31 ms·

The Boring Company [video]

• AlexandrB 10y ago
  I don't get it. Much of the USA is faced with crumbling infrastructure and a lack of money for maintaining that infrastructure. How is creating a network of powered tunnels - which are much more expensive to maintain than surface roads - going to interact with this economic reality? This seems like technology that addresses mostly fun, theoretical problems - like traffic optimization, not ugly, practical ones like tight municipal budgets and urban sprawl.
  • devopsproject 10y ago
    municipal budget problems are only a problem for the people in office when it goes downhill.
  • kiba 10y ago
    Lack of money for maintenance is a problem of overextension and overconstruction. Urban sprawls result in the same thing. Creating a powered tunnel, especially if it can be engineered to be done faster and cheaper, could result in increased urban density?
  • loeg 10y ago
    It's unclear why this centralized control car-train approach even needs to be underground. Seems like you could do something very similar above-ground. It's basically freeways but without human operation.
    • stcredzero 10y ago
      But getting rights of way are more complicated above ground. That's probably the one thing that's going to kill the Hyperloop and it already strangles passenger rail in the US.
      • placeybordeaux 10y ago
        And it's unlikely that any technological/engineering innovation will make that cheaper. I can see why going the underground route is an attractive idea, you can hope to drive the cost down there. That being said the cost is currently extremely high, the tunnel that is finished boring and still under construction is estimated to cost 4.2 billion for 2 miles dug over 3 years.
  • jrockway 10y ago
    I am not sure the poor state of existing infrastructure precludes someone from building their own new infrastructure. Public transportation outside of the US is often run by private companies, and they make plenty of money. Even in the US, passenger rail is typically run by the government or government-like bodies, while freight rail is just private companies. I don't think there's an intrinsic reason for that, it's just how it is. (More like, people with goods to transport are willing to pay, but people with only themselves to transport aren't. Or we see public transportation as a "public good" that's worth subsidizing, but of course the government super subsidizes the road network too.) The fact that your local politician doesn't want to allocate public funds to shoring up a collapsing bridge doesn't mean that Elon Musk can't spend his own money to build his own bridge (tunnel in this case), right?
    • stcredzero 10y ago
      I am not sure the poor state of existing infrastructure precludes someone from building their own new infrastructure. Public transportation outside of the US is often run by private companies, and they make plenty of money. It would be relatively easy (which is to say, it would be easier than doing it to private cars) to fit the municipal bus fleet with the equipment to also become automatically piloted "packets." For that matter, it would also be possible to bake-in such functionality to Tesla cars.
    • AlexandrB 10y ago
      > The fact that your local politician doesn't want to allocate public funds to shoring up a collapsing bridge doesn't mean that Elon Musk can't spend his own money to build his own bridge (tunnel in this case), right? If you're advocating for a private transportation network, then I'm theoretically OK with that as long as it's not subsidized directly or indirectly by the taxpayer. No special tax loopholes or favourable deals on digging rights please.
      • tormeh 10y ago
        The problem with such tunnels is that they're natural monopolies, not least because underground space in reasonable depth is finite. It's not a service you'll get competition on.
  • rhino369 10y ago
    The easy solution is using private project finance instead of public funds. But I seriously doubt this thing is actually cost efficient.
    • gizmo385 10y ago
      I feel as though a large scale privatization of roads would see an explosion in toll roads, which I don't believe is a sustainable solution to infrastructure problems.
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  • oneshot908 10y ago
    Well, since the Internet was once described as a series of tubes(tm), the Boring company is just extending this metaphor to create the Mole People Highway of The Future. That said, it seems like a great experiment to run somewhere in the middle of nowhere in China the next time they want to build another one of those nearly empty cities they wish to fill with future citizens some day. But seriously, Elon Musk appears to be dating hot and crazy at the moment. Let's just let him get through this phase of his bucket list so he can get back to being visionary once he realizes why one should never marry hot and crazy.
  • webreac 10y ago
    Degradation of infrastructure is caused by heavy vehicules (trucks), weather and bad driving. Tunnels solve these 3 issues.
    • hk__2 10y ago
      How do tunnels solve bad driving? Tunnel accidents are even worse than those on the surface.
      • Houshalter 10y ago
        It doesn't look like you get to drive in the tunnels. You get put on a car that is on fixed tracks.
  • jodrellblank 10y ago
    They are clearly pictured as being private tunnels for Tesla owners, which allow the rich technologist to avoid surface traffic, charge their car while on the tunnel platform, and avoid driving through all those uncomfortable poor regions. It will interact with the surface economic reality in the same way that flying Audis in tunnels interact with the dystopian wilderness in Hollywood sci-fi films.
• devopsproject 10y ago
  this solves the "last mile" problem since your car will be at your destination
• Mattasher 10y ago
  Giant hole opens up in street with no gate around it. Have they actually spent time thinking about this or is this a joke?
  • devopsproject 10y ago
    there is cool new technology called a "barrier" that could be used
    • deleted 10y ago
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    • Mattasher 10y ago
      Indeed. They might want to have included that in the video if they were suggesting this as an actual project and not a toy vision.
      • devopsproject 10y ago
        This is a mock up. Do you seriously think they forgot to ask the question "what about the giant hole in the ground"? lol
        • deleted 10y ago
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  • jameshart 10y ago
    then the vehicle on a tray is accelerated up to high speed inside a tunnel without its axles or body being secured onto the carrier. Then a vast network of these tunnels is somehow posited. I don't think reality was one of the constraints applied to this concept.
    • randyrand 10y ago
      > without its axles electric hub motors would work here quite easily.
• accountyaccount 10y ago
  This is the dumbest thing I've seen him produce. Reliable rapid public transit is better in dozens of ways.
  • Analemma_ 10y ago
    ... except in the crucial way of "getting people to buy more Teslas", which is the metric Musk is most concerned about.
    • tetrep 10y ago
      Well, Tesla is getting into the large vehicle industry, so it's not crazy to think they'd make autonomous vehicles for public transit if there was a market for it.
    • Spivak 10y ago
      Yeah, proposing a massive engineering and infrastructure effort with an insane upfront cost in order to be the exclusive provider of the commodity trains for a few years until other manufacturers lobby for manufacturing rights is the real business venture here.
  • kiba 10y ago
    I don't know. It looks like a public transit system to me.
    • accountyaccount 10y ago
      a public transit system... that requires a car
      • susi22 10y ago
        It doesn't. It's shown in the video.
  • Spivak 10y ago
    And worse in others. This at least has the advantage that people might actually want to use it since it's zero latency and you have your car for local driving.
• sxates 10y ago
  It seems crazy, but there's also some appeal in the idea of opting out of all the legacy infrastructure. If we could rebuild our roads from scratch today to serve a vehicle for the 21st century, what would we build? Probably something like this - standardized vehicles on automated roadways with built in electric connections that enable unlimited long-distance high-speed travel (though we'd just build this into cars instead of using 'carriers'). But it does seem pretty far out that we'd have tens of levels of tunnels for all this underground traffic. Hyperloops seem more plausible.
  • devopsproject 10y ago
    > Hyperloops seem more plausible the vacuum requirements alone make hyperloop an non-starter imo. This type of "fastloop" seems a lot more viable.
  • wahern 10y ago
    Hyperloop would seem even _more_ plausible if we were able to lower the cost of tunnel construction. Likewise, traditional mass transit and other infrastructure (power, telecom, sewage) could be significantly cheaper with improved tunneling technology. If Elon Musk wants to spend--or convince others to spend--billions of dollars innovating tunneling construction, then I'll enthusiastically support whatever vision motivates him. It's like if a kid decides to clean his room so the aliens can land their spacecraft, then by all means, let's get ready for the aliens!
    • tgarma1234 10y ago
      Sorry I know that post quality is important and everyone should strive to make important points that move the conversation forward but at the same time I have to say "let's get ready for the aliens" really made me happy. Funny.
  • clock_tower 10y ago
    > It seems crazy, but there's also some appeal in the idea of opting out of all the legacy infrastructure. If we could rebuild our roads from scratch today to serve a vehicle for the 21st century, what would we build? I don't know, but we did rebuild our roads from scratch to serve as a vehicle for the 20th century, and it was a disaster. Let's first fix the problems that the last attempt to start from zero created (read up on Robert Moses and Jane Jacobs), before trying to start from zero again.
• buzzybee 10y ago
  If you go and do something like that, why have the car at all? Edit: To be a little less snarky, multi-modal transport of this form has been considered; it's one of the ways in which PRT systems have been proposed. But those systems don't also say "and now we build the highway underground."
