Boring Company Approved To Build Futuristic Garage That Would Connect To Underground Commuter Tunnel (mercurynews.com)

On Tuesday night, the Hawthorne City Council gave Elon Musk's Boring Company the green light to build a prototype for a new garage that would connect passenger cars to the entrepreneur's envisioned underground hyperloop. The Mercury News reports: Musk's Boring Company recently bought a private residence abutting the one-mile underground tunnel it already built beneath 120th Street between Hawthorne Boulevard and Prairie Avenue near SpaceX. The garage at the residence would connect to the tunnel. But as part of its approval, the company agreed not to open the test elevator to the public or to have cars move in and out of the garage from the street. Cars would enter the tunnel from the SpaceX campus, move through the tunnel and on to the garage and then back to SpaceX, so the test process would not create additional traffic on the street. The company wants to show that it can utilize an elevator and short tunnel spur for developing a high-speed underground public transportation system. It plans to rent the house as well.

As sketched out in public documents, a car would drive onto a "skate" that connects to a hyperloop track, such as the ones being developed by two private companies and recently featured in the collegiate Hyperloop Competition at SpaceX. The company also on Tuesday earned approval for a separate short spur from its existing tunnel in order to remove a boring machine that it first intended to leave in the ground. Originally, the company planned to bore a two-mile length of tunnel, but as company representative Jane Labanowski explained to the City Council, they identified an opportunity to remove its expensive cutter head. So, it now plans to reduce the tunnel length to just one mile and extricate it from another piece of property the company recently purchased.

Comments

Re:Passenger cars in a hyperloop tunnel?

[Rei]

This has nothing to do with Hyperloop. Hyperloop is a longer-term objective. This is about Loop. That said, both Loop and Hyperloop are - regardless of what the Dugout Loop prototype will do - designed for hauling both cars and passenger capsules. The whole point of all of the work they're doing right now is prototyping and testing. Even Dugout loop is just a larger-scale test.

Re: actually

[Rei]

You FUDsters are hilarious. Musk goes on Joe Rogan, demonstrates little knowledge about pot (including being apparently unaware of the existence of blunts, asking whether it's a joint or a cigar, and after having it explained to him, responding, "so it's like posh pot, tobacco pot?"), studies it like a curious scientist examining an alien species for the first time, takes one non-inhaled puff, shrugs his shoulders (**everyone screenshots here), shakes his head no, gives it back, and later talks about how he doesn't like marijuana because it hinders his ability to accomplish things that make a difference in the world.

In FUD world, this translates to "Boring's CEO may be too busy hitting the rock and/or getting stoned"

I'll repeat: you FUDsters are hilarious ;) Meanwhile, Musk got 11 million people (in under a week) to watch a 2 1/2 hour interview with him which has gotten over 72 thousand comments on Youtube, with by far most reactions to Musk being positive. As an example, at the time of writing this post, here's the newest comments in the thread that concern Musk:

"The way elon scans his brain after every question freaks me out but it's kinda badass"

"I love this man. He's not a typical high roller business man that's for sure. We need more Elon Musks in the world. "I love humanity, I think it's great.""

"Why does it seem like Elon Musk has already seen the end? He must be visiting us from an unknown realm and couldn't help but feel sorry for us."

"Elon seem mildly autistic"

"Damn, this guy is really a genius."

"This will be a tough one to beat. This one was by far my favorite Joe Rogan interview and likely my favorite interview I’ve ever watched. I’ve given Joe jazz in the past, but we’re all human, and I can’t deny the great job Joe does giving us Internet consumers one hell of a platform into so many fascinating minds - including Joe’s. Thank you, Joe. Thank you, Elon. This was truly great. We’re living in a amazing time in history. Love IS the answer. It starts with oneself."

"So i just rewatched Iron Man recently... And Elon Musk is basically our real life Tony Stark. I love that guy."

I'll also add that while I'm personally not a fan of intoxicating substances of any stripes, I find it rather silly that nobody seems to care about the fact that they're drinking whiskey during the interview. Which is more of a "debilitating" substance. One non-inhaled puff on a blunt? "OMG!" Drinking whiskey? "Meh...."

Hopefully soon, more info about this aspect

[Rei]

Here's to hoping that we soon get more info about their surface connections. Because they've talked almost nothing about them and to me it seems like the hardest part. Loop, in their ultimate design goal, fundamentally requires large numbers of these surface stations (in contrast to subways that use a smaller number of large terminals), so you have to be able to build them quickly and cheaply. You obviously can't make them with a TBM, it's not just going to make a sharp right-angle turn and drive vertically to the surface. And while the main tunnel can be as deep as you want in order to avoid city infrastructure, every single one of the surface stations has to penetrate every layer below it en route to the Loop tunnels.

I really want to see what their approach is to be able to rapidly make the vertical tunnel segments while quickly detecting and avoiding or rerouting any unmarked underground hazards or infrastructure. Their ease of getting permits en masse will depend on how well they can demonstrate causing minimal disruption to everyday life. To me, this sounds like the hardest part of the whole Loop goal.

