If the Boring company could produce a reliable boring machine that dug at 10x speed, the boring machine would far far more valuable than these tunnels. It makes me think that the claims are exaggerated or misleading.
It makes me think that the claims are exaggerated or misleading.
Which is why they need to get their first paid job so they can prove it. They can make lots of bold claims for their own tunnel, but if they prove it's true on a real job, then their technology suddenly becomes much more valuable.
The history of the telegraph is entertaining. It was so good, investors thought Morse was just flim-flam man. Morse finally wised up, and devised a demonstration that could not be faked.
He set up a line between Washington and Baltimore, and transmitted the news from a convention in Baltimore. It arrived in Washington 64 minutes before the train bearing the news did, thus proving it worked.
Within 2 years, there was 2,000 miles strung, within 4 years, 12,000 miles. People had discovered they could make money by using the telegraph. People who received news faster made money.
Note he didn't fund it himself, the US Government gave him $30K:
In March 1843, the US Congress appropriated $30,000 to Samuel Morse to lay a telegraph line from Washington, D.C. to Baltimore, Maryland, along the right-of-way of the Baltimore and Ohio Railroad.
$30K in 1843 was around $1M in today's money. I wonder if that $30K paid for the whole project or if Morse had to kick in some of his own.
Without environmental and employee protection laws, or permitting concerns, maybe it would be doable for under $1M today. Since copper is so expensive, I thought the cost of wire would dominate the expenses, but 5000 ft of uninsulated 16 gauge wire sells for $400 on ebay, so 45 miles worth of a pair of wires would cost around $40K
Not sure. Did finishing in 1/10th time part of the contract? If not, then it we can think of the '10 times faster' claim to be bullshit which was only meant to win the bid...
There's no advantage to promising more than needed to get the contract, and there's a big disadvantage in that projects universally tend to take too long, whether the tech is 10x better or not.
> If the Boring company could produce a reliable boring machine that dug at 10x speed, the boring machine would far far more valuable than these tunnels.
My understanding is that the way he gets most of the way to 10x is to dramatically decrease tunnel size and to have the machine dig and create the tunnel simultaneously. The second part may be valuable to other tunnel boring companies, but most municipal projects tend to use quite large tunnels, where Musk's machines wouldn't be a viable solution.
I think there's another, more prosaic aspect to consider. It's possible that when Musk did his research, he found that the reasons tunnel boring were unreasonably slow weren't actually technical in nature. But actually coming right out and accusing an entire industry of essentially graft wouldn't be good PR. So he alludes to it by giving BS reasons.
Well, we're already seeing Musk's approach to human resources in Tesla. And the regulatory issue he probably thinks he can get around simply by being useful enough to the government that they'd be willing to give him political cover.
As far as I know, there are already boring machines that assemble the tunnel as they go. I recall seeing video of one being operated, though perhaps it was a prototype? Perhaps those manufacturers' machines don't operate at the speed of Elon's but if that's the distinguishing factor then it's not really much of a distinguishing factor.
Throughout the centuries there were men who took first steps down new roads armed with nothing but their own vision. Their goals differed, but they all had this in common: that the step was first, the road new, the vision unborrowed, and the response they received — hatred. The great creators — the thinkers, the artists, the scientists, the inventors — stood alone against the men of their time. Every great new thought was opposed. Every great new invention was denounced. The first motor was considered foolish. The airplane was considered impossible. The power loom was considered vicious. Anesthesia was considered sinful. But the men of unborrowed vision went ahead. They fought, they suffered and they paid. But they won.
The second part has been available for decades. I visited the prep site of a TBM doing exactly that back in the 90s, and there was nothing new about it back then.
I think both of the latter approaches make sense in the context of their era. With classical train / subway-style approaches, it made sense to have a bigger upfront cost, so that you could have fewer (but larger) trains. On the other hand, with today's relatively reliable small-scale electric vehicles and automated driving, I can certainly see lots of smaller pods being perfectly viable.
That said, I don't have any particular insight into the field itself; however I do have a respect for Musk's ability to rephrase the problem just slightly (e.g. landing boosters to save costs) and to turn the whole economics of the situation on its head.
> On the other hand, with today's relatively reliable small-scale electric vehicles and automated driving, I can certainly see lots of smaller pods being perfectly viable.
How? These pods take 16 people, and per the article, only one can set off every 30 seconds. This limits capacity to 2k people per hour (even assuming that it manages the promised numbers, and historically Musk stuff doesn't), which is far less than one would expect of a decent bus rapid transport line, never mind an underground train.
With a 10x increase in tunnel-boring speed, it may be possible to build several parallel tunnels, all serving the same route. In this case, each individual tunnel would be launching 16 people every 30 seconds.
Or, for 10% more cost, you could build a regular subway and move the same amount of people in much less space. You even reduce the truly expensive part of subways (i.e., stations), since you only have to have a mezzanine that covers two tracks rather than 20 tracks.
small pods introduce the insanity of the highway system into spaces meant for trains. perhaps there are some improvements to be made through automation and scheduling of lanes but it seems possible pods would prove to be significantly less efficient when compared to the traditional use of lanes with large vessels that hundreds of people fit into
I guess it depends on just what size vehicles we're talking about. I agree that having tiny one or few person pods would probably not be efficient. But a "10-person cars on rails", type of scenario might not be as insane as you make it sound. Since it neatly side-steps the most complex parts of automated driving, we could have the reality of a well orchestrated fleet of smaller units. These could link up for efficiency on demand (maybe even while in motion), then separate again if they are operating in a complex web. Having a cheaper way of making tunnels feeds back again into the loop. Without doing any rigorous analysis, I can't comment much, but I wouldn't dismiss it offhand.
