Hacker News Board Hacker News, browsed like a classic message board
Live data from Hacker News

The Boring Company’s Las Vegas tunnel is nearly 50% done

teslarati.com

Post reply on HN
Print view View original

241–250 of 303 posts

Re: The Boring Company’s Las Vegas tunnel is nearly 50% done

#241

Post by adrianN »

asdff wrote: post #231
martamoreno2 wrote: post #184

Is this for real? They are basically getting orgasms just because someone drills a tunnel, which is indeed revolutionary for public transportation... And it transports a whopping 4500 people per hour, will you think of that! That is almost as much as a normal, 100 year old subway train can do in a few minutes.

About as much capacity as a bus lane for point of reference. I wonder what is cheaper: a can of paint, or boring into the living earth?

In terms of political capital it's probably cheaper to bore a tunnel than to take away a lane for cars.

Re: The Boring Company’s Las Vegas tunnel is nearly 50% done

#242

Post by Erlich_Bachman »

mbesto wrote: post #159
SECProto wrote: post #102

Earlier quoted context omitted.

And the Tesla Roadster was just a modified Lotus Elise. Buying an of-the-shelf product and reverse engineering it, before building ones' own, is a very valuable step.

And Tesla's Gigfactory is a JV with Panasonic and partially funded by taxpayers. I'd say the largest value add about Elon Musk is his ability to create a reality distortion field to convince large swathes of people to follow his dream. I'm actually not being critical of Musk here. Jobs did this and you can see how transformative certain technologies have been as a result.

> And Tesla's Gigfactory is a JV with Panasonic and partially funded by taxpayers.

What you don't seem to understand is that the battery tech's problems currently are not the chemical process or format of the cells, but the volume. The volume of cells that we are able to produce. This is a major bottleneck of electric cars. It is not just some minor problem, it is a great fundamental problem.

This is also why tesla can churn out hundreds of thousands of cars with battery only, and with range of hundreds of miles, and where practically all other manufacturers in this price range are only able to do hybdrids with small batteries. This is not coincidence, this is because tesla has a gigafactory and those others do not and are subject to volume problems in the outside battery production chain.

So no this is not only about vision, Tesla (whether Musk himself or his engineers) identified a real problem, and engineered a real solution - the gigafactory.

Re: The Boring Company’s Las Vegas tunnel is nearly 50% done

#244

Post by Erlich_Bachman »

asdff wrote: post #223
clairity wrote: post #117

Earlier quoted context omitted.

induced demand is often (intentionally?) misunderstood as demand being literally insatiable (and by extension, "why bother?"), but really, we're just severly underserving the market, and there are very limited price signals we can rely on to understand the cost and value of a road foot-second (or meter-second). people want more fast, affordable, on-demand, point-to-point private transportation. "induced demand" tells…

On paper, when everything is just objects floating in gaseous infinite space, this makes sense. Once you begin to realize that a car takes space, this all falls apart. You can make the 405 100 miles wide to fit everyone across, but you'd loose the entire county in the process. The fact of the matter is that it's absurd to transport people in a dense environment 25'x10' apart, one at a time, all going back and forth t…

Aand this is exactly why going 3D (using boring tunnels) instead of 2D is the solution.

Re: The Boring Company’s Las Vegas tunnel is nearly 50% done

#245

Post by Erlich_Bachman »

prawnsalad wrote: post #178
drcross wrote: post #142

Earlier quoted context omitted.

You're bad mouthing someone who regularly lands rockets on ships in the ocean and has bootstrapped the first electric car company. I think Elon deserves the benefit of the doubt here.

I'm a fan of Elon but he did not bootstrap the first electric car company. Electric cars have been around since the 1800s with a resurgence in the late 1900s. Musk got into electric cars in the 2000s.

Strapping a motor into some wheels is not "electric car company". Designing a high-volume, easily produced, long range, beautiful, profitable(!) business out of it, meaning something people actually use - that's bootstrapping an electric car company. We live in a real world, not in some imaginary "that was technically an electric car in 1800"-fairy tale.

Re: The Boring Company’s Las Vegas tunnel is nearly 50% done

#246

Post by kenneth »

The Boring Company's FAQ is actually pretty helpful in understanding why their approach is innovative.

