• Boring Tunnel Opens with live Boring Product Unveiling
    69 replies, posted
silly musk you don't future-proof teslas by turning them into trains you gotta make them into venice-style gondolas
Fun fact, if you submerge a Model X past the point of no return, it will automatically open the falcon doors so that the occupants can escape. (Opening car doors underwater becomes incredibly difficult as the pressure outside the car builds. Past a certain point the only way to escape is to break the glass or wait for the inside to flood and equalize with the outside at which point you'll probably drown.)
I applaud Elon Musk's scheme to get rich assholes like himself off the road.
What a horrible horrible idea. This idea conceptually is absolute garbage. Utter bullshit. Lets assume transport length of 5 km (the choice is arbitrary) Single tesla unit: lets assume 16 people per vehicle Travel speed: 200 km/h (lets assume we are willing to risk those 16 peoples lives) or 55.6 m/s Interval between units: 30 seconds because why not, lets just assume we're super optimistic that people can board and de-board in 30 seconds One-way route duration: 5000 m / 55.6 m/s = 90 seconds (excluding startup and shutdown, lets just assume instantenous acceleration) Two-way route duration: 90+30+90+30 = 240 seconds (two stops, two stretches) Total number of cars on route: 240/30 ~ 8 cars Total resulting capacity: 1 hour / 30 seconds = 120 cars/hour Total resulting passenger throughput: 120*16 = [b]1,920 people/hour[/b] Why is this bullshit? For same 5 km stretch of track: Single subway train: 300 people per car, but hell, lets assume 150 people per car in off-peak hours Train length: typically between 4 and 10 cars, lets assume 4 cars because we want to give Musk's system a chance Total train capacity: 150*4 = 600 people per train Travel speed: 80 km/h, but average would be 50 km/h with start/stop times. So lets take average of 50 km/h or 13.9 m/s Interval between trains: 90 seconds (though can be as low as 60 seconds) One-way route duration: 5000 m / 13.9 m/s = 360 seconds Total number of trains on route: 360/90 = 4 trains (4*4 = 16 total cars) Total resulting capacity: 1 hour / 90 seconds = 40 trains/hour Total resulting passenger capacity: 40*1200 = [b]24,000 people/hour[/b] [b]Public transit systems must be mass-transport systems, otherwise they are only a dream for the rich![/b] Building tunnels is not cheap. Realtalk: you have to build one one-way tunnel to attain 50,000 people/hour rate (which is a practical ceiling due to considerations not reflected above - it's hard to get more than 50k/hour through a single station and hard to maintain such passenger flows). For Musks system, to attain a similar rate under most ideal conditions we are talking about 50000/2000 = 25 one-way tunnels, a horribly expensive mesh of tunnels underground. Does this in any way even remotely seem reasonable? No matter how you spin it, these little sociophobic vans going underground simply do not carry enough people to be a real transport system. Good ol' monorail which is seen as a joke of public transport gets you to [b]8,000 people/hour[/b] capacity. Boring old multi-lane highways are on level of monorail by capacity (but are very flexible - the only reason why such capacity is justified). [i]Trams and buses[/i] are better than this, giving you [b]20,000 people/hour[/b] transport rates, with ability to scale up to 30-40k for trams (running in multiple-unit trains).
I can't believe how anti-progress Facepunch has become. What happened?
Long term goal for Boring Co is dispatching 1 car per second. The main tunnel goes at high speed with offshoots to the stations.
Impossible - 30 second intervals are not just about getting people in and out (can be parallelized), but also about safety margins between vehicles that move in one tunnel. 1 car per second would require upstream track switches to operate very rapidly - all this extra risk for throughput that only starts to approach public mass transit at 1 car per second (= 3600 cars/hour = 57,600 people/hour theoretical max capacity). If we're transporting that many people, how about building subway trains which have safety probabilities orders of magnitude less than mainline railways? If we're transporting less people (because we are building a more broad network rather than a single line like subways do), then why tunnel if trams (sharing roads with personal cars where it matter less, trams on designated tracks where it matters more) can be used instead? Trams are much more flexible and it costs so much less to plop down two steel rails and some ties between them, some contact network for power supply.
Well it seems to me that at this point they're basically selling the tunneling ability. I consider it a well-marketed tunneling company. Idk if the car thing will ever pan out but in his presentation he said they can also build tunnels for utilities or whatever else and even other modes of transport. (He mentioned hyperloop which is another story all together). If a city wants them to build a hole for a standard subway I'm sure they're not going to say no. The time to really scrutinize it will be when they start building the Chicago tunnel since that's supposed to be an actual infrastructure project servicing O'Hare. And I think anyone who bothered to look into what they do already knows that it's a boy standard TBM and hole. That's not the point. It's a baseline point for figuring out how to make it better, if possible. It's like buying a shitty used Ninja bike off Craigslist to learn how to ride before buying a new Ducati. If they're dead set on using it as a car tunnel I don't see why they can't also run trained up busses in it if the whole point is that all the traffic is communicating autonomously.
Only standard tunnelling has been demonstrated so far. What they are selling doesn't add up, they didn't even buy the state of the art TBM to learn off it. They just bought a very standard TBM and bored a very standard tunnel. Could've gotten Chinese to dig you these tunnels for cheaper (no joke, that would be probably cheaper than what it cost for them with their current TBM). Being dead set on using it as a car tunnel demonstrates that they don't have adequate experience with mass transit and as result should not be trusted. I will change my mind when I see feasible and ready for mass use improvements in tunneling. Until then, I don't see any reason to view this as anything more than simply a borderline-scammy marketing stunt.
They have purchased (or are in the process of purchasing) two other TBMs that are supposedly more advanced. They probably wanted to get digging as fast as possible as cheaply as possible. Hell for all we know Musk could've just bought out an existing tunnel company and rebranded it. There's no harm in testing the waters with some used shit to see if you can even scale it up to bigger ones. From what I understand they've already made some minor improvements with this one like running it off grid.
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