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Why can't they put electric vans or buses in these tunnels? shuttling everyone in 4 person cars seems inefficient... Lay down a track, and they can be autonomou

Why can't they put electric vans or buses in these tunnels? shuttling everyone in 4 person cars seems inefficient... Lay down a track, and they can be autonomous very easily (compared to relying on tesla self driving tech)

ahoy 3y ago
musk's companies do this precisely in part because it's inefficient. By lobbying hard against good transit infrastructure and building flashy but sucky alternatives, they lock in dependance on their product, automobiles.
- mensetmanusman 3y ago
  Lobbying against transit succeeded long before Musk was born.
  - red-iron-pine 3y ago
    GM made that happen in the 1950s and 60s.
guardiangod 3y ago
Tesla doesn't have an EV platform designed for vans. Musk said (if you believe his words) that's one of the goals.
otabdeveloper4 3y ago
> Let's reinvent the subway but call it an "electric van" so that Americans don't feel squeamish. This is comedy gold.
jandrese 3y ago
Because Tesla is a car company. Literally, they only things they currently build are sedans, a crossover, and a handful of semi-developmental semis. They're building factories as fast as they can and still can't keep up with demand. Plus you have that corporate "synergy" with everybody using the self driving tech to produce more test data, although enclosed single lane tunnels populated only by self driving vehicles should be a trivial use case for it. In some ways using Teslas as the cars is nice. If the system is lightly loaded the waiting time is always short. There's no "waiting for the next train/bus to arrive". The downside is that if it gets busy the system doesn't scale well, maximum capacity is low, but that's a future problem and it is trivial for Tesla to swap out the cars with higher capacity vehicles once they are building them. One of the nice things is that the per-car cost is far lower than it is for a train car (which typically cost on the order of $2 million[1] each), and the cars can be sold on the secondary market to make back some of the capital costs. The secondary market for metro cars is far smaller. [1] https://wamu.org/story/20/02/27/metro-just-received-the-last-of-its-7000-series-rail-cars/ https://wamu.org/story/20/02/27/metro-just-received-the-last...
martythemaniak 3y ago
Why do you believe autonomy requires rails?

ahoy 3y ago

musk's companies do this precisely in part because it's inefficient. By lobbying hard against good transit infrastructure and building flashy but sucky alternatives, they lock in dependance on their product, automobiles.

mensetmanusman 3y ago
Lobbying against transit succeeded long before Musk was born.
- red-iron-pine 3y ago
  GM made that happen in the 1950s and 60s.

guardiangod 3y ago

Tesla doesn't have an EV platform designed for vans. Musk said (if you believe his words) that's one of the goals.

otabdeveloper4 3y ago

> Let's reinvent the subway but call it an "electric van" so that Americans don't feel squeamish. This is comedy gold.

jandrese 3y ago

Because Tesla is a car company. Literally, they only things they currently build are sedans, a crossover, and a handful of semi-developmental semis. They're building factories as fast as they can and still can't keep up with demand. Plus you have that corporate "synergy" with everybody using the self driving tech to produce more test data, although enclosed single lane tunnels populated only by self driving vehicles should be a trivial use case for it. In some ways using Teslas as the cars is nice. If the system is lightly loaded the waiting time is always short. There's no "waiting for the next train/bus to arrive". The downside is that if it gets busy the system doesn't scale well, maximum capacity is low, but that's a future problem and it is trivial for Tesla to swap out the cars with higher capacity vehicles once they are building them. One of the nice things is that the per-car cost is far lower than it is for a train car (which typically cost on the order of $2 million[1] each), and the cars can be sold on the secondary market to make back some of the capital costs. The secondary market for metro cars is far smaller. [1] https://wamu.org/story/20/02/27/metro-just-received-the-last-of-its-7000-series-rail-cars/ https://wamu.org/story/20/02/27/metro-just-received-the-last...

martythemaniak 3y ago

Why do you believe autonomy requires rails?