It's hard for me not to view the situation as intentional. Conversion of buses to guideway operation has been done by local shops in several cases around the wo

It's hard for me not to view the situation as intentional. Conversion of buses to guideway operation has been done by local shops in several cases around the world. If you look at the tunnel design it seems that the small side curbs may have been intended to support side guidewheels similar to what many AGTs use. It's hard to believe that introducing at least steering guidance would have been that big of a project, but when you look at the stations it seems pretty clear that there was zero consideration of any kind of existing guidance technology. Sure, some of this can be attributed to a very hand-wavey "we'll do it in software," but it's hard for me to believe that automation was every seriously planned when they didn't build out mechanical steering guidance and design the stations for it. That's well-established technology going just about to WWII and the early Boeing APM experiments, and with a track record of shops doing semi-custom conversions of existing vehicles. Ultimately I think Boring/Tesla would introduce automation to the Las Vegas tunnels faster if they just bought a commercial moving-block system like Cityflo and adapted the vehicles. The fact that they don't seem to be pursuing this makes me think that the automation goal was never serious outside of its potential as a marketing tool for Tesla, which they are perhaps ironically also failing to deliver.