Re:Hopefully soon, more info about this aspect

[RhettLivingston]

In addition, these surface tunnels can't just drop straight into the main loops. To be able to carry any real volume in the main loops, you can't have acceleration occurring on the loop. If you accelerate on the loop, you have to maintain a ridiculous gap between vehicles to allow for a car or carrier to enter the loop and accelerate before being rear ended. The throughput would suck.

The solution is to have lots of acceleration and deceleration tunnels that merge with the loop and some automated management of the merging process. Given that tunnels are planned to be cheap, this is likely the intended solution.

So a connection involves an elevator to get through the crud closest to the surface using the shortest route (straight down cuts through much less crud than ramping down) connecting to a ramp that leaves the loop, passes a bunch of elevators, and rejoins the loop.

Extra points to anyone who can design an off ramp that splits off in such as way as to make it impossible for any vehicle to ever hit the divider because that is the only point in the system where a head on collision with a wall could happen.

Re:Hopefully soon, more info about this aspect

[Rei]

Indeed - "feeder tunnels" and onramps/offramps are an explicit part of their plan. That's a relatively straightforward part - just more boring, at depth. It's the vertical access shafts that they've not talked much about, and which seem to be the trickiest part. So here's to hoping for more info about their approach here.

Re:Hopefully soon, more info about this aspect

[mlyle]

Assuming uniform loading for capacity factors is erroneous. People take more trips at 8AM than at 3AM or 2PM. Adding more station density out at the edges of San Jose doesn't help capacity in the downtown at rush, too.

And so Elon Musk

[maroberts]

..completes his transformation from hero to villain by having a secret underground lair

Re: actually

[Anonymous Coward]

Have you been there? Most of the work Elon Musk does is engineering, like 80% of the work he does.

> This celebrity bullshit everything has to end, it is a lie, a great big fat, psychopathic egoistic lie.

Good luck with that. We need role models. It can even be observed in toddlers. It is never going to end. Certainly not within our lifetime, and not for the next 1000 years either. Now get with the program and be a better role model instead.

>Be careful who you call a real like Tony Stark, a make believe characters with a really good public relations team, that believes themselves above the law and above government, in real life, those fuckers belong in prison.

This again. Prison? Why? What criminal law did he break this time?

Re:Passenger cars in a hyperloop tunnel?

[Rei]

OMG, a car caught fire - quick, get breathless overcoverage of it! Wait, you already did? Good!

There's one car fire in the US for every 20 million miles driven and one fatality per 85 million miles.

Teslas have been driven 9 billion miles. This should correspond to 450 fires and 106 deaths.

Where are they?

Concerning fires, here's a list of Tesla fires between 1 January 2013 and 11 March 2018, which is the vast majority of Tesla miles. The total count? 14. Vs. an expected 450.

Concerning fatalities, three months ago an anti-Tesla Twitter account added up the number of deaths in Teslas and arrived at 34. Note that many of these occurred in other countries like China that have a much higher road fatality rate than the US. It's still a third of the expected number for US-only driving of that many miles.

Let's look at the newest Teslas, shall we - the Model 3? So far there have been no fatalities and no reports of fires in customer cars (there was one Model 3 found up for scrap that had been gutted by fire, but it was "Location: Fremont" with 1 mile on the odometer, so clearly something that happened at the factory. Also, the fire damage was heaviest on the bumper, where it had melted the alumium - but hadn't managed to do so over the pack itself. So it's not clear that a battery fire was actually involved). But how many miles have been driven for this rate of "0/1 fires and 0 deaths"?

Lacking specific numbers, the best we can do is estimate. The average driver drives around 12k miles per year. Owners of new cars put significantly more miles on them during their first year, and particularly first few months because - obviously - it's a new car that they bought because they wanted to drive it. Bloomberg says there were around 25k made in the past month (0-1m ago), 19k in the previous month (1-2m ago), then 13,5k (2-3m ago), then 9k (3-4m ago), the 9k (4-5m ago), then 6,5k (5-6m ago), and 9k earlier than that. So around 19k*(30k/12)*0,5 + 13,5k*(30k/12)*1,5 + 9k*(26k/12)*2,5 + 9k*(23k/12)*3,5 + 6,5k*(21k/12)*4,5 + 9k*(18k/12)*6 = ~315M miles. Meaning if they were gasoline cars we should expect 16 fires and 3 1/2 deaths. Where are they?

Re:Passenger cars in a hyperloop tunnel?

[Rei]

I mean, I assume you're equally diligent about reporting fires in gasoline cars, right? I totally remember your coverage of, say, the million BMWs that were recalled in 2017 due to over 40 parked cars - not cars involved in accidents, but parked cars - spontaneously bursting into flames, right? That's just up to 2017. And they keep getting more fires and keep issuing more recalls this year. The BMW fires have been particularly prolific in South Korea, where 11 burst into flames in July alone.

Want something more recent? Just seven days ago, Ford recalled two million trucks due to fire risks. GM's last major fire-related recall was a couple years, their *third attempt* to fix a problem that was causing cars - often ones that were parked - to burst into flames. Also seven days ago a million Priuses were recalled due to a fire risk in the wiring harness. Need I keep going? Remember here that we're not talking about fires in these cars from crashes - we're talking only the subset of fires that occur during normal use. Fires in gasoline cars during crashes are effectively a problem flagged "WONTFIX" by the NHTSA.