  • wvenable 10y ago
    It solves the last mile problem -- same problem we have fiber installation. You can build fast transport hubs but you can't get right from door to door.
  • Spivak 10y ago
    I don't think anyone really enjoys hiring or renting cars on both ends of the journey. Being able to BYOCar would make me use this system immediately.
• dmix 10y ago
  Toronto really needs this. We have a raised express way that's right in front of our harbourfront and it makes the whole area noisy and ugly, blocking what should be a great view towards (great) Lake Ontario. Most importantly it takes up a ton of very valuable real estate. A huge amount of condo development has been done right next to it and having lived in one the noise is a real problem. Living on the south-end of the highway towards the water almost feels like being cut off from the real city You basically have to keep your window closed most of the time otherwise it's a constant drone. Night time is the worst as it goes quiet then occasionally a truck will come by and wake you up. The higher up you live the better, but that still leaves about half the units close to it. So not only would it open up a lot of new property development but also significantly increase the value of existing properties. The city has been considering burying the highway underground similar to Boston's tunneling project. But the Boston one ended up going billions over budget, so it is not an easy thing to do. If they can bring the price down dramatically and perfect the concept I'm sure we'd be one of the first consumers for the tech.
  • hourislate 10y ago
    Toronto is one of the most dysfunctional cities in NA. They can't even add a new subway line or additional stops. They have no problem closing down every major high way in the City for a marathon every weekend during the summer or the Molson Indy causing massive traffic issues. The City Council is inept so good luck hoping they could ever have the insight to agree to something like this. , so I really doubt they will ever be capable of implementing a solution to the traffic congestion, noise, etc.
    • sanswork 10y ago
      Toronto has enough space that LRT makes way more sense financially than subways but Ford ruined LRT in the minds of almost everyone. Even GO could cut down a lot of traffic if they'd just add more parking lots on the edge of the city and make it all day two way. When I use to live north of the city there were 3 trains into Toronto in the morning on the Stouffville line and 3 trains back at the end of the day and if your schedule didn't fit them exactly then you had to drive to Finch and hope for a parking spot or drive in.
• andrewem 10y ago
  I have to give Elon Musk credit - the average person would be hard-pressed to come up with even a single laughably impractical mode of transportation, but he's got two.
  • TillE 10y ago
    Hyperloop looks insanely good in comparison. Like ideally it's just an upgrade on trains. This is some bizarre daydream.
    • droopyEyelids 10y ago
      People said exactly the same thing about toilet paper when it was invented.
    • notahacker 10y ago
      On the other hand, investments in better boring technology produces a lot of valuable real world construction industry IP for pretty conventionally dull projects that happen to involve underground travel (as well as potentially being useful for his Mars and megacity dreams). Millions of people travel on underground railways and drive through hillsides every day. Whereas most innovations necessary to develop relatively-less-unsafe means of propel people at high speed through long distance above-ground vacuum tubes are kind of predicated on the assumption that people might actually travel in a way similar to his concept sketch. Ignoring the marketing video, it's easy to see why he's potentially going to spend more engineer time and money on the boring technology and schemes for building big swooping curvy tunnels through prime metropolitan real estate whilst being happy to "open-source" the idea of firing people through metal vacuum tubes for others to work on.
  • wvenable 10y ago
    Actually he has 3... Rocketry is a pretty impractical mode of transportation as well.
    • baq 10y ago
      It's the only practical way to get to space and stay there...
• OrwellianChild 10y ago
  Don't fully get the benefit of moving cars on rails vs. moving cars on wheels... Higher fixed costs to power the rail vs. just letting cars auto-drive with internal propulsion. What am I missing?
  • Robotbeat 10y ago
    The fact that the idea is that most cars would be able to use the system, not just ones from a certain company. Additionally, 130mph is pretty sporty to maintain for all vehicles using the system! Most cars probably can't even achieve that speed all out, let alone safely (even if self-driven).
  • pmtarantino 10y ago
    I suppose you can't control (or detect?) if the car fails, and if that is the case, the whole system would be screwed.
    • astrodust 10y ago
      These platforms will have to strap the car down somehow to prevent someone from driving off the platform while it's operating. A crash at that speed would wreck that tunnel and put it out of service for weeks.
  • notahacker 10y ago
    If you want cars to be more closely packed, travelling at higher speeds and controlled by computers, you probably don't want individual car owners to be able to bring the whole thing to a screeching halt through sloppy maintenance or shutting the engine down (See also: Channel Tunnel)
    • hk__2 10y ago
      > If you want cars to be more closely packed, travelling at higher speeds and controlled by computers Isn’t that called “a train”?
  • goodcanadian 10y ago
• mandeepj 10y ago
  Whenever I am stuck in traffic, I am thinking about how can we have no traffic jams at all. My idea is similar to this but not in tunnels. I think we can do it on earth. Just have an elevated freeway that is reserved for this type of traffic where road is like a conveyor belt. I hope you got the idea.
  • yoz-y 10y ago
    Auto piloted cars could easily reap the "conveyor belt" advantage if they were the only type of vehicle allowed on the road.
• lightedman 10y ago
  This is not likely to work in SoCal. Our geology and prolific and scattered mineral/gas reserves simply would not allow for it. Maybe elsewhere, but not down here.
• fudged71 10y ago
  I can't get over how impossibly dumb this idea is. It's a clever fantasy but it doesn't seem practical at all, from a cost or safety perspective... has he given a "first principles" talk about why any of this makes sense? By the time a system like this is built, all cars will be autonomous, so the self-driving sleds will be entirely redundant and it just becomes a super expensive road with no safety escapes. Autonomous ground travel optimization, hyperloops, and air travel all work together to make a seamless system that make this seem redundant.
  • Namrog84 10y ago
    why is it impossibly dumb? > from a cost or safety perspective Maybe that is why he is pursuing it, is because maybe he can help reduce the cost and safety. Just look at how much he is going to reduce the cost of rocket launches and landing them is far safer. And to me that is a far harder challenge than making underground transit cheaper and safer. > By the time a system like this is built, all cars will be autonomous I think even if we all switch to traveling pods, this doesn't JUST solve a transportation problem. It solves underground expansion problems. That tunnel could alleviate 'autonomous pod traffic' in dense areas. OR perhaps it could be used to build underground cities (tube cities) or (tube storefronts). Or perhaps just improved and accessible infrastructure for a city to utilize more expandable tunnels instead of the tiny ones we have now. (If they made boring significantly cheaper/safer). Just remember there is more to underground boring than just transportation. And your 2 reasons why it won't work is likely the very 2 things they are trying to address. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Ateh7hnEnik https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Ateh7hnEnik
• Arizhel 10y ago
  Instead of using all this space and energy to move cars around, it'd make more sense to just have small pods for 1-2 people, and transport the people around from point to point. There's already a project to do just this, called SkyTran. It never gets any attention.
• rhcom2 10y ago
  Isn't this a solution that becomes outdated with self driving cars?
  • bartwe 10y ago
    I think this is actually more of a fix for the problems with self driving cars, specifically: other traffic. By creating a new category of infrastructure the selfdriving parts can be far more reliable and simple.
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• anonymous_iam 10y ago
  Is it just a coincidence that Musk's main competitor in the space business is called "The Boeing Company"? I don't think so.
  • joshmanders 10y ago
    The Boring Company isn't a jab at Boeing, it's a generic name for a company that bores holes in the ground... Ya know.. Tunnels?
• shouldbworking 10y ago
  Did anyone else notice that cars being lowered leaves a giant fucking hole in the middle of the street?! This is a marketing fluff video untouched by engineers
  • ythn 10y ago
    Someone needs to edit the video so you see a pedestrian falling down the shaft and breaking their neck
    • chrisper 10y ago
      Might as well add Judge Judy and a scene in court when the lawsuit happens.
      • differentView 10y ago
        The amount would be way over Judge Judy's limit.
    • Fricken 10y ago
      There's a sidewalk I walk down, it's quite narrow and runs along a shoulderless road with a steady stream of cars whizzing by at 50 miles an hour. I think to myself 'how much more or less dangerous is this than walking along the edge of the Grand Canyon? One misstep and I'm toast. One misstep from one of those cars and I'm toast.' We have a hardwired respect for heights, but at no time in our evolutionary history did we ever have to deal with the kind of speed cars move at. So we look at a 10 foot deep unprotected hole in the ground and instantly think 'Hey, that's a hazard', but we don't give nearly enough consideration to speed, and as such 2 million people each year who are killed and injured in US motor vehicle accidents, and we just sort of shrug our shoulders.
