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I think this follows Elons pattern of being able to find areas where the fundamental technology has advanced and is available, but the integration and step up t

• mc3 7y ago
  Yeah OK, does anyone have the angle on that? Is there a new technology aspect here?
  • seiferteric 7y ago
    The big one I remember was to remove diesel engines from the machine and make it electric. This removes the problem of fumes. Did they do that?
  • xeromal 7y ago
    The idea is to make it 10x cheaper and 14x faster. The boring company is more of a personal effort by Elon due to his hatred of LA traffic.
    • astrodust 7y ago
      "Let's solve traffic by building more roads!" Elon has a lot to learn about induced demand.
      • cgy1 7y ago
        He has said that he doesn't believe in induced demand: https://twitter.com/elonmusk/status/1211076829395738626?s=20 https://twitter.com/elonmusk/status/1211076829395738626?s=20
        • majormajor 7y ago
          I think he's woefully disconnected from the non-rich person's life, then. He can already afford to buy however much space he wants. >If the transport system exceeds public travel needs, there will be very little traffic. Sure. But... it would take an enormous amount of development to make this happen, because so many people are going to want more space if they can have it with still a <1hr commute. So more sprawl, leading to more pressure on the new network, lather, rinse, repeat... For all the talk of walkable neighborhoods, if you gave people the choice of a 30min walk-and-subway commute in a 5-story condo building vs a 30min new-car-tunnel point to point commute with a 2000sqft house on a private parcel of land, you're going to have a lot (not everyone, but a lot) of people picking the latter. Best case it's going to, for a long time, until we reach steady state, still just be a repeat of the "build roads, watch sprawl" cycle of the last century, just with potential to build even more roads by being able to continually go deeper (but is this that much easier than vertical overpasses and such?).
          • deleted 7y ago
            [deleted]
          • logifail 7y ago
            > potential to build even more roads by being able to continually go deeper (but is this that much easier than vertical overpasses and such?) Isn't it easier to persuade local residents to support a tunnel under their area than an above-ground structure in their area?
        • astrodust 7y ago
          This is like not believing in climate change.
      • njarboe 7y ago
        If you believe that car travel must be innately evil, then induced demand is a problem with building more roads. More roads mean more people using them to do something they want to do. These tunnels will be toll roads, so if you just up the tolls you can have them not get jammed up. You then have a real idea of how much a tunnel can make and you can get people to invest in building more of them. Individual point-to-point transport systems are great. We just need to find a way to reduce the bad externalities of cars (pollution, traffic deaths, non-walkable cities/town, traffic congestion, taking up surface space). Elon Musk is working on three of these with Tesla and the Boring Company.
        • astrodust 7y ago
          The bad externalities of cars are numerous and extend well beyond those things you list, but primarily they create an astoundingly expensive barrier to being part of society and not someone who's left behind. There aren't enough tunnels in the world to dig your way out of traffic problems. The more roads you make the more traffic you get. Toll roads just increase the already staggering cost of owning a car, marginalizing even more people. What about not doing that and instead investing in alternatives?
          • Gibbon1 7y ago
            A lot of this stuff, 'ride sharing', self driving cars, boring company tunnels, and electric flopters seems not like a way to solve societies transportation/congestion issues but to solve it for the small percentage of well to do people.
        • paranoidrobot 7y ago
          > More roads mean more people using them to do something they want to do. I'd argue that a lot of people don't want to drive a car, they want to get to their destination. Where options other than driving are available, then they weigh cost/convenience to make their decision. My view isn't that cars travel is innately evil, or that building roads is always terrible - but that so much more money is spent on building more roads than on public transit options. For some reason we ignore the last 60+ years of evidence to show that building more roads doesn't lead to reduced traffic. It's simply not possible to build out roads fast enough to beat the rise in traffic. If you build public transit options that get people between locations they want to travel, ensure that it's run on time, clean, and affordable - then people who already drive will evaluate that cost/convenience function for themselves and decide that public transport is actually better. This results in much reduced road traffic.
      • johannes1234321 7y ago
        He also wants to sell more cars. Not less.
