
Elon Musk's D.C. To Baltimore Tunnel Sounds Worse Than Pointless - spazz
https://jalopnik.com/elon-musks-dc-to-baltimore-tunnel-is-worse-than-pointle-1834165213
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aeternus
Article is pretty short-sighted. The overall goal of the Boring Company is to
substantially decrease the cost, and increase the speed of building tunnels.
This is something that benefits public transit.

Sure the initial demo where a slightly modified Tesla traveled through the
tunnel is not practical, why does that matter?

The challenge is digging tunnels quickly and efficiently, even if hyper-loop
tech does not come to fruition, efficient tunnel digging can be used with
traditional high-speed rail tech. Compare the state of underground transit in
the US vs. other countries, there is clearly substantial room for improvement
here.

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N_trglctc_joe
> The overall goal of the Boring Company is to substantially decrease the
> cost, and increase the speed of building tunnels.

Good for it, but in the mean time a car tunnel would still have worse
throughput than public transportation (less than two train's worth per day),
rely on unproven technology (both for tunneling and moving the cars in a
human-friendly way), and almost certainly not be financially viable (without
massive subsidies).

Yes we need better public transportation, but there are well-established
methods for effecting this. We just need to invest in them instead of Musk's
poorly-conceived flamethrower company.

~~~
aeternus
What are those well-established methods? The hyperloop was conceived by
multiple SpaceX employees due to extreme disappointment with California's
public transit proposal.

This is from the original Hyperloop paper:

> When the California “high speed” rail was approved, I was quite
> disappointed, as I know many others were too. How could it be that the home
> of Silicon Valley and JPL – doing incredible things like indexing all the
> world’s knowledge and putting rovers on Mars – would build a bullet train
> that is both one of the most expensive per mile and one of the slowest in
> the world?

We can do better.

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woodandsteel
How often have the experts confidently told us that something Musk was
planning to do would be a complete failure, and turned out to be wrong? Pretty
often, I would say.

~~~
eesmith
Could you help by saying which projects experts thought would be a "complete
failure"?

Three I can think of are 1) the original hyperloop proposal, 2) the mini-sub
to rescue the people stuck in the Thai cave, and 3) car-based mini-tunnels as
an better alternative form of transport.

All of those objections, as far as I can tell, are correct.

I would like this clarification because there are a large number of other
goals which experts said would be impossible to achieve in the timeframe
given.

Consider that in 2014 he said that self-driving cars would be safer than
humans in about two years.

Now, at that point there were self-driving cars and in some circumstances they
were already safer than humans. More so if you include automated trams on
special tracks. Remember, the first nearly hands-free trip across the US was
in 1995.

However, at least some experts doubted it would happen in that time frame, and
we still don't have such technology. We especially don't have it at the level
that we can sleep while the car is driving, which in 2017 he implied we would
have by 2019. [https://www.independent.co.uk/news/science/elon-musk-self-
dr...](https://www.independent.co.uk/news/science/elon-musk-self-driving-cars-
sleep-boring-company-tesla-spacex-futurism-a7711516.html)

Is that a "complete failure"? No. But were the experts who said it was not
achievable in anywhere near the time frame given correct? Yes.

As another example, in 2018 SpaceX said that there would be a crewed flight
around the Moon. Didn't happen, and as I recall there were experts who doubted
it - though they of course know from history that such flights are possible.

If in 5 years there is a crewed flight around the Moon, does that make that
prediction correct?

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woodandsteel
Many experts predicted that Tesla would be a complete failure, that it would
never produce electric cars that people would buy. Many experts predicted that
SpaceX would be a complete failure, that it would never produce commercially
successful space rockets, much less reusable ones. And the same experts are
today continuing to tell us that Tesla is going to fail.

~~~
eesmith
A couple of questions:

1) Does "many" equal "the large majority"? That is, 100 people can be "many",
but if there are 100,000 with the opposite view then it doesn't make sense.

2) Do you place the same weight on market 'experts' as you do on engineering
'experts'? That is, if a transport engineer says it's not possible to build a
hyperloop on the original because of a half-dozen well-understood engineering
issues, and a market expert says that a given product is not going to be
commercially successful, then are they equally (dis)trusted?

Because the three examples I gave were in the "not possible because of known
engineering problems", while the successes you listed were more marketing and
commercialization.

Going back to 1), I'm not a car person so I don't know the history. It's not
hard to find car experts from 2009 who tried out a Tesla and were enthusiastic
about it. For example, from
[https://www.thecarconnection.com/news/1021105_driven-2009-te...](https://www.thecarconnection.com/news/1021105_driven-2009-tesla-
roadster)

> I was fully prepared to write something negative about the 2009 Tesla
> Roadster simply because it is the poster child for "environmental change"
> and "all things wrong with Detroit." Then I drove it.

> I suppose it's OK to be wrong when you admit it...

> If this is the future of cars, enthusiasts have nothing to worry about.

So I assume the experts you refer to are "car people before 2008 with
knowledge based on gasoline engines and a few earlier electric cars, who had
strong doubts that a small company would be able to produce a mass-produced
electric car."

That seems to me to be substantially different than a transport engineer who
points out that the raw numbers - load time, capacity, speed - simply do not
justify the cost for a small tunnel given that there are well-known
alternatives which can provide much better service for the same cost, and
there are no proposals for how the small tunnel can come close to matching
those alternatives.

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true_tuna
Careful. Musk doesn’t like criticism. He might smite you for talking like
this.

