The point is, building tunnels underground for personal transport vehicles as a "solution" to traffic is a terrible idea, and something only a showman can sell. Even if he has an awkward 2 hour speech about it, he succeeded as a showman because Vegas funded this terrible idea (just look how it ended up).

It's not intended as a solution to traffic congestion. It is intended to give local politicians new talking points to delay any large scale investments in public transportation.

Who knows how we'll solve transport in the future? Maybe we'll all be in personal cars underground and any massive investments in rail will be for nothing?

It's a variant of the general idea of pushing things like elevated monorails that you know are so expensive they won't be built in the near future. Or, indeed, very low pressure tube transportation systems.

Car companies have done this type of lobbying work since forever. Just as the oil companies when they push for more production, but since all oil will be biofuel in the future, in the end it will be a net positive for the environment.

> The point is, building tunnels underground for personal transport vehicles as a "solution" to traffic is a terrible idea, and something only a showman can sell.

The fundamental point of boring company is to reduce the cost of underground boring. Shoving cars through tunnels is a means to an end of reducing the cost of underground boring. It's about finding a path to make some kind, any kind, of money off of boring in order to make the product development costs self-feeding. This is why the idea of cars driving through the tunnels was done rather than the original idea of putting cars on platforms through the tunnels. Cheaper and faster to market.

Musk started boring company with the idea that transportation needs to be 3 dimensional, and not just adding another single layer of transport under the ground (trains/subways), but having a whole ton of layers going deeper and deeper into the ground. Now they've done their first iteration of tunnel, which is quite bad, rinse and repeat until it gets cheaper.

BTW, Musk has never come out against subways, his point was just that in the US, people drive into cities in cars, so if they're using cars, then the transport system in the city needs to handle cars in a three dimensional way.

Even if nothing else, a boring tunnel could be used for “remote parking garages” and if the tunnel robot takes your car ten miles away to store it what would you care as long as it was available when needed?

So, like subways? Or every single road and train tunnel anywhere on the planet so far?

Moving transportation underground is such revolutionary idea that it exists for a century by now.

There are differences. I don't know if the idea will actually work but here is what I understand of it. Use an analogy of cities as computer chips/networks.

1. He wants to move roads to 3d just like computer chips are 3d. This should increase bandwidth.

2. He wants to packet switch the system instead of batch. This should lower latency.

3. For the first two to work, you need to greatly reduce the cost/speed to construct them. Think Moore's law.

4. One way to do this is to speed up the boring machines.

5. Another way is to lower the additional necessary equipment. Tunnels carrying internal combustion cars need air circulation lest people die from carbon monoxide poisoning/ lack of oxygen. EVs don't need that.

6. Smaller tunnels are much faster to construct so constructing one for a subway would be much slower than one for EVs.

Arguments against this can either attack the premise that cities are necessary (remote work), that bigger cities are necessary (why not have smaller cities), that existing or other transportation can handle it better, or one or more of the above chains of thought are flawed.

This line of thinking is also found in his latest factories where the line is just a line of cars moved by carriers that aren't physically anchored to the floor). He makes an analogy of factories as computer chips.

You lost me with comparing transportation infrastructure to micro processors and apllyin Moore's law to infrastructure work.

And chips are not even 3d, are they?

At most there are memory chips with just a few layers

>Tunnels carrying internal combustion cars need air circulation lest people die from carbon monoxide poisoning/ lack of oxygen. EVs don't need that.

Maybe not as much, but you’re still gonna need air circulation

>Moving transportation underground is such revolutionary idea that it exists for a century by now.

You ignored the essential part of his well written and detailed explanation - its not about the fact that its underground, but the cost of creating underground pathways, for cars or whatever. It saddens me that bad posts like yours infect HN.

It saddens me tgat at HN people start to blindly believe certain people's claims without checking precendce. In Musks case based on, IMHO, pure hype and his celebrity status. So I guess, same?

> In Musks case based on, IMHO, pure hype and his celebrity status

Or his proven track record of creating groundbreaking companies such as SpaceX and Tesla, which has made him the worlds richest man and why we are talking about him right now? Jeez

So Musk moved the Monorail underground... Isn't Mars' atmosphere already a hyperloop?