      • clairity 7y ago
        induced demand is often (intentionally?) misunderstood as demand being literally insatiable (and by extension, "why bother?"), but really, we're just severly underserving the market, and there are very limited price signals we can rely on to understand the cost and value of a road foot-second (or meter-second). people want more fast, affordable, on-demand, point-to-point private transportation. "induced demand" tells us we're woefully under-providing that demand. we're very far from the desired equilibrium point in nearly every metro area. elon seems to understand that better than a pithy quip might indicate. along with mixed-use-as-default along transportation corridors, i would prefer more underground trains, dedicated busways, and small personal transport infrastructure (for electric bikes, scooters, etc.) in our cities (particularly in LA), but every effort, including the boring company's, that addresses that overwhelming demand helps.
        • BurningFrog 7y ago
          My take is that road access is severely underpriced. If you had to pay for road access, you could easily set the price to where demand meets supply, and all roads would have well flowing traffic 24/7. But of course "induced demand" happens when the price is $0. The same would occur for bread, phones or pianos at that price point.
          • fctorial 7y ago
            Roads do have a price, and it does increase with demand. What is the worth of 10 minutes of your time?
            • mc3 7y ago
              Therefore more roads => more cars => same trip times. I could see that people would make decisions to take jobs where they travel by car, or choose to live further away etc. with more tunnels. That could be a good thing or bad, but yes the demand will increase, because people will find new reasons to get about if there is more road to do it on. Let alone business use of roads.
            • MiroF 7y ago
      • CamperBob2 7y ago
        Induced demand = the product is actually being used. The hoary old cliché that says, "Building roads just increases congestion," is nothing more than an exercise in measuring the wrong thing. Market demand, induced and otherwise, is a good thing, if the externalities are also addressed. That's basically Musk's whole business model.
        • astrodust 7y ago
          Infrastructure operates differently from a good or service where you have a multitude of often interchangeable selections. The easy availability of roads leads to more people driving since it's the more effective option, which in turn leads to more traffic. Eventually the system reaches equilibrium where it's busy enough that other alternatives are more desirable. Time and time again predictions of apocalyptic traffic doom have failed to manifest when roads are removed. The traffic just goes away largely because the traffic was an artifact of the roads being there in the first place. People are highly adaptable. They take the path of least resistance. If that path is a road, they take it. If you make the road bigger, it reduces resistance and becomes busier.
          • CamperBob2 7y ago
            So where are we on this particular rendition of the Laffer curve? Are we already fortunate enough to be at "peak road," right here and now? That seems unlikely, but I suppose it's possible. Or would it be best to either remove more lanes, or add new ones? Would traffic flow become infinitely fast if we removed them all? Conversely, would it become infinitely slow if we paved every square inch of land in sight? It's almost as if such simplistic models are worse than useless, huh.
            • paranoidrobot 7y ago
              > It's almost as if such simplistic models are worse than useless, huh. I'd say that it's more like taking models to extremes is useless. If your doctor says that you're consuming too much salt it is increasing your risk of a range of diseases, you don't turn around and say "But salt is necessary for the function of life, I can't just cut it out entirely!". The answer, as with most things - is somewhere in between. With our current set of transport options - a mix of transport options are going to be optimal. The specific mix is going to depend entirely on the area and traffic patterns.
  • drcross 7y ago
    Along with the tunnelling speed improvements from what I'm gathering they are using model X chassis vehicles within the tunnels. The benefit of this is that you don't need rails, just line following sensors. There's no brake replacement because of regen etc. The main takeaway is that the carriage system will be able to be maintained by car mechanics and not locomotion engineers. What the stations will look like will be interesting to see because each "carriage" will be able to depart once full instead of waiting for an entire train to fill up.
    • int_19h 7y ago
      But rails were invented for a reason - they're drastically more efficient. So doesn't this just trade lower upfront costs for much higher operational costs (in energy consumption per mile travelled)?
      • incompatible 7y ago
        Would rails even be a particularly expensive part of such a project in any case?
      • privateSFacct 7y ago
        I hope this is a joke, but if not please look into the cost and timeliness of subway maintenance costs by unionized workforce’s dealing with things like switching and signaling equipment - your claim is that this is drastically more efficient than some car mechanics? And if your number is low - you are not counting deferred maintenance which is huge in these systems
        • MiroF 7y ago
          Yes, even counting "unionized workforce" cars cannot even remotely compete with mass transit rail on a per capita cost. Why is this so hard for people to understand?