      • MattRix 10y ago
        Reminds me of this image: http://i.imgur.com/mE7uGoA.jpg http://i.imgur.com/mE7uGoA.jpg
• nlh 10y ago
  Side note/tangent: I think this is closer to what "flying cars" look like in the future vs. what's being attempted lately (which are really just increasingly small lift-based aircraft.) Replace the underground rails with above-ground "rails" (perhaps electromagent based, when there's enough power to do so.)
• brosky117 10y ago
  The tracks were surprising until I thought about all the idiots I encounter on regulars roads. Then it made perfect sense.
  • _coldfire 10y ago
    Metal on metal also has a fraction of the rolling resistance.
    • gsnedders 10y ago
      Though it looks like they're still rubber-wheeled with a guide-rail down the centre rather than steel-wheel on a pair of running rails.
• rb808 10y ago
  On the downside, LA traffic sucks but at least you get the sun shining in. Spending your whole commute in tunnels seems a depressing way to live, even if its shorter.
  • jitix 10y ago
    That's your opinion. Getting stuck in a traffic jam on a hot sunny day is very displeasing to me. I'd rather move fast through a tunnel. Edit: fixed typo
    • astrodust 10y ago
      So what you're saying is you'd rather get stuck in line waiting for tunnel access instead of actually driving to where you're going? Based on that video it looks like the cycle time on those platforms is pretty limited. There's a fixed number of them circulating at any time. You'll be stuck waiting for one to pop up even if you're second in line. If you're tenth? Get out a magazine.
  • hfourm 10y ago
    I dunno man, spending 2 hours in traffic versus 15 minutes is probably a pretty easy choice for most people. I get the sentiment, but if we are being honest, sitting in traffic is ALREADY a depressing way to live for most people.
• loufe 10y ago
  The costs of tunneling are like FAR more expensive than most think. Breaking, excavating, and supporting rock is slow, time and cost heavy, and precarious work. While this is an interesting concept, unless there are serious advances in rock boring techniques (personal opinion: there are none coming) this will never approach fruition. I would suggest anyone interested in further research look into the "Big Dig" of Boston and the staggering costs and challenges it faced. Good luck, Elon. It'll be another moonshot company if you can pull it off.
  • throwaway2016a 10y ago
    > unless there are serious advances in rock boring techniques I'm pretty sure Elon Musk doesn't enter a market unless he intends to do just that. Edit: I got downvoted a bit but it is his MO. He takes things that are expensive and makes them cheaper. For what it's worth though, I do think the tunnels in that video are ridiculous.
    • astrodust 10y ago
      And concrete production? And underground hazard detection? And coordination with city infrastructure? And...
      • 27182818284 10y ago
        Honestly though these same sentences came up around Teslas too. And battery production? And crash test safety? And coordination with NHTSA?
        • astrodust 10y ago
          People made electric cars before Tesla and they'll make cars after. People made rockets before SpaceX and they'll make them after. He's cut component costs on the Tesla by maybe 70%. On the SpaceX project it's more like 80% compared to the highest cost competitor. Both of these are huge achievements. The problem with tunnels is they're not cars, not rockets, not anything like he's ever done before. If he had a functioning Hyperloop system, if he'd proven he can build out infrastructure on a geographic scale and not just product from a factory I'd be more likely to agree with you. This is a bad idea, a bad project, and a total waste of time.
• throwaway2016a 10y ago
  When I heard about Boring Company I kind of just assumed it would be used for underground hyper loops. This feels kind of wrong.
  • astrodust 10y ago
    Hyperloop at least has the right idea: Building above-ground is vastly less expensive than tunnelling.
    • throwaway2016a 10y ago
      My thought process was... Hyperloops are round + tunnels are round = Boring Company Putting cars through the tunnels is not what I first expected.
      • astrodust 10y ago
        It's the sort of thing a guy who owns a car company would do, not someone who's actually trying to solve a transportation problem.
        • Spivak 10y ago
          Or a person who actually understands what people want in a transportation solution. Nobody outside of city planners and environmentalists take the train/bus solution seriously because it's such a lifestyle downgrade from cars.
          • astrodust 10y ago
            If you're in a city that's not explicitly designed around cars, a car is a total hassle. America's gone all-in on cars, but even then the current generation is abandoning them and instead doing something crazy: Living close to where they work. A car is a massive investment of time, money, and emotional capital that an increasing number of people are simply unwilling to make.
  • 10y ago
• blueintegral 10y ago
  Now what if we add an Uber-like component to this and let people share/carpool together to reduce the number of cars above and below ground? Instead of tires that wear out, we could use steel on rails! Aaaand, we just re-invented the subway.
• thunderstrike 10y ago
  This doesn't seem feasible at all. Especially the overview shot of the underground network, like it's all open air. Definitely wouldn't be possible like that under a major city.
  • tbabb 10y ago
    Pretty sure that's a cutaway view.
• orf 10y ago
  How about... mass transit. You know, not needing to dig giant big tunnels and build the infrastructure to ferry individual people in huge cars around underground, because the roads are too congested with individual people in huge cars. Dig big tunnels to ferry trains with people underground. Works pretty well.
  • hoprocker 10y ago
    This is the thing. Why on earth would you build this insane network to ferry one person in their car, the displacement of which could probably move 8 people using the same footprint. I think they throw that idea a laurel at the end, where a more people-pod-like vehicle is getting lowered in the same manner.
    • tropo 10y ago
      If the system doesn't move your car, then you need two cars and parking for both of them. Park your first car, use the system, then get into another car that you have previously left waiting for you. Unless there is a stop at every home and business, you'll be needing cars. You might as well transport them.
      • orf 10y ago
        Or you could walk a little bit between stops.
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• vtange 10y ago
  What if the tunnels themselves are congested? Wouldn't it mean a line of cars surface-side waiting for their turn?
  • tmalsburg2 10y ago
    Exactly. A transportation infrastructure operates most economically when its capacity is (close to) maxed out. Since demand is variable it will inevitably happen that the capacity is sometimes not enough (as in overbooked flights). Traffic jams are the result. So what this system is doing is moving traffic jams underground or, as you say, to the on-ramps. What have we gained?
• pnathan 10y ago
  This is very, very wasteful compared to actual mass transit. A subway network is much more effective at delivering people. If he's looking for mega-good, Musk would do significantly better to drop a full subway network. edit: tunnelling is a broadly solved problem. It's difficult, expensive, slow, etc. But there's no engineering reason why a hole in the ground can't happen. Musk might be able to drive some significant improvements there. No idea. But tunneling itself is not a reason to knock an idea beyond the cost and geoengineering involved.
  • naravara 10y ago
    Hilariously so even. This is basically a subway system, except you have to provide your own seats. All this is succeeding in doing is making Musk look hilariously out of touch.
    • wcr3 10y ago
      hilariously.
    • stupidcar 10y ago
      He may well be out of touch, but at least Musk's suggesting a real solution to current transit problems, even if it's impractical. On the other hand, whenever I read stuff by politicians and engineers with real knowledge and influence in this field, I'm astonished by the total lack of vision. Even in London, where you have a major, successful transport engineering project (Crossrail) completing, and an entire city dependency on, and supportive of, public transport, you only hear the most anemic plans for future expansion. For example, TFL is pushing a "New Tube For London" plan that consists of little more than trivial improvements. Some new trains, platform edge doors, etc., scheduled to be delivered in 2050 or so. But absolutely nothing with real ambition, like entirely new lines, that would actually solve London's insane congestion problems.
      • astrange 10y ago
        Opening new lines, like building new roads, might hurt everything due to induced demand. You can reduce demand by not needing everyone to go the same place every day. Why does everyone have to work in London and why don't they already live where they work?
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• chrismealy 10y ago
  A subway, but you have to be in a car to use it. Brilliant.
