This doesn't apply to the centrally controlled car delivery system Musk is planning.

> This doesn't apply to the centrally controlled car delivery system Musk is planning.

How would that work? Now it's true that there won't be any delays caused by drivers not paying attention, but unless the cars will go 125 mph with only a couple meters of space between them (eep!) the cars will require a non-zero delay "off the line" to allow them to spread out as they gain speed.

I don't think they need any space between them as long as they're on the same path. They're parked on centrally controlled carriages.

How fast they can fork and merge is more interesting, and I dare not have an opinion about that.

Centrally controlled trains are still required to be spaced out by their stopping distance. The only way this or hyperloop will do better than trains is through regulatory arbitrage.

Quite the opposite: the requirement to be spaced out by their stopping distance is regulatory arbitrage; if the design was "it might, in corner cases, crash and injure people, but who cares, they knew the risk", you could run trains far closer together (which happens all the time in manually controlled streetcars: tailgate the other tram and pray the guy in front won't slam the brakes).

Regulatory arbitrage is when you profit from a difference in regulations. If someone could figure out how to run a train but have it regulated as a car (with car-like safety properties) they would be able to run an extremely high-capacity service; I suspect this is Musk's gameplan.

They all change speed at the same time, so there is no need to space them out.