Sure, but "we're going to cut the costs of horizontal drilling to a tiny fraction" was the Boring Company's original stated goal. And not all of it does need to be underground.

Even if it was a good idea (which I doubt, it's just a idle thought), I don't think there's a practical way to retrofit such a system in existing cities due to the costs, planning and presumably private funding for a non-public network, because the public road system exists, needs to continue to exist for large items and can be used for virtually free in comparison. So if/when the depot-to-neighbourhood leg is automated, it's much more likely we'll see drone vehicles on the road or occasionally in the air instead of dedicated pipeline-like delivery systems.

Even without the pipeline, you can conceive of self-diving heavy vehicles pulling up next to local delivