Elon Musk's Boring Company

[Halicia]

I won't need all the infrastructure costs either because you can just do this above ground

you still need the infrastructure costs, the location of the infrastructure just changes.

you can discuss costs all day, but aside from a few specific locales, infrastructure costs should be cheaper when weather, nature, and human wear & tear are removed. (as far as the human factor, I mean aside from vandalism... the general indifference people and corporations have to the state of the property they drive on. so if the transport is automated, it removes a good deal of potential wear & tear)

[Yvaelle]

How would it be cheaper than mantaining a trainroute? Things that one has to mantain:

- The elevators
- The rails themselves
- The platform where the car moves
- The computer that coordinates this stuff

I don't see how maintenance for this would be cheaper than for a train.

It's not meant to be a replacement to trains. The central premise of The Boring Company is to reduce the cost of tunnel boring by like 10-fold. This isn't the primary reason to make the company, this is video is clearly just meant to spark people's imagination for what it could mean if building tunnels like this was a largely automated process, using a boring machine that doesn't require large teams of mechanics and engineers performing maintenance every minute the machine runs.

It's the labour cost of boring that makes it so expensive, and it's becoming possible to eliminate those costs with automation - that has big implications for what we can do with tunnels.

Yes, transporting cars is FAR more expensive than using a train - but not everybody wants to use trains (Americans in particular seem to almost despise trains, probably because it's at odds with Car Culture and individualism).

The biggest benefit of this is actually.... *drum roll*.... trains. More specifically, Hyperloops. The biggest challenge to building a Hyperloop between two metropolitan areas (ex. NYC->DC, SD->LA->San Fran, Vancouver->Seattle->Portland) - is where the hell to put it. Cities are so big that putting it on the outskirts would make it a journey in itself - it needs to depart/arrive from a downtown location - and it can't just cut a path through the urban, suburban, or even rural areas between cities - since these are often developed corridors already - due to the same traffic that makes a Hyperloop make sense. The science of hyperloops is proven from way back in WW2, and even scaling it up isn't really a challenge (it's just a mag rail in a tunnel): it would cost hundreds of billions to buy all the property in the way, maybe trillions - meaning that Hyperloops will never make sense unless new cities are developed specifically with Hyperloops in mind: unlikely.

If it goes underground though, and if boring becomes dirt cheap - Hyperloops make a Lot of sense - and even the common complaints of terrorism or accidental damage is eliminated (at least, as much as they are for planes - only as good as the TSA inspection).

Once constructed, Hyperloops are faster travel times than airplanes along the same route, and significantly cheaper to operate once it's paid off (like, cheaper than current trains). Human transport of course, isn't where the real money is - transporting goods between places over long distances is worth a fortune - and a reduction in transport costs has a colossal beneficial effect on both microeconomies at either end of the loop. Allowing humans to use the hyperloop is almost an afterthought compared to putting goods into the Hyperloop.

If tunnel boring got cheap enough, yea - we could build underground tunnels for personal cars to go in too - it would resolve the current issue of exiting the hyperloop and being without a vehicle to get to your final destination. Of course, my money is on self-driving taxis fixing that pretty fast anyways.

Beyond that - reducing the cost of Boring technology has massive applications far beyond hyperloops and underground highways. I'm certain that once this tech is fully designed, Elon's long-game here is to drop a few of the fully automated Boring drones onto Mars or the Moon - and have them build us an underground city - so that when we finally do arrive - there are a literal series of tubes all over the planet.

All his tech tends to come together. Producing better batteries has real world applications for electric cars - it also has long-term benefits for getting us to the stars with future tech. Producing better solar panels has real-world benefits for independent personal electrical generation, it's also a critical technology for Mars colony or any deeper solar system exploration/colonization. Reducing the cost of putting shit in space has the short-term benefit of helping governments the world over do what they want to do, cheaper. It has the long-term benefit of being critical if we want to get people into space for not-billions of dollars.

Elon Musk isn't so much Tony Stark, as he is Peter Weyland. He doesn't want an Iron Man suit, he wants a space empire.