• dahart 10y ago
  The Boring Company: ...solving the hole problem ...it's underground ...making tools to take you down
• Someone 10y ago
  I would think that elevator has less capacity than a tunnel entry would have. The video compensates for that by having multiple such elevators, closely spaced, that presumable share an on-ramp. I'm not convinced that gives you enough capacity, because each car being lowered on that on-ramp blocks traffic for quite a while. Also, entering this system leaves a big hole in the street where the carriage was. Before another car can enter, a new carriage must be brought up from below. That decreases capacity even further, except for the ideal situation where that carriage always carries a car. In the less than ideal sitautin, there's the added problem of getting that replacement carriage in place at just the right time (for example, at the end of the day in a business district)
• Animats 10y ago
  The Disney version of this concept: [1] [1] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=e0q_oP9TPD4&t=2479 https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=e0q_oP9TPD4&t=2479
  • Animats 10y ago
    I thought Disney wouldn't want that shown much any more. But no. It's on a big display screen at Disneyland for the queue at Autopia.[1] Nuclear reactor scene and all. [1] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=uA82TQmMUvU https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=uA82TQmMUvU
• bcheung 10y ago
  Telecommuting is a lot cheaper and easier. Also, what is the point of those rails? Seems like self-driving cars would be much easier and require a lot less. I think the robotic conveyer belt style design like seen in movies like iRobot would be cheaper and more convenient. Plus, having it so people don't walk to their cars means you don't have to worry about theft in parking garages as much either.
  • gsnedders 10y ago
    Consistency of acceleration/deceleration/top-speed, I'd guess.
  • desdiv 10y ago
    >Also, what is the point of those rails? Seems like self-driving cars would be much easier and require a lot less. That was my first reaction as well. I think it might have to do with there being no way of expelling the exhaust gas. As long as even just 1% of the cars using the tunnel are fossil fuel powered their exhaust will poison the whole system (carbon monoxide can fuck you up at even just 50 PPM). They could limit the tunnels to just self-driving electric cars though.
  • grondilu 10y ago
    This. When Musk came up with his hyperloop idea, I found it odd. It seems to me that transportation nowadays needs two things : supersonic airliners and self-driving vehicles. The ideal scenario to me is this: 1. wait for a self-driving car to pick you up, 2. be driven to a subway/train-station, 3. take a train to the airport 4. fly at supersonic/hypersonic speed 5. repeat previous steps in reverse
• akhilcacharya 10y ago
  I'm still waiting on this to be revealed to be a part of the new Nathan For You season.
  • strgrd 10y ago
    This is 100% Nathan For You.
• yueq 10y ago
  Why does it even need the rails when the cards have autopilot built-in???
• idlewords 10y ago
  This is the kind of idea you come up with when you spend too long inhaling exhaust fumes on the 405. http://articles.latimes.com/2013/apr/25/local/la-me-ln-elon-musk-405-freeway-20130425 http://articles.latimes.com/2013/apr/25/local/la-me-ln-elon-...
  • huangc10 10y ago
    I don't know why you got so many down votes. That's EXACTLY how Elon Musk came up with the Boring Company.
• adamsea 10y ago
  What they don't show you is the dome keeping the air in, as this is the future society which Elon Musk will build on the moon.
• elorant 10y ago
  You know, we have something like that and it's called Metro.
• jarboot 10y ago
  I thought this was satire until I came to the comments.
• tuacker 10y ago
  I feel like everything Elon Musk undertakes with his companies is just one huge Mars Beta Test. - SpaceX: Obvious, got to get to space somehow - Tesla: Build cars/machines to run on something that is guaranteed to exist on Mars (the sun) vs. Oil - Gigafactory: How to build batteries 101 - Solar roof: While Earths environment may not be as harsh as Mars you still learn something, and improve solar panel production in the process - Boring: May not make too much sense on Earth with existing infrastructure, but undereart..undermars? transportation is protected from the environment/sand stroms/whathaveyou. I also don't know about the mineral composition of Mars and what boring does to the usability of those, but this may be a 2 birds one stone: Bore underground network and get required materials to build out mars base. How to go to Mars and stay there: 1. Figure out what you need 2. Build it 3. ??? 4. Mars Where 3. is use it, refine it, perfect it, like landing a rocket on a automated barge in the middle of the sea. Or he just hates LA traffic.
  • tinym 10y ago
    By the time we've learned how to live on a planet as inhospitable as Mars, maybe we'll know how to make a home on Earth.
    • bhhaskin 10y ago
      We know how to live on another planet like Mars. The issue is getting there, and getting there at scale.
      • dyarosla 10y ago
        I didn't downvote you, but I am genuinely curious where you got the idea that we know how to live on Mars already?
        • phlakaton 10y ago
          In theory, you just go there, plop down a habitat, and live in it. In practice, it might be a little tougher than it sounds. :-)
• outsidetheparty 10y ago
  "The Grimdark Slotcar Company"
• ben_w 10y ago
  The whole thing is sufficiently bizarre that I just have to assume it's an excuse to develop something more useful. If that something is cheap autonomous mining that can be sent to Mars to build a colony before anyone arrives, or a sneaky way to make very large underground nuclear bunkers that always have a surprisingly large number of random ordinary people in them, or just that Elon knows about a major valuable mineral deposit that nobody else is aware if yet, great. But if this really is just some self-driving pods that attach to your car and take you around at relatively high speeds, I don't see the "while underground" doing much for the congestion.
• deleted 10y ago
  [deleted]
• ThrustVectoring 10y ago
  So it's roll-on roll-off rail, with one car per train rather than running on a schedule. Loading and unloading is also parallelized through elevators (though it'd likely be far better to build a ramp down to a station. Basically it'd be an underground angled parking lot, except the parking spots can put themselves on rails and go somewhere else.)
• perteraul 10y ago
  Musk launches companies like designers post on Dribbble. Too bad that only a small % of them really get developed - really love his creative consistency though.
• quux 10y ago
  Given the time, cost, and complexity of Boston's big dig[1]; I'd be very surprised if there's a way to do this practically. 1: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Big_Dig https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Big_Dig
• placeybordeaux 10y ago
  This seems pretty similar to Musk looking at everyone throwing away rockets and deciding to do something about it, however if you look at Seattle's big dig the cost of the machine was only 80 million out of 4.2 billion. He's going to have to find significant price reductions beyond just reusing a boring machine.
• kristianc 10y ago
  Oh jeez I wish someone could just invent some kind of underground mass transportation system able to efficiently transport lots of people from place to place in built up metropolitan areas. That'd be awesome. We could call it a 'Metro' or something.
• tptacek 10y ago
  Since this is a thread about Elon Musk, transportation infrastructure, public transportation, and urban design, and because HN has a sort of affinity for the Robert Moses story (The Power Broker was one of 'aaronsw's favorite books), this seems like a particularly on-point Twitter thread to read after the video: https://twitter.com/EmilyGorcenski/status/858022699112824832 https://twitter.com/EmilyGorcenski/status/858022699112824832 You might not agree with all/any of it but I think it's hard to say this isn't thought-provoking.
  • OrwellianChild 10y ago
    Very real risk for developing transport infrastructure... Would checks against this kind of malicious intent be on the digging company, or on the city planning departments that determine route alignments, etc.? (Real question - I don't understand the relationship between technical contractors and cities in this context.)
  • jbooth 10y ago
    It's not thought provoking, it's a series of thought terminating cliches. I'm as liberal as they come, I'm very sensitive to disguised racism, but the tweets' entire basis of comparison between Musk and Moses is "both are/were ambitious men and now musk is talking about infrastructure". It's free-association garbage. The Moses story is fascinating because he accomplished great things that built NYC but was also a horrible person. The tweeter you linked is like, "hey, Musk is trying to accomplish great things, he must be just like Moses".
    • tptacek 10y ago
      Moses wasn't a horrible person. He was an ambitious, unscrupulous, and effective person with a singular view --- one not totally out of step with the elite of his time --- that happened to be (in the opinion of many, including me) very harmful to the long-term health of New York. I think it's your rebuttal that's facile here, not the comparison in the Twitter thread, but, like you, I might be wrong.
      • 10y ago
• fiatjaf 10y ago
  This is not boring at all. Finally someone found a way to monetize tunnels. Someone is pointing to problems that seem obvious, I can see a lot too, but they've solved monetization.
  • objclxt 10y ago
    I can't quite tell if you're being sarcastic or not. If you are, credit to you as you fooled me.
• kirian 10y ago
  When I heard about this previously I wondered if it's a way of developing tunnel boring technology and expertise that would ultimately be useful on Mars. Underground tunnels and spaces are likely to be useful for a Mars colony and Musk is trying to figure out a way to get someone to fund it here first.
• agjacobson 10y ago
  Ridiculously wasteful. Not needed. Optimize "self-driving in packs with prefiled flight plans." No new infrastructure required.
• jacquesm 10y ago
  What we really need to do is to figure out ways that reduce the need for all this transportation. When you look at it from a distance almost none of it makes sense. The only travel that really needs doing is people working with physical stuff, moving the goods themselves around and leisure travel (and that one is definitely not a must but it is hard to make a stand-in experience that is comparable to the real one). Most commuting is - or rather should be - totally useless.
