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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.
The thing that Elon Musk does is drive down cost to enable scalability. This isn't about a bumpy prototype tunnel, this is about looking at the tradespace and finding the combination of attributes that may enable this architecture to be affordable when it is scaled.
Its the source of his incentive...
[($)]
If you're building a tunnel, laying a set of rails and an electric rail is a relatively small cost compared to the tunnel itself. The vehicles should run on rails -- metal-to-metal friction is lower than rubber to concrete, and they provide a way of powering vehicles without dealing with toxic batteries.
I'm not suggesting building a conventional subway, but rather some form of personal rapid transit. Designed correctly, the vehicles could "switch" themselves to different tracks without needing the complex switching equipment used by trains and subways today.
If nothing changed... last time I heard, he was sued and the tunnel constructions was abandoned. How is it possible that he's unveiling it now?
Man i always wanted a handcar, didnt u ever? :)
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LOL. I heard they're less fun than they look -- most of the old handcars had plain bearings, not ball or roller bearings, so pumping them was a sweaty job.
It sounds like a drug running tunnel.
A transit system based on tunnels won't have to worry about fire code in California. The fire code will be long forgotten centuries before he finishes the environmental impact studies. He'll need to make sure it's waterproof, because California will be underwater before they approve something that could effect the habitat of a pair of Palo Alto earthworms.
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The vehicles should run on rails -- metal-to-metal friction is lower than rubber to concrete, and they provide a way of powering vehicles without dealing with toxic batteries.
LOL at "toxic batteries" - you aren't going to be eating them and the material inside get recycled.
As for rails - the reason not to use them is that laying them down is a lot more exacting. It adds a lot of needless delay to building out the tunnels, a lot of maintenance in the tunnels to make sure they stay aligned exactly. Not using tracks means maintenance is mostly moved outside the tunnels, meaning fewer closures or delays (I have seen a LOT of issues with subway rails over the years, and I don't even live in a place with a subway system!).
I am also not sure the cost will be relatively small compared to tunnel cost by the time they have advanced the tunneling machines - even V1 of the tunnel was just $10 million for 1.3 miles. They are talking about making something like 10-30 tunnels between various locations, that is a hell of a lot of track.
"There is more worth loving than we have strength to love." - Brian Jay Stanley
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.
so it's kinda hard to take you seriously.
Musk keeps redefining what "finished" means in terms of this tunnel, and people keep lapping it up. He seems to have inherited a portion of Steve Jobs' reality distortion field.
I'm sure if and when it actually has sleds running in it circa 2020-2021, people will swear that was the timetable all along.
#DeleteChrome
A rail engineer made a few interesting comments comparing this tunnel (which I guess admittedly is more of a proof of concept?) to an actual train. A few numbers extrapolated out of the press release; it doesn't really compare favourably:
To put it another way, Musk's shoddily-built tunnel will have to carry over EIGHT VEHICLES PER SECOND to match the capacity of an underground railway. No chance.
Just build some fucking trains, America!
Seriously dude. Nobody cares about your tunnel. And in California? It'll never get done. NEVER.
If there is one thing that Californians care about, it is traffic. It is the #1 topic of conversation, since we don't talk about the weather. What would we say? "Well, it looks like another nice sunny day with clear blue skies, just like every other day for the past six months."
...now we can be stuck in traffic underground! Brilliant!
Any sufficiently unpopular but cohesive argument is indistinguishable from trolling.
How does this solve traffic. Adding one lane?
Some drink at the fountain of knowledge. Others just gargle.
You mean like get our of my car and walk? Dude, only a nobody walks in LA
Some drink at the fountain of knowledge. Others just gargle.
it's not about how fast you bore, it's about how fast you can take away the dirt.
that's just a fecking lot of trucks
Go well
If they are going to propel cars at 150 mph, they better make damn sure that the folks that use this tunnel have tires that are rated for that speed.
Which is not possible. Muskâ(TM)s tunnel cost $40 million per mile.
In the presentation he said it was $10 million for 1.3 miles.
Also stated - recently completed subway expansions in NYC were about $2 BILLION per mile.
This is just V1 of Musk's tunneler, they have other iterations to go that are cheaper and faster.
In the end the goal *is* multiple tunnels for throughput. As Musk said, once you go 3D you can do as many tunnels as you need.
"There is more worth loving than we have strength to love." - Brian Jay Stanley
...look at the Gotthard base tunnel, made by not so boring people who really know how to build tunnels. Trains can go 200km/h in that tunnel btw.. Price was roughly 200 million US$ per mile (not 1 billion as Musk claimed).
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/...
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Congratulations Elon, you have invented the Obahn.
You meant "implemented", or maybe "made practical".
No sig today...
Working implementations of other people's ideas is still value.
No sig today...
Maybe you meant "alter".
No sig today...
A conventional subway requires the same tunneling as Musk's tunnel. A conventional subway carries a lot more people than individual cars. Entering and leaving the subway will require vehicle elevators, also less efficient than people elevators. Can anyone explain how sending electric cars with an additional set of wheels underground to run through the tunnel is going to be more efficient than just another subway? Is it solely the fact that you can can build one way paths (tunnels in one direction only, you have to return via surface streets, or wait until the end of the day when the tunnel direction is reversed)? If the latter, how is it better than a single lane highway with alternating direction?
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
The tunnel is the least of the problems with this system. Trying to scale it to a size which would have any measurable impact on traffic would be the challenge. And if it did scale, imagine the queues of cars all waiting to be somehow transported under the surface by lifts or whatever. Where do these cars wait and for how long, and where? Cities could end up swapping one traffic management problem for another and potentially not even be the beneficiaries if it is run by a private company.
it's just an extra single lane road which is underground for the moment?
On a long enough timeline, the survival rate for everyone drops to zero.
If California's priority is traffic, then they have a serious moral problem. They have one of the largest populations of homeless(both working and not working) in the United States. That should be their priority.
Anonymous comments are as pathetic as the anonymous "sources" that contaminate gutless journalism from the New York Time
When I lived in Cali, no one talked about the weather because it was always too depressing. Always rainy and blah. And cold. And everything was brown and ugly, except for 6 weeks or so each year in spring. Silicon Valley is a nasty place, and I still don't get why anyone would want to be there if not dragged there for a job.
Socialism: a lie told by totalitarians and believed by fools.
Want to know why your an AC? You can't handle truth. Your a coward when it confronts you. In this instance, your are a non caring asshole that doesn't give a flying fuck about your fellow citizens. Where the extreme right are bible thumping assholes. You are a fucking NAZI*(socialist) who doesn't care about anyone but your self. The only thing you are good for is to feed to the hogs. One body part at a time. Look forward to when you grow a set of balls and actually do something. I am sure you won't last 5 minutes in the real world. Why? Karma, you don't give a fuck about nobody. And that is exactly how you will be treated.
Anonymous comments are as pathetic as the anonymous "sources" that contaminate gutless journalism from the New York Time