In short: Small autonomous vehicles instead of big subway cars means you can change the model from one of big stations with big heavy trains that must speed up and slow down constantly to let people in and out, to one with smaller pods that go directly from a specific origin to a destination, travels mostly entirely at their top speed, never have to slow down for stops or other vehicles, etc.

Also, the tunnels for this can be smaller and therefore exponentially cheaper to dig.

https://www.boringcompany.com/faq

Re: The Boring Company’s Las Vegas tunnel is nearly 50% done

#247

Post by conjectures »

toomuchtodo wrote: post #186
mbesto wrote: post #159

Earlier quoted context omitted.

And Tesla's Gigfactory is a JV with Panasonic and partially funded by taxpayers. I'd say the largest value add about Elon Musk is his ability to create a reality distortion field to convince large swathes of people to follow his dream. I'm actually not being critical of Musk here. Jobs did this and you can see how transformative certain technologies have been as a result.

Can’t we call it passion and vision instead of “reality distortion field”?

Can we not use the word 'passion'. In a world where subway job applicants need to have a passion for sandwiches the word has long since passed its sell by date.

Re: The Boring Company’s Las Vegas tunnel is nearly 50% done

#248

Post by nickik »

snifflumpus wrote: post #177
chrisco255 wrote: post #157

Earlier quoted context omitted.

What's amazing to me is that we built the Golden Gate bridge for $35 million in 1933 (would be $688 million in today's dollars) and it only took 4 years. The Empire State building was built in one year (1930). What happened to our ability to build massive structures quickly? Is it amazing that Musk can do things so quickly or is it just that we got so fucking slow on everything that it seems amazing?

If you want a serious answer: try and build a house. I did. It will expose you to the bananas state of local government. Planning/zoning will kill you, it's simply illegal to build most types of houses in most of the US. There was a recent blog post about this I can't find, but it outlined all the houses that exist that are now practically illegal. For example, mixed use where there's a business on the ground floor.…

Going threw this in Zürich Switzerland, it seems to me that the local government is basically like interacting with a fascist. They are obsessed with 'image' of the city and everything from colors, to shapes of windows, size of outside area, parking spots and so on is regulated.

It seems to me like building a house is more like a doing a complex tree fitting problem then actual design.

Re: The Boring Company’s Las Vegas tunnel is nearly 50% done

#249

Post by nickik »

stephen_g wrote: post #194
drcross wrote: post #142

Earlier quoted context omitted.

You're bad mouthing someone who regularly lands rockets on ships in the ocean and has bootstrapped the first electric car company. I think Elon deserves the benefit of the doubt here.

It’s actually a fairly common trap to fall into - having expertise in one area and assuming you can jump into a completely different field and revolutionise it. That doesn’t mean it doesn’t sometimes happen, but at this point there’s no evidence that the Boring Company is really doing anything particularly novel at this point...

The difference is that Elon had no experiance in cars or rockets. So he has shown the ability to go into a different field and change it.

SpaceX was also not really novel. Their engine, construction method and most things were pretty standard and not very impressive.

Re: The Boring Company’s Las Vegas tunnel is nearly 50% done

#250

Post by Traster »

ilitirit wrote: post #232
martamoreno2 wrote: post #184

Is this for real? They are basically getting orgasms just because someone drills a tunnel, which is indeed revolutionary for public transportation... And it transports a whopping 4500 people per hour, will you think of that! That is almost as much as a normal, 100 year old subway train can do in a few minutes.

I don't know a lot about the background of this project or the region. Why has it taken this long for a tunnel to be built in LV? Was/is it not considered necessary?

It's pretty much misleading to describe this as a Los Vegas tunnel to be honest. What they're actually doing is building a small shuttle system to get from one side of a convention centre to the other. The total length of the tunnel will be 1 mile. So in terms of what this project does, it's best compared to the sorts of bus systems, monorails, and light rail systems that airports use to transport people from one terminal to another. There's a reason these small funky transit systems are only used on small scales.

It's not comparable to real mass transit systems used on the scale of a city and the length of the tunnel means that the public really can't view the cost of this as comparable to the cost of a real Subway system tunnel or road tunnel.

The relevance of the project for TBC is that they're going to learn from it, but for the rest of us it's really not going to be that interesting.

Post reply on HN