  • agumonkey 10y ago
    Robots doing physical work, people discussing strategies in conf room with collaborative tools. Problem solved ?
    • clock_tower 10y ago
      Dense cities and narrow streets would solve the same problems with fewer technical demands. Look up New World Economics and "Really Narrow Streets"; the author provides a blueprint of sorts for traditional cities with minimal commute/transport expenses.
      • agumonkey 10y ago
        this ? http://newworldeconomics.com/corbusier-nouveau-3-really-narrow-streets-with-high-rises/ http://newworldeconomics.com/corbusier-nouveau-3-really-narr...
        • clock_tower 10y ago
          Exactly!
        • closeparen 10y ago
          Why wouldn't you at least have right-of-way for two wheeled vehicles? People are so much more efficient on bikes than on their feet.
• kirykl 10y ago
  Where's everyone going in this automated universe? To the work from home office? To the online store?
• brentm 10y ago
  I love it
• webwalker 10y ago
  Anyone else notice the mess of CSS and HTML? The document fully downloaded almost 900kb. In hosting costs alone this could have been down with bare fraction of that and supported 20x more traffic for the same cost. Anyway. Love the idea :D
• otto_ortega 10y ago
  This is impractical in SO MANY levels... Sorry Elon, I support 99% of your ideas, this one belongs to the other 1%...
• Houshalter 10y ago
  City streets have more than enough space for fast transpiration. We just don't use them efficiently. Congestion is a tragedy of the commons. It could be trivially solved by putting a high tax on cars using city streets. Then the only vehicles on the street would be those that transport multiple people or valuable goods. And they would have free reign with minimal congestion. (Also maybe put an extra tax on nonelectric vehicles, because there's much less justification for using them in a city.) If you are willing to build entirely new infrastructure, like this project, there is so much you can do. The main reason self driving cars are taking so long is because they have to be able to do everything a human driver can do. Which is very hard. If you build tracks and sensors into the road itself, it could be much easier. You could have a city filled with fleets of small automated electric people movers.
  • gavinpc 10y ago
    A game I play with my kids when we're waiting at street corners is to count the vehicles' occupancy. Spotting anything > 1 is like scoring points. We don't take the car without an explicit reason: we're late, it's far away, we're hauling stuff, it's raining. But this is Oklahoma, and as soon as you're a block from the OU campus, pedestrians are seen as freaks. Young guys yell at you from pickup trucks. (It's not just me; I have confirmed this with other people over the last 12 years.) We need electric cars, but we also need a cultural change. We drive, and I don't want to judge people for driving. But I wish it were seen as a fallback, rather than a default.
• sid-kap 10y ago
  If anyone's looking for a good source of information on transportation costs, I highly recommend http://twitter.com/MarketUrbanism http://twitter.com/MarketUrbanism and http://twitter.com/2AveSagas http://twitter.com/2AveSagas. They cut through the BS of the mainstream media and politicians on transportation policy and give really intelligent opinions, particularly on zoning/land use and on the US's ridiculous transit costs. (A lot of it is complaining about the ridiculous cost of New York's Second Avenue Subway, and complaining about how the media won't even mention that its cost was 3-5 times more per km than similar routes in London, Paris, and elsewhere in Europe. @MarketUrbanism also has a few other ticks: * He aggressively argues that train systems in the US should save money by getting rid of conductors. * Also, he argues that US buses should use Europe-style fare policing (with ticket inspectors) rather than requiring people to swipe as they board the bus.) They're snarky and a bit hard to undeedia won't even mention that its cost was 3-5 times more per km than similar routes in London, Paris, and elsewhere in Europe. @MarketUrbanisrstand to the uninitiated, but they grow on you. I've learned a lot from them.
  • klarrimore 10y ago
    We have fare policing on express busses here in NYC.
• namesbc 10y ago
  This is a solved problem. It's called trains. Visit Switzerland and you'll see that it is superfluous to build all this expensive infrastructure just to stick your personal car on a train. Riding in a train is bigger, way more comfortable, and much cheaper.
• ziikutv 10y ago
  Here's a question for those way smarter than me. Why is there a need for a platform? Some pros: - If its a shitty, poor regulated car.. this will lead to more safety - Avoid adding extra gear (software/hardware) to the car Cons: - Size restriction - Clean up and Maintenance - How do you ensure the car is in the platform securely?
  • edko 10y ago
    Also: according to the video, entry is quite free. How will they prevent some terrorist asshole from causing major damage with a car full of explosives?
    • ziikutv 10y ago
      Yes. This is also a concern. Also people are usually fucked up. How will I know that some idiot wont jump out of his damn car during this? A restriction would be to simply have all windows and doors locked but this can be circumvented in older cars. Perhaps a restriction would be to cover the entire car in some sort of a housing. This will lead to the size constraints I described earlier. So all in all, a lot of safety concerns with this but I am confident Musk has something up his sleeve. Something like this is a raging yes to one of his two questions; (Yes - "[Will this do good]" | Maybe - "[Is it tractable]" ). I think a solution like this is great if we have a blank slate, which will be the case on Mars. Edit: Spelling and grammar.
      • tsao 10y ago
        Only Teslas will be allowed?
        • ziikutv 10y ago
          Even tesla a [will] havr different sized models. Sedan, the new one that's in backlog, truck that is being unveiled in September, etc. I also do not think he will convince any municipality to allow boring of a network just for tesla. I also do not think he is that close minded.
• ggoss 10y ago
  My bet: it's all about the lithium. The Gigafactory (located near a large domestic lithium cache) will soon consume a large fraction of the world's lithium output, and currently, Tesla is completely dependent on other companies to mine it. My question: will the debris Musk will need to transport away from the next "beta-test" city happen to contain large quantities of lithium? Or will his current suppliers have a new source of (too-good-to-refuse) industrial machinery?
• techmind9669 10y ago
  who wants to buy these domain names tunnelrider.com tunnelriders.com
• techmind9669 10y ago
  who wants to buy these domains tunnelrider.com tunnelriders.com
• ares2012 10y ago
  It's a great video, but one of the most impractical ideas I've ever seen. It would be cheaper to buy more buses and install congestion charges (fees to drive in cities during peak times).
  • Spivak 10y ago
    So you want to reduce traffic by making the roads less enjoyable and more expensive to drive on? Not exactly the type of solution I would like be excited about.
• panabee 10y ago
  besides google, what are the best sites for learning about the challenges of underground mapping and the current state-of-the-art?
• walrus01 10y ago
  Advancements in boring technology for small stuff (1.5 meter diameter utility tunnels) would also be a game changer in major urban areas. If you need to do cut and cover trenching to install vaults/manholes and duct for underground fiber in a major city nowadays, a several km distance project can run anywhere from $400 to $1000 per meter or more. Traffic closures, street closures, flagging, shoring of excavations, moving big construction equipment around on flatbed trailer in urban cores, etc. To the extent that at $800/meter, a 4 km fiber path could cost $3.2m. A bored small diameter service tunnel sized lined with concrete sections (basically a mini version of what the Bertha TBM in Seattle has just finished boring), sized to accommodate small electric carts that could be shared by multiple cables stuck to walls would be a game changer.
• theprop 10y ago
  I feel this could be useful as a kind of underground super-highway for some cities i.e. I need to get from one end of the city to the other end without stopping somewhere in between. Tunnels can get built today as opposed to drones or flying vehicles which are at least several years away. It could probably help traffic in some large cities. If it could be done inexpensively and quickly it's interesting. Some sort of a cross-country vacuum tube type tunnel that could let you go from NYC to LA in 15 minutes would be amazing and I think closer to the original hyperloop idea, but ridiculously expensive and engineering-wise beyond the initial goals of this project.
• Flemlord 10y ago
  If successful, I assume this will be used to drill underground hyperloop tunnels. That's obvious, right?
• xxgreg 10y ago
  I like the idea of putting cars underground, because then you can build a human focused city above. But the video shows an urban wasteland of aboveground high-speed traffic and no people. WAT?
• EJTH 10y ago
  Makes more sense than the hyper loop to be honest...
  • aphextron 10y ago
    I'm pretty sure cheap and efficient tunneling would be a prerequisite for the hyperloop
• partycoder 10y ago
  I wonder why having to transport a car and not just the passengers themselves.
  • bamboozled 10y ago
    He is a car salesman ?
