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Elon Musk Unveils 1.14-Mile Boring Company Tunnel (cnbc.com)
Last night, Elon Musk unveiled his vision of a high-speed tunnel system he believes could ease congestion and revolutionize how millions of commuters get around cities. CNBC reports: Musk, who founded the Boring Co. two years ago after complaining that traffic in Los Angeles was driving him "nuts," says the demonstration tunnel cost approximately $10 million to complete. Engineers and workers have been boring the 1.14-mile-long tunnel underneath one of the main streets in Hawthorne, California. One end of the tunnel starts in a parking lot owned by Musk's Space X. The other end of the demonstration tunnel is in a neighborhood about a mile away in Hawthorne.
Tuesday afternoon, the Boring Co. gave reporters demonstration rides through the tunnel in modified Tesla Model X SUVs, going between 40 and 50 miles per hour. Engineers have attached deployable alignment wheels to the two front wheels of the Model X. Those alignment wheels stick out to the side of the main wheels and act as a bumper along the track walls inside the tunnel, keeping the Model X on course and preventing the vehicle from running into the side walls of the tunnel. While the Boring Co.'s first tunnel may be complete, it is far from being finished. The surfaces are bumpy and have yet to be smoothed out. As a result, the demonstration ride, for now, is rough and passengers in the Model X definitely feel the alignment wheels bumping into the track walls to keep the SUV on course.
Tuesday afternoon, the Boring Co. gave reporters demonstration rides through the tunnel in modified Tesla Model X SUVs, going between 40 and 50 miles per hour. Engineers have attached deployable alignment wheels to the two front wheels of the Model X. Those alignment wheels stick out to the side of the main wheels and act as a bumper along the track walls inside the tunnel, keeping the Model X on course and preventing the vehicle from running into the side walls of the tunnel. While the Boring Co.'s first tunnel may be complete, it is far from being finished. The surfaces are bumpy and have yet to be smoothed out. As a result, the demonstration ride, for now, is rough and passengers in the Model X definitely feel the alignment wheels bumping into the track walls to keep the SUV on course.
Why "personal rapid transit"? That doesn't make any sense. You will never get the throughput to get enough people where they need to go if they are in their own personal box. And how would you "switch" a thousand different personal transit cars without "complex switching equipment" (never mind the fact that subways don't use complex switching equipment). The entire idea is completely stupid.
Yeah, we get it. The costs will be driven down by the tax payer. Just like with SpaceX, the GigaFactory and all his other projects.
Rocket launches are dramatically cheaper with SpaceX then before SpaceX--and the US now nolonger is reliant on Russia for ferrying astronauts to and from the ISS. Any gov investment has long since paid off there.
For those who live at that one destination point? Absolutely. For everyone else? Not so much. Yes, I know the plan is to have thousands of cars zipping from station to station underground - but then you'll get gridlock down underground as well as above ground.
Browsing at +1 - no ACs, I ignore their posts. So refreshing!
...look at the Gotthard base tunnel, made by not so boring people who really know how to build tunnels. Trains can go 200km/h in that tunnel btw.. Price was roughly 200 million US$ per mile (not 1 billion as Musk claimed).
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/...
Signature deleted by lameness filter.
Musk failed so miserably with Tesla.
I mean Tesla loses even against "domestic" competition like the Chevrolet Bolt which beat the snot out of Tesla Model 3 by 20% price-wise.
LOL. The Chevy Bolt sold 3,949 cars in the third quarter of 2018; at the same time, Tesla was making and selling more Model 3 cars per week than that. For the whole quarter Tesla sold 55,840 Model 3 cars. That's over 14 times the sales.
The Model 3 costs more, but it's also a better car than the Bolt, and it appears that customers are willing to pay the premium.
https://electrek.co/2018/10/03/chevy-bolt-ev-sales-slumping-us/
In November 2018, the Tesla Model 3 was the 6th highest selling car on the market, period. The Model 3 outsold the Ford Fusion and the Nissan Sentra. It sold about double compared to Volkswagen Jetta and about triple compared to the Toyota Prius.
https://cleantechnica.com/2018/12/08/tesla-model-3-completely-crushing-us-luxury-car-competition-10-cleantechnica-charts/
In fairness, the above is with a $7,500 tax credit. That credit will be reducing soon and then will go away. But by then, Tesla should have their $35,000 model available to sell.
Elon Musk had hoped to have the $35K car available by the end of 2018. That's not happening but it looks like it will happen in the first half of 2019.
https://insideevs.com/base-35000-tesla-model-3-production-8-months/
Another fun fact: the Honda Civic and the Honda Accord are two of the top five trade-ins of Model 3 customers.
https://electrek.co/2018/08/01/tesla-model-3-top-5-trade-in-cars/
I don't think the word "failure" is the right word to describe Tesla or the Model 3. I expected it to beat the stuffing out of the BMW 3-series and other luxury cars; I didn't expect it to be competitive with the Honda Civic or the Nissan Sentra.
Also, for your prediction about Japanese car makers beating Tesla to come true, the Japanese car makers are going to need a guaranteed source of batteries. Tesla spent the big money to build their own battery factory, which at the same time gives them the lowest cost on batteries and a guaranteed supply of batteries. There will be millions of Tesla cars on the road before any other company can even begin to compete with them.
lf(1): it's like ls(1) but sorts filenames by extension, tersely