the 17, I would probably pay even more.
It's not really that simple, though. You could put any old highway in the tunnel, but nobody wants to actually drive themselves in a tunnel for that long. If you're going to be in a tunnel, you're definitely going to want to watch TV, or read a book, or take a nap, or screw... or do any of the other number of things which you might like to do in a car that you don't have to drive for that long. And expecting people to maintain their vehicles in a state which will permit them to safely travel at high speeds is not realistic, hence TBC's concept video showing cars riding on sleds — theoretically, at speeds of around 120 MPH. If the tunnel is exceptionally straight and has few defining features, then there will be very little sensation of speed. It should be much easier to keep the roadway flat and smooth without the influence of weather. I'd still prefer that the vehicle ride on some kind of rail, because even at their best (tweels?) tires are kind of lame, but they seem to be implying something under the road surface which drives the vehicles, like trolley cars.
If you accept this vision as a given, and if you're building the whole tunnel to begin with then it's really not that unreasonable, the question is not "who would pay a ten dollar toll" but "who would pay for a self-driving journey whose total cost included a ten dollar toll". So let's say my car gets around 25 MPG on the highway, because it's oldish and has a V8. And let's say I can get into this tunnel around Millbrae, and my route comes out in Scotts Valley. That 57 mile trip might only be an hour, if I'm magically doing it at the low-traffic time. In that case, I'll drive it. Or it might be two hours, if I'm doing it anywhere near commute time. In that case, I might take the tunnel. Or it might be four hours, if the commute traffic is backed up over the hill really badly, like maybe there is an accident. In that case, having the trip cut down to 45 or even 30 minutes in a tunnel while I watch a video on my phone would be worth some money to me, since I'm not a commuter. But this is a trip I take semi-regularly, so I'm using it as an example. I'd pay much more if I could just get into the system in Cloverdale, which is now a major bedroom community and a logical place to begin the system on the North end of the 101.
"You're right," Fisheye says. "I should have set it on 'whip' or 'chop.'"
Not until *your* EXPENSIVE insurance pays for a computer-controlled, RADAR-guided anti-aircraft gun to be mounted on my roof, to shoot down the teens, the drunks, the "lost control of my vehicle" seniors, and YOU SLASHDOTTERS who are texting while flying, before you crash into my second floor bedroom.
Tunnel boring can be done for about $10,000 per foot.
I'm not sure where you are getting this number from. Tunnel boring cost is highly dependent on the size of the tunnel (approximately proportional to area or radius, I forget which). It is also extremely prone to cost overruns, as in the Big Dig. For a car tunnel you also need to provide ventilation, emergency exit systems, signalling, and other costly additions.
Instead of building a tunnel from San Jose to Palo Alto, you could build an elevated highway for a much lower cost. Alternatively, you could build a subway for a similar cost, which would carry many times the number of people. Either way, a tunnel for cars is almost always the least cost-effective solution.
Can you translate that into English?
No. The people my comment is directed to, understand it just fine. Not being idiots and having some understanding of vehicles.
John McAfee 'It was like that time I hired that Bangkok prostitute; to do my taxes, while I fucked my accountant'