• renega3 10y ago
  Obviously a terrible idea, but a mining/tunnel building company would be a reasonable outcome.
• vmasto 10y ago
  Kinda off topic with what this is about but I have a few technical questions regarding the website (which is just a logo and a YouTube video embed on a white background): - Why is it built with React? - Why does it need to load so much JavaScript? - Why does it need to load a custom web font? (There's exactly zero text from what I see). - Why does it need a CSS grid framework?
  • deepuj 10y ago
    There is obviously more coming soon.
  • collinmanderson 10y ago
    Yeah, it's amazing how much code is on that page. Really? How many font weights are you pulling in? 5? Is there _any_ text on that page? :) It actually looks like it was made using a GoDaddy website builder. https://builtwith.com/boringcompany.com https://builtwith.com/boringcompany.com I suppose they don't really need a perfect website at this point.
• OoTheNigerian 10y ago
  I think there is nothing more boring than reading a bunch of people who never propose anything point out flaws. You all sound like Balmer. This is a CONCEPT!! Elon is THINKING you all are pointing, laughing and adding no value to the conversation of "What comes next?" If your idea is "the metro works", a 150 year old system, then this video is not for you. To the video, I like the concept of combining public and private transportation in the same path. It also makes sense as a way to directly link far distances. To me, this is a modification of the hyperloop concept. Something more feasible in the shorter term and definitely less risky. Of course all this depends on the economics and physics of boring becoming cheap and 10x faster. keep thinking Elon. Earth needs more of your "fantasies". Let the pointers keep pointing.
  • nebabyte 10y ago
    If that is your idea of value, there exist plenty of scifi writers/artists with concepts like this, except more practical, better thought out, or so on So perhaps instead of 'pointing' you should take your own advice?
    • ryanwaggoner 10y ago
      That's really unfair considering the source. This is someone who continually has proved the skeptics wrong. At what point does he earn the benefit of the doubt in your eyes?
      • Trd 10y ago
        Proven what? His main claim of glory, Tesla, still hasn't achieved what he built the company for: making EVs mainstream. Rather than the ecological revolution he pretends it to be (his focus on climate change), it is still nothing but an expensive toy for the wealthy. Not exactly selling at the levels where we could talk about making a change for the planet. Maybe you're referring to SpaceX in proving skeptics wrong? We have yet to see if that company ever becomes profitable. Reusing rockets is not what made people skeptical as much as pretending it'd make financial sense to do. Most of his other popular pet projects are even more pie-in-the-sky. Neuralink? That's nothing but talk. Hyperloop? not a single prototype built in the real world, in a real location. OpenAi sounds like what a conspiracy theorist would come up with.
• megablast 10y ago
  What a huge waste of resources for individual transport options.
• deleted 10y ago
  [deleted]
• simplehuman 10y ago
  Stupid naive question. If Musk cares so much about environment and all that, why not just build proper public transport for the bay area?
  • macawfish 10y ago
    This is actually a very, very good question.
  • ryanwaggoner 10y ago
    I think he's motivated by the idea of building systems that enable other systems that wouldn't be possible otherwise. Examples would be the gigafactory, his comments about how Tesla is not learning how to build cars, but learning how to build car factories, etc. The approach with SpaceX wasn't "OK, let's build a rocket system that can get to Mars." Instead it was "OK, let's build a company that has a repeatable and sustainable launch business that can drive down cost and drive up efficiency over time, so that getting to Mars won't be a near-impossible problem anymore." Building a one-off public transit system in the Bay Area, with all the current technological, regulatory, and social headaches, doesn't really offer many opportunities to improve things, does it? Elon isn't God; he can't magically overcome all the factors that cause the Bay Area to have bad transit today, just like he couldn't magically start colonizing Mars in 2004. So building a new class of technologies to bore tunnels much more quickly, safely, and cheaply seems like it enables a whole new set of opportunities to make the current transit problems more tractable. It creates a whole new set of opportunities for transportation that simply don't exist today. I'm tired, so forgive me if that isn't clear, just what's running through my head.
• deleted 10y ago
  [deleted]
• amelius 10y ago
  Curious: how many solar panels do you need to drive a tunnel boring machine?
  • tmalsburg2 10y ago
    Why is that interesting?
• yourapostasy 10y ago
  It would be interesting if TBC commercialized a subterrene [1], and drove down costs of building underground structures to a tenth or hundredth of current. But commercial mobile nuclear power is unfortunately not available. [1] https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Subterrene https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Subterrene
• bbcbasic 10y ago
  Just... wow! How did they generate that monstrosity of a html document?
• Xcelerate 10y ago
  It's amazing to me the amount of negativity directed toward his projects and the millions of reasons people give for why they "won't work" (not necessarily on HN, but at least on general news websites). I'm starting to believe the only difference between those who start their own companies and those who don't is that the latter convinces themselves that it is impossible, never builds anything, and from their own lack of having ever produced anything, concludes that their original supposition was indeed correct.
  • dustinupdyke 10y ago
    Many people think and are incentivized to think about how to optimize for today. Thinking about tomorrow can be counter-intuitive as to the way things work today, and it is pretty easy to construct negative arguments about tomorrow that are based on what we know right now.
  • aaron-lebo 10y ago
    edit: don't feel like arguing. Best of luck to Musk.
    • darawk 10y ago
      > The Hyperloop was supposed to be a revolutionary form of transport, turns out it was overblown. He didn't launch the Hyperloop, though. He explicitly said he wasn't personally going to pursue it, he was just putting the idea out there. You can't put the fact that it hasn't yet been implemented (even though there are people working on it) on him. I've seen no evidence that the concept is infeasible, or poorly thought out.
      • jodrellblank 10y ago
        It is infeasible, if it's going to be vacuum, for a pile of practical and safety reasons: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=RNFesa01llk https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=RNFesa01llk Maybe it will pivot into something not-as-originally-hyped by the same name.
• wireedin 10y ago
  What happens to those holes once the car is lowered into the tunnel by those carriers? Can I pedestrian just jump into the hole and then sue the boring company?
• wireedin 10y ago
  What happens to those holes once the carrier lowers the car into the tunnel? Can I, pedestrian, just jump in there with the intention of discovering the future and then sue the Boring company? Well jks aside future is getting here sooner than we think.
• edpichler 10y ago
  My opinion: moving a problem to other place you do not solve the problem. We have too much cars, millions of people, each driving a ton of steel to move from place to place alone. Cars on the underground is not a good solution. What world needs is automated and intelligent transport, and for the masses.
  • legolas2412 10y ago
    Automated intelligent transport for the masses. Subway trains you say? Americans hate those.
    • edpichler 10y ago
      Subways are expensive and complicated in some terrains, but woks pretty good I think, don't you? PS: Hiperloop also seems a good solution for long travels. PS: Each solution is better for a specific problem. Automated cars seems promise to small and medium cities.
• dynjo 10y ago
  Whether Elon Musk can deliver on all of his ideas is almost an moot point. The important thing is that he is inspiring an entire generation to think outside the box and to believe that they really can change things. For that alone he gets my gratitude.
• athenot 10y ago
  This looks really cool. However, boring through rock is the most expensive way to connect 2 places. It only makes sense if the land features or purchase value require it. Fundamentally, this is about short-circuiting the regular road network and establishing a managed packet network that can bypass congestion. Interestingly, that's also the value proposition of public transit, though it also runs into issues of cost, and too low of a population density make it unfeasible. I still think we haven't fully leveraged the potential of busses. In most cities, they are slow because they combine the disadvantages of road traffic with the disadvantage of time tables. But what if busses operated on their own dedicated network? Bogota deployed a public transit system made with busses but with a UX of a train[1]. This is a genius idea that could work in many US cities, which have a lot more space to spare. But back to the original idea, I think we might see in the future a "managed" road network, reserved to self-driving cars which are driven by some central management system, optimising routing for the whole network so as to prevent congestion. This won't require tunnels, just gates, dedicated roads and lots of software. [1] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=cU6ImWY4IBc https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=cU6ImWY4IBc
  • 19eightyfour 10y ago
    Regarding the boring expense, an NTBM[1] or subterrene[2], is said to be cheaper and faster. [1] http://www.sheepletv.com/nuclear-tunnel-boring-machines-switzerland-has-nothing-on-us-2/ http://www.sheepletv.com/nuclear-tunnel-boring-machines-swit... [2] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Subterrene https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Subterrene My impression is the boring feasibility and costs will not be the limiter of a very cool tech like this happening, but a more boring practical cost, probably the "zoning" cost required to get compliance and permission for all that state and federal land needed to build the underground link network.