          • CamperBob2 7y ago
            Yes, rail transit is far more cost-effective than private automobiles when it comes to getting people from one place where they don't want to be to another place where they don't want to be.
• threeseed 7y ago
  Actually Musk leased an existing Canadian boring machine: http://superexcavators.com/news/super-excavators-consult-machine http://superexcavators.com/news/super-excavators-consult-mac... There is no evidence of any improvements or innovations.
  • dv_dt 7y ago
    A line of that article says this: > He also drew upon the 67-year-old contracting company’s expertise to get going, with an ultimate goal of developing ways to dig tunnels faster Not evidence I agree, but not entirely inconsistent with improvements.
    • nathanvanfleet 7y ago
      So you think the article is saying they have made improvements because it's the "ultimate goal" or something? This is kind of funny to me. The tech industry thinks it has a monopoly on the idea of improving efficiency or something?
  • SECProto 7y ago
    And the Tesla Roadster was just a modified Lotus Elise. Buying an of-the-shelf product and reverse engineering it, before building ones' own, is a very valuable step.
    • threeseed 7y ago
      But are they actually building their own ? Haven't seen anything covered about what they've built or how it compares with anything else on the market.
      • dv_dt 7y ago
        With the Tesla EV, you have to market to the public how the car is better because you're selling it to the end customer. With the Boring company, you don't have to prove to anyone but yourself, or the governments or the project investors that your bid is good.
• gamblor956 7y ago
  Musk never learned that most of the cost of subways is the stations and supporting infrastructure, not digging the tunnel itself. Musk has not proposed any improvements to the expensive parts of tunneling.
  • ryantgtg 7y ago
    Most of the costs are also emergency systems, such as ventilation and frequent exits. From what I've seen (I'm not an engineer or a tunnel expert), his tunnels do not account for these things. The standards, which cost a lot to meet, are there for a reason.
    • aeharding 7y ago
      What I am skeptical about is putting large car batteries in tunnels, which store enormous amounts of energy that could potentially be released in combustion and need be managed by adequate ventilation and fire suppression systems. Versus an electric train. Theoretically, since the energy is transported into the tunnel via power lines, wouldn’t fire suppression and ventilation systems be cheaper since they wouldn’t need to handle so much stored energy potential (via batteries) traveling through a tunnel?
      • deleted 7y ago
        [deleted]
      • ryantgtg 7y ago
        Yes, seems like it. An engineer acquaintance who builds subway tunnels says that they put in emergency exits every X feet, so that emergency-exiting people never have to walk more than a certain distance before they have a chance to make it to ground level. And in the case of an emergency, massive ventilation fans kick in (that are otherwise dormant). So, from what he's told me, the costs are less in suppression than in providing safe exit opportunities.
  • jejeyyy77 7y ago
    Lol reading the comments in this sub show how clueless the general population is. Probably the same people that said Tesla was vaporware. To answer your question: He’s not building subway tunnels. It’s tunnels for Tesla vehicles.
• beerandt 7y ago
  Part of my Musk Hypothesis: It's not where technology has advanced, per se, but where he can find a niche that provides an excuse to not be constrained by existing burdensome regulation, or where he can shape and use regulation as a competitive advantage. So far this has mostly been by advances in tech, but the tech isn't necessarily the key component to the formula. In the case of the boring company, I suspect the initial plan was the same (a la hyperloop), but have 1) discovered hyperloop is not cost feasible, 2) discovered that the same skills for negotiating regulation is itself a major advantage in subsurface construction, and 3) can use the Elon marketing hype machine to overcome NIMBY opposition, whether that be publicly or via politically (whereas people generally view mega construction companies as untrustworthy, and these companies are unlikely to be able to sway public opinion, except by maybe buying politicians.) It's sort of an Uber approach to dodging rules, but in markets that limit competition by being relatively capital and knowledge intensive.
• rumanator 7y ago
  > I think the Boring company basically made more efficient custom built tunneling equipment. Not quite. The company has standard COTS tunneling equipment but an above par and well financed marketing and propaganda machine. That's it. And hyperloop is another bullshit story as well.