So, it would presumably be like loading small trams at a ski area--if they had lots of intermediate stops rather than maybe just one. Yes, those work. Everyone is typically also able-bodied enough to be skiing and you have attendants supervising the loading and unloading.
Generally, every city has big transportation hubs - airports, train stations and so on - located at strategic places within the city. Musk's idea is to ditch these hubs and replace them with more frequent and much smaller stations which get you closer to your destination. On the other side if they don't have to move millions of people to the same hub but rather move a much smaller number of people, they can afford to dig smaller tunnels and stations which are way more easy and fast to build.
For instance, in London every time they build a new transportation hub, it takes years. These stations are massive, they literally dig in every direction for several meters.
I don't know if it's going to work but surely there's thinking behind it.
I think if this tech proves to somehow work (aka actually reduce expenses by at least 10x) the real play becomes PtP tunnels that don't follow the traditional "heavy rail" subway routes, but connect to those stations for transfer.
This also could really only be the long time play anyways - it's the only reason using autonomous battery powered model X's as the "cars" makes much sense.
I think it's an interesting idea, Musk obviously likes his sci-fi. He is basically attempting to implement packet switching for human mass transport vs. the current circuit switching we have.
> On the other side if they don't have to move millions of people to the same hub but rather move a much smaller number of people, they can afford to dig smaller tunnels and stations which are way more easy and fast to build.
The actual cost of tunneling itself is generally fairly cheap--somewhere around $50 million / mile. The expensive part is the stations. You can probably save money without having to build mezzanines, but the lower utilization of the tunnel and the greater number of vertical access shafts needed (not to mention the challenges inherent in moving through that very crowded portion of real estate) is probably going to cause cost blowouts compared to subways. Particularly if you design the tunnels to move cars, not people (SOV cars being about the worst use of space possible).
He has specifically said they are making smaller tunnels to dig faster and will use transportation tech that fits in smaller tunnels to take advantage of this efficiency. I think many industries could benefit from this kind of thinking. "Because that's how we've always done it" is a great way to stagnate
I think the grandparent is nitpicking the "faster" claim here. To make your comment more specifically address that, Musk isn't claiming to have technology that can bore 10x more volume than competitors. He's reframing the market needs from cubic volume bored to distance bored.
But that really isn't the metric you actually care about. The only things that matter is distance tunneled per time and that the resulting tunnel can handle your transport needs. Musks believe is that the transport needs can be handled by smaller diameter tunnels than everyone else is boring. At least if they also built the "trains" and casually looking at subway networks that very well might be true.
Why would it be? If you can run fast in a small tunnel you can run just as fast in a big one. The size of a tunnel is a factor of what you want to do with it and what you want to run through it. TBM manufacturers can scale down to 3ft if that's what you need.
Building a new network would not be constrained by existing implementations. For example, you can't just drive the trains faster on existing systems. Everything would have to be redesigned/upgraded to do it - the motors, tracks, track bed, brakes, suspension, safety equipment, schedules, signals, everything.
If you can still get people through the smaller tunnel you have dug more quickly (because you're using smaller, low-profile vehicles on 'skates') then it's not snake-oil, it's smart.
Don't forget also being able to handle evacuations and emergency situations. A lot of tunnel design isn't just getting a train through, it's getting people out.
According to boring company: Many of the speed improvements come from the design of the system. Smaller tunnels, automatic stone placement, removal of dirt.
Building rockets wasn’t new, landing rockets wasn’t new, grid fins weren’t new. But now we have an 80% reusable orbital launch system and he’s working hard on the other 20%.
Likewise with the Boring Company. Of course they still need to prove themselves, but the factors that work in their favour in tunnel construction are the same ones that favoured SpaceX.
ULA and the established rocket manufacturers made big profits off the fact that launching rockets is stupidly expensive. That meant their profit margins ended up being stupidly large quantities of money. Musk’s contention on big tunnelling projects is that big construction companies have similar incentives not to reduce the costs of tunnelling. However Musk as an outsider is free to innovate and develop the engineering and technology because he doesn’t have big fat profits he’s already tied to.
Others weren't doing the same, because they very specifically claimed that doing it at all was flat out technically impossible, so they didn't even consider looking at the economics.
It will be, it's just not ready for sale yet. "Currently under development as of May 2018." The company still needs revenue, so they bid projects, which is probably the best way to test new technology, I mean, other than drilling random tunnels in the desert.
A boring machine that could dig 10x as quickly (and hold all other desirable characteristics equal) would save tens of billion of dollars in infrastructure projects around the world and substantially increase the financial viability of tunneling globally. It would totally transform the sector, much more profitability and meaningfully than these tunnels will change transportation.
apple makes a chip that's 2x faster than their previous model, why are they putting it in their own phone when they could sell it to other phone manufacturers?
Which is why they need to get their first paid job so they can prove it. They can make lots of bold claims for their own tunnel, but if they prove it's true on a real job, then their technology suddenly becomes much more valuable.
That said, I'm skeptical too.