    • cbhl 10y ago
      Considering the name of the company, maybe they have invented a radical new way to reduce boring costs?
      • 10y ago
• bmuppireddy 10y ago
  I was just wondering if building bridges is more feasible idea than digging tunnels. Bridges will be easier to maintain, costs relatively cheaper, relatively easier to setup and we already have more experience in building bridges.
• dflock 10y ago
  Genius marketing/PR - just look at this huge thread ;)
• hxta98596 10y ago
  Interesting idea but very weird video. A couple thoughts: 1. "Boring Company" is such a great, funny and fitting name for a tunneling startup. FYI there are people who get so excited about a name they think is just perfect (or title for book or name for a yacht...) that they pursue creating it even though they aren't seriously into the idea. See: the better the name of the yacht, the less the owner uses it... 2. Agree with other comments the video verges on embarrassing. I don't think it helps Musk's cause much...Unless: (A) he subscribes to "there's no such thing as bad publicity" and/or (B) Musk in fact wants other entrepreneurs to see his crazy ideas as a catalyst to start their own copy-cat companies working on the same issue usually with their twist. He has made public comments (especially around the time when he open-sourced his patents) that support both (A) and (B) being true. See: all the new space, solar and hyperloop like companies that started in Musk's wake. 3. I don't think we should blindly give big-thinking entrepreneurs the benefit of the doubt. That has gone very poorly recently and historically. But I think we/the public/government regulators can support innovation and keep an eye on big-thinking well-funded entrepreneurs so they don't do something f'ing stupid full of negative externalities and tragedies of commons and tyrannies of small decisions etc... 4. This particular form of new tunneling as seen in the video might not happen. I hope it doesn't as there are serious engineering and public safety issues. But Musk has a point about needing to dig! AND Musk thinks very long term (the guy is working on going to Mars). Earth only has so much land, as human population increases, especially around cities, we can only build up or down. Both should probably be tried. I remember when Jeff Bezos said Amazon wants to try to deliver your packages by drones, and that Amazon also is out destroy the American economy. Ok he didn't say the second thing. But as for drones, people went nuts on both sides he said that but it's going forward. What if Musk's tunnels started off smaller, focused on delivering packages into and across cities, so not huge tunnels for people but more like conveyor belts for deliveries? There is a need for that or there will be soon. Would that be more palpable and would there be less averse reaction? Have a good, relaxing weekend to all!
• nprecup 10y ago
  I do like the idea of coupling self-driving car technology with taxi service and underground highways. When it comes to urban environments, automobiles and associated infrastructure takes up an enormous amount of the available space. It hurts resident's quality of life in many ways (noise, pollution, traffic, stress, less green space, etc). This is one of the reasons I am totally on board with investing heavily in mass transit underground (super excited that Seattle is finally getting their act together on this, which is my home). If the cost of developing underground transport infrastructure is driven down enough by this venture, we could improve traffic flow and reclaim some of the space on the surface as space for people, not cars. Couple that and a future with clean energy for cars and when using a self driving car service is more convenient than owning a car, we could create a transportation system that can get you anywhere, quickly, efficiently, and without transfers. Self driving car services would allow us to reclaim huge portions of cities by reducing the need for parking spaces everywhere we go, and make driving safer. Tunnels for highways could replace interstates that cut cities in two, as well as provide more flexible routes. Electric cars could make our cities healthier. I think I see what Elon is trying to do...
• jaimex2 10y ago
  My guess is Space X came across a way to make tunnels really fast and cheaply. Now to interconnect the world underground.
• gregpilling 10y ago
  If I recall, this whole idea started as a result of traffic on the 405 or something. This idea is only useful if it could deliver traffic volumes at meaninful percentage of the current 405 throughput. wikipedia says "The freeway's annual average daily traffic between exits 21 and 22 in Seal Beach reached 374,000 in 2008" . So how many car elevators to do 10% of that? How many car elevators to move 37,000 vehicles per day? Assuming a 1 minute cycle time, that would be 25 elevators running 24/7 evenly, with no rush hour (obvious unrealistic). I think it is a scale problem, much like 3D printers won't upset the economics of high speed injection molding anytime soon.
  • jws 10y ago
    Looking from the other direction, say an elevator can handle 60 cars an hour, so given staggered commutes it might serve the needs of 100 drivers. If having elevator access let you cover most of your commute at 100mph, what would that be worth? Multiply by 100 drivers, and 10 more to get from annual revenue to capital expense and I'd say million dollar elevators are no impediment at all.
• termie 10y ago
  I wonder if you could make a big drill out of hundreds of hot swappable high torque Tesla motors that were intelligently geared and well mounted. Hot swapping battery packs from the underside of a car via automation was demonstrated years back by Tesla so learnings there could be used. Tesla uses a bunch of widely available 18650s for their packs and benefit from that same modularity, and I imagine big cost savings there for a drill that size even with a great deal of breakage in the array of motors.
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• Tiktaalik 10y ago
  The experts are panning this idea. http://www.cbc.ca/news/canada/british-columbia/elon-musk-ted-vancouver-2017-1.4090459 http://www.cbc.ca/news/canada/british-columbia/elon-musk-ted...
• dankohn1 10y ago
  The essence of The Boring Company is the same as the business plan behind SpaceX: people assume that an existing industry (tunnel development, rocket launches) is reasonably well run and operating at something of a local optimum. But it turns out that there are order of magnitude (i.e., 10x) improvements available when Musk is able to assemble a sufficiently capable team to focus on it. I would suggest that tunnelling is a more fertile opportunity, given that there had already been a bunch of rocket startups that had tried and failed over the last couple decades. Tunneling today is insanely expensive. Here's a superb article from Matt Yglesias at Vox on the $2.2 B per km Second Avenue Subway: http://www.vox.com/policy-and-politics/2017/1/1/14112776/new-york-second-avenue-subway-phase-2 http://www.vox.com/policy-and-politics/2017/1/1/14112776/new... . Other countries are already achieving costs of $100 M per km or less. Now, does the car carriage from the video make perfect sense? I'm skeptical. But Musk has never been slavishly faithful to the original conception of his ideas. He gets started and then iterates, and so far the results have been awfully impressive.
  • pnathan 10y ago
    I would love to see a cheap tunnelling technology in the US. Musk certainly has experience dropping the costs of technology, and I would guess that a well designed private subway system might be profitable after a time in some US cities. Would. Love. It.
• yongjik 10y ago
  Ever been to New York or a similar city and watched people pouring out of a subway station at 8:30 am? Now imagine every one of them is sitting in a sedan that is delivered out of an elevator, one by one. According to Wikipedia, "Times Square–42nd Street/42nd Street–Port Authority Bus Terminal" station has 206,247 riders on each weekday on average. If we have 100 elevators which can transport a car every five seconds, it will take 172 minutes to move all of them. With more realistic numbers (an elevator usually doesn't go down and come back in five seconds) it will be more than a day.
• givinguflac 10y ago
  The monorail!
• musesum 10y ago
  Maybe car tunnels are a gateway to terraforming small moons.
• marcell 10y ago
  Engineering aside, how does this work out legally? How does a company get permission to dig tunnels under Lps Angeles, or any other American city?
• datahack 10y ago
  Well if you figure a mile of urban freeway in an urban area is an easy 5 million per mile which makes it about a thousand bucks a foot. That doesn't include annexation or planning, just construction. A tbm can make a tunnel for 19k a foot in the right environment (https://www.wsj.com/articles/the-high-tech-low-cost-world-of-tunnel-building-1461549887 https://www.wsj.com/articles/the-high-tech-low-cost-world-of...), but that cost is dropping as more and more tbm projects since 2000 have driven the costs down. So basically it's 20x as expensive to bury a highway as it is to build one on the surface. Ok. But, when you look deeper, in urban areas there just aren't rights of way available to put new highways, and so you have huge slow costs that grind out projects. In addition, if you can find a place to put one, they are... ready... usually public infrastructure. This is a private highway... private highways are a good idea. Take a look at https://mises.org/library/privatization-roads-and-highways https://mises.org/library/privatization-roads-and-highways This is a bet on free market roads. That is a big bet, but goodness it's not a naive one. I feel like Elon has some kind of cache of historic photos and documents from the late 60s and early 70s that he is just pulling pages out of. Anyways, 20x more expensive is very doable and these roads could operate profitably in urban areas (and that's the opening, current cost). Oh, and the son of a gun bought a used tbm, which will save gobs of the cost. Oh, and it's for a ton of jobs (the cost of acquiring the Tbm is a large part of the cost of tunnels), and there is going to be a glut of tbm inventory in coming years. Add it all up, and it sure isn't a "dumb idea" in some kind of intrinsic, obvious fashion. Seems like a good bet actually.
