> Umm, and the capacity of these tunnels is also orders of magnitude lower than a subway.
Even assuming that capacity/dollar is actually worse than subways, they can still be economically superior, for the same reason solar+battery is beating nuclear. The ability to incrementally build capacity relatively quickly and with relatively low, incremental costs beats any system that requires billions of initial investment and only comes online in the timescale of decades.
And I really don't think that capacity/dollar will be worse than subways, assuming that he intends to build off-ramps for leaving the system, as alluded to in the stream. Simply removing the need to stop at every exit greatly improves capacity, and while the capacity of an individual tunnel is still much worse than a single subway tunnel, they can just build more.
> Maintenance will be impossible. Breakdowns of any sort would go from being annoyances to a few to being catastrophic failures for the system. Even if the tunnels never degraded, even if no car ever had a flat tire in the middle of the tunnel, and even if you could actually achieve 150mph (which would be extremely unpleasant for the passengers anyway), you couldn't physically fit enough cars through the tunnel to compare to real transit system.
You seem to be assuming a single tunnel per direction. Assume 20 instead. Suddenly a car failing in the tunnel turns from a catastrophic failure into one that causes some traffic to have to take a little extra time as they back their way to the closest cross-tunnel, and a relatively minor loss of capacity until a recovery vehicle can come pull the broken one out.
And as Musk said like a dozen times in the stream, he intends to match a real transit system not by increasing capacity per tunnel, but by starting building tunnels and then not stopping until there are no more traffic issues. Since he gets to expand in three dimensions, he can just stack them on top of each other.
> Given that this thing requires rigging something up to your vehicle, the onload and offload points would immediately become major bottlenecks to any serious throughput even if you could cram them in bumper to bumper.
Their demo had the "subway wheels" deploy automatically, while in the elevator. For high-throughput exits, they probably need to bite the bullet and just build off-ramps.
> You seem to be assuming a single tunnel per direction. Assume 20 instead.
I think this is the really important part. Think of it like a computer bus - do you want a single channel able to move a lot of data at once but with potential bottlenecks as various systems fight to talk to each other, or lots of channels able to move medium amounts of data without bottlenecking one component while favouring another?
When one channel is at capacity you move to the next, with further redundancy to spare.
Even assuming that capacity/dollar is actually worse than subways, they can still be economically superior, for the same reason solar+battery is beating nuclear. The ability to incrementally build capacity relatively quickly and with relatively low, incremental costs beats any system that requires billions of initial investment and only comes online in the timescale of decades.
And I really don't think that capacity/dollar will be worse than subways, assuming that he intends to build off-ramps for leaving the system, as alluded to in the stream. Simply removing the need to stop at every exit greatly improves capacity, and while the capacity of an individual tunnel is still much worse than a single subway tunnel, they can just build more.
> Maintenance will be impossible. Breakdowns of any sort would go from being annoyances to a few to being catastrophic failures for the system. Even if the tunnels never degraded, even if no car ever had a flat tire in the middle of the tunnel, and even if you could actually achieve 150mph (which would be extremely unpleasant for the passengers anyway), you couldn't physically fit enough cars through the tunnel to compare to real transit system.
You seem to be assuming a single tunnel per direction. Assume 20 instead. Suddenly a car failing in the tunnel turns from a catastrophic failure into one that causes some traffic to have to take a little extra time as they back their way to the closest cross-tunnel, and a relatively minor loss of capacity until a recovery vehicle can come pull the broken one out.
And as Musk said like a dozen times in the stream, he intends to match a real transit system not by increasing capacity per tunnel, but by starting building tunnels and then not stopping until there are no more traffic issues. Since he gets to expand in three dimensions, he can just stack them on top of each other.
> Given that this thing requires rigging something up to your vehicle, the onload and offload points would immediately become major bottlenecks to any serious throughput even if you could cram them in bumper to bumper.
Their demo had the "subway wheels" deploy automatically, while in the elevator. For high-throughput exits, they probably need to bite the bullet and just build off-ramps.