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On the spectrum of likeliness to mean shit all, how does "verbal green light" compare to Obama announcing $8 billion toward high speed rail (which was later obs
by Tiktaalik 9y ago
On the spectrum of likeliness to mean shit all, how does "verbal green light" compare to Obama announcing $8 billion toward high speed rail (which was later obstructed by republicans).
I can't help but think of this Simpsons scene whenever I hear Musk talk about Hyperloop and the Boring company.
http://imgur.com/a/KRmlS http://imgur.com/a/KRmlS
The guy has no skin in the game, and meanwhile he's building a car company which does not benefit from increased public transit use. It's a sham folks.
- unethical_ban 9y agoSo a hyperloop in the NE corridor means no one in the 320,000,000 person, 9,833,520 km2 landmass would want an electric car and all its potential benefits? Also, Tesla is a vehicle (heh) for battery research.
- blackguardx 9y agoI may not be up to date, but my understanding was that Tesla makes battery packs, not the cells themselves. They get the cells from outside suppliers.
- mortehu 9y agoTesla Gigafactory 1 started making cells in January 2017.
- deleted 9y ago[deleted]
- deleted 9y ago[deleted]
- blackguardx 9y agoAll the articles I've read made it sound less like Tesla was building cells, but that Panasonic was building cells inside the Gigafactory.
- mikeash 9y agoThe Boring Company is meant to work with the road system by transporting cars underground. It fits perfectly with his car company. What's the nature of the supposed sham? It doesn't look like he's structuring this company in a way that will let him take the money and run, so what's the plan?
- Tiktaalik 9y agoThe sham is that he's creating hype in future nonexistent tech to distract government officials from investing in current infrastructure that would compete with automobiles. Governments could build high speed rail right now and significantly improve transportation options, but with the promise of some better Hyperloop system in the future, they could be encouraged to hold off. Of course Hyperloop may never appear at all. Similarly with the Boring Company Musk is asserting that increasing road capacity with tunnels will reduce congestion and improve the transportation system, when in reality this issue has been studied at length and has been proven false. Due to induced demand increasing road capacity simply encourages more people to drive, which Musk would of course be in favour of. Yet again by putting forward a zany idea and additionally hand waving about the future promise of autonomous cars, Musk distracts government officials from real transportation solutions that can be implemented today.
- oh_sigh 9y agoYour first paragraph doesn't make any sense. Our government could have built high speed rail any time in the past 30 years if there was the political will to get it done. There wasn't. The fact that someone is offering alternatives at this point just means that they realistically see that no one has no desire to build high speed rails in the US.
- mikeash 9y agoI'd say the history of our public transport infrastructure over the past few decades demonstrates the utter unnecessity of this scheme, since it happens all by itself anyway.
- mtotheizhphenom 9y ago
- crush-n-spread 9y agoThe reality is that USA has terrible trains. Our transportation technology is horribly behind in everything but cars. You can tear down this guy as much as you want, but the truth is that our trains are decades behind China and Japan. This is an effort by private industry to bring us back to the forefront, and we should embrace it.