• senthilnayagam 10y ago
  If you ignore the boring and tunnel part. A autonomous high speed contraption to carry cars, yes human driven cars including the fuel driven ones is the actual innovation. This will definitely work in many cities now itself.
• dafidof 10y ago
  Where do you get the energy to make this and then to maintain this? Entrophy? Hello?
• TD-Linux 10y ago
  The rails are a rather interesting vote against batteries. Previously, the hyperloop designs were all gung-ho about loading batteries, however that's not shown here, implying third rail power.
• tim333 10y ago
  While this looks very cool I'm not sure how the economics would work out. The UK-France channel tunnel for instance which transports cars fairly rapidly through a 31 mile tunnel cost $21 bn to build and the tickets aren't cheap (~£100 single) which works if the competition is a ferry but may not if it's just driving a bit. Maybe Musk will figure how to bring down the cost a few times. I would have thought semi self driving cars platooning would be a cheaper and more practical way to beat the jams.
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• tzs 10y ago
  This is very confusing. There is nothing on the site but the video, and the video doesn't explain who they are and whether this is a serious project or just a design concept, and so on. I think that this is a case where a secondary source submission, such as this one [1] to a TechCrunch story about this, is better than the primary source source submission, because the TechCrunch story actually tells us what the hell we are looking at. I think the moderators goofed by deciding that this submission was the one that should win. Anyway, it's an Elon Musk company, and he talked about it at a recent TED talk. [1] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=14222545 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=14222545
• convivialdingo 10y ago
  Not that tunnels are a boring idea, but if you handed me a couple of billion, I think we could solve public transportation using ultralight above ground systems. I would base it on a roller coaster type design using single or dual tracks suspended by high load anchored polls. The car weights would be kept to a minimum, allowing tracks and supports to be sized much smaller, lowering cost and design requirements. The average car would weight less than a bus, and could travel at very high speeds. Existing trains and subway systems are based off of hundred-year old freight train systems which were designed to transport thousands of tons of weight. This has a huge cost for subway and commuter train design. A modern subway train costs millions of dollars, weighs multiple tons, and is an immense engineering task. By engineering a total target track and car weight of a few tons per spacing instead - this system would be far cheaper and easier to maintain. Passenger cars would be designed to hold only a dozen people, and cars would be linked or unlinked as needed to increase capacity and efficiency. This design also allows the system to maintain extra cars of varying sizes to manage variable rider capacity. Rather than time tables, the system would run based on rider demand, maintaining a slight over-capacity to handle peaks. This is no different than the typical Uber-type demand based system. On the typical street, such systems would only utilize a few square feet of space per block. They could also utilize existing utilities and would require minimal space for stations. Trains would exit the main track to prevent stalling the main rails while boarding passengers. This system could also be extended to long-hail service as well into suburbs, or perhaps across states, It wouldn't have nearly the same difficulties of property right of way, environmental impact, and NYMBY - as it essentially has about the same impact as a typical electrical infrastructure. It could also be placed along existing roads and bridges to quickly build out the system. Anyway - just an idea.
  • unityByFreedom 10y ago
    Sounds better than drilling through rock to me.
• jpswade 10y ago
  Interesting concept, but big, deep holes in the road seem like a health and safety nightmare. Look forward to seeing the next iteration.
• london888 10y ago
  I can't see how the economics of this would make it viable.
• sonnhy 10y ago
  This seems like a premium service, because you have to choose your destination somehow, and here comes some device that you have to install in your car (I'm referring to some kind electronic toll collection + navigation system). Also, the amount of people using this service has to be limited somehow. As the technology is presented in video, the input/output of the carriages is quite limited. Also, what about the rush hours? Everyone wants to get in, to go faster, so queue will be created, waiting for their turn. What will happen when more people, than the exit queue can handle, want to get out on the same exit/area? You will be redirected to another exit, far away as much as how many people wanted to get out in that area.
• JepZ 10y ago
  The funny thing about Elon is, that the lower the general chances for a successful undertaking are, the higher are the chances that he will succeed. I'm just not sure if the entrance to the boring market is a high-risk venture. But at least the idea of building an underground network under existing cities is a very ambitious project.
• mikojan 10y ago
  In germany this is called a subway. We also fixed the problem with the queue and people being required to bring their vehicle to use this vehicle.
• rmm 10y ago
  As someone who has been in the UG mining industry for the past decade. This is very interesting.
• Reason077 10y ago
  Why the "pods"? Wouldn't it make more sense for self-driving electric vehicles (which can safely maintain separations from other traffic and travel at high speed on a narrow track) to use their own propulsion? Apparently the concept behind The Boring Company is to reduce the cost of tunnelling, but surely the "pods" would add a great deal of cost to this system.
  • irfanka 10y ago
    Because not all vehicles are self driving.
    • Reason077 10y ago
      They will be, though. It's reasonable to restrict tunnel access to appropriately equipped vehicles. Why jump through expensive hoops to support classic cars which can still use surface streets anyway?
• cerebrum 10y ago
  Where is the advantage to the tried and tested metro? Transporting individual vehicles instead of people is much more complex, costly and will require more maintenance.
• frik 10y ago
  This looks totally like a copy cat of old school books about electric cars and the future. So nothing special at all, people had such visions for some decades. Funny thing is projects like "Hyperloop", "Boring Company", etc all are already tried many decades ago in various places around the word, just marketed under a different name e.g. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pneumatic_tube https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pneumatic_tube
• lopespm 10y ago
  I have profound respect of Musk's perseverance and courage to tackle difficult problems, coupled with a great vision of the future. This project however, as it was presented, strikes me as a bit off the mark. I lived in a dense city with good public transportation and good bike and pedestrian lanes. To get around the city and its surroundings, I would mostly use my bike. It was incredibly fast to find a parking spot and to get from point A to point B. Other times, I would use the integrated public transport system (bus/train/tram) if wanted to go somewhere further in less time. I had options, flexibility and much more freedom than I would if I used/owned a car. Not only that, but my quality of life was way higher than that in the suburbs. Not having a car made a huge difference: more physical activity, less monetary burdens and the piece of mind acquired by not thinking about its maintenance and care. This takes me to my second point: passenger cars are mostly useful in sparse areas, like the suburbs. In dense areas it makes less sense to have a personal cocoon for transportation. Although the boring company's tunnels are underground, that same energy and investment would be better suited in a public transport alternative, like a subway. This subway would transport people and their bikes, and this could serve as a push for the street level pedestrian, bike and public transport infrastructures to get better.
• reubenswartz 10y ago
  By the time you could conceivably build some of these tunnels, the Teslas and most other cars will be at least somewhat self-driving. (Since you're in tunnels, the problem gets a lot simpler, with on/off the real tricky parts. I would have thought you'd say where you wanted to go, and if you had enough battery to get there, the car would just drive itself in the tunnel, eliminating the need for a whole other wheeled, motorized sled to move a wheeled, motorized vehicle.
• stuaxo 10y ago
  If he does bring down the cost of tunnelling, I hope we get a lot more tunnels for trains. If he has any sense he would be bidding for these projects too. It would be great if by default we could get bigger tunnels (if crossrail were bigger then we could get double deck train in the future for instance).
• gens 10y ago
  I'd like to see them try to do that beneath my city. PS I am ashamed of the current top comment (despite not having anything to do with it).
• spudley 10y ago
  Check out the absolute lack of any pedestrians and cyclists in the street scenes. That tells you everything you need to know about the value of this video (pretty much zero).
• niyazpk 10y ago
  This looks like a cool (probably impractical) way to recharging the car on the go. No more delays to re-charge the battery.
• ChuckMcM 10y ago
  As a backup you could always sell them as automated parking lots while you were working on the tunnels. Because I'm odd in that sort of way, I imagine the tunnel as an infinite tape and the entrance/exit ramp as a place where you can read or write the tape. Now if you could just force the cars to either forward or backward on demand ...
• yy77 10y ago
  Musk might probably not want to build a full network but just one or two tunnels for his own convenience and grab some more focus and investment as well.
• carapace 10y ago
  Bollards around the elevators; the car-cars should connect into trains.
• jeshwanth 10y ago
  Elon should do AMA on Boring company to answer many questions and confusions here.