| ▲ | AlexandrB 20 hours ago |
| The Boring Company seems like a total nothingburger at this point. The Las Vegas Loop is not particularly impressive and it's taking a long time to expand it. Nothing about this feels revolutionary or even evolutionary. Just novelty. The fact that Teslas can't navigate autonomously even in these controlled, enclosed environments is also quite embarrassing. |
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| ▲ | testing22321 20 hours ago | parent | next [-] |
| > Nothing about this feels revolutionary or even evolutionary. They were trying hard to make a TBM that was faster than the current literal snails pace and cheaper than existing ones. It doesn’t appear they’ve had much success, though I’d rather they tried than just sticking with the status quo forever. > The fact that Teslas can't navigate autonomously even in these controlled, enclosed environments is also quite embarrassing. They can, regulations just don’t allow it yet. Coming soon (tm) |
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| ▲ | jazzyjackson 19 hours ago | parent | next [-] | | Were they even trying to redesign a TBM? I think they were just using off the shelf boring machines at a smaller diameter (many tunnels one lane each) because building tunnels wide enough for a highway is exponentially more expensive. | | |
| ▲ | rsynnott 13 hours ago | parent | next [-] | | The funny thing is, the actual industry is going in the opposite direction, because it turns out that a single big tunnel is in practice cheaper than a bunch of small ones. Conventional deep-bore metro lines consisted of two tunnels about 3.5 meters in diameter, but if you look at _current_ metro projects, the Dublin metro is using a single 10 meter tunnel, the newer Barcelona lines are using a singe 12 meter tunnel... The expensive bit of building metros isn't actually boring the tunnel, generally, not anymore. It's everything around that; securing a route, the disruption while it's going on, etc etc. So the last thing you want is to have to do it twice. | |
| ▲ | theptip 18 hours ago | parent | prev | next [-] | | Elon did some napkin math along the lines of “we will make tunnel boring ~10x faster by: 4x lower boring surface area, 4x faster boring because the industry are currently idiots not operating their machines at the limits that physics dictates”. (I can’t remember if there was actually another factor of 2 in there) Making a much faster TBM was absolutely part of the initial plan. | |
| ▲ | YouAreWRONGtoo 18 hours ago | parent | prev [-] | | [dead] |
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| ▲ | k4rli 14 hours ago | parent | prev [-] | | Regulations about using their own tech to drive inside their own property? The problem rather appears to be with the tech itself being unable to perform "full self-driving". | | |
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| ▲ | nrhrjrjrjtntbt 20 hours ago | parent | prev | next [-] |
| What do they do that is more impressive than routine tunnels built in cities for the last few decades (or even between different soverign countries under the sea!)? |
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| ▲ | ggreer 20 hours ago | parent [-] | | Their main differentiator is cost. The Boring Company bid $48.7 million for the initial LVCC loop. The total cost to complete it was $53 million. The second cheapest bid was Doppelmeyer Cableliner, which would have built a people mover for $215M. The people mover would have had about 50% more capacity per station, but at 4 times the cost. Tunnel cost is mostly dependent on the volume of material removed, which means that cost goes up linearly with length but with the square of the tunnel diameter. Trains and people movers tend to require significantly larger diameter tunnels, so their costs tend to be much higher. Also Boring Company tunnels don't need much infrastructure in them, so they save money on rails, high voltage power systems, rolling stock, etc. | | |
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| ▲ | wyldfire 20 hours ago | parent | prev | next [-] |
| It's an outstanding mechanism to derail public transit efforts, that's all. It's not a nothing burger because that would suggest it's a good faith effort that just didn't pan out. |
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| ▲ | jazzyjackson 19 hours ago | parent [-] | | People like to die vote this because it's apocryphal that the purpose of hyperloop was to sabotage public transit but the motive sure fits the crime, musk ain't in the railroading business. They even derailed (no pun intended) a train link from Building 37 to O'Hare by offering to build a train station in the cavern already dug for a high speed rail terminal that may exist someday in the future. I don't think they ever did anything there but the city was onboard (damn a lot of idioms are train related huh) | | |
| ▲ | jcranmer 19 hours ago | parent [-] | | > because it's apocryphal that the purpose of hyperloop was to sabotage public transit but the motive sure fits the crime Elon Musk told his biographer that the purpose of his Hyperloop proposal was to kill CAHSR. That's not exactly apocryphal. | | |
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| ▲ | whamlastxmas 9 hours ago | parent | prev [-] |
| They literally autonomously drive through a Boring tunnel when they leave the manufacturing plant to park in a parking lot. I have no idea why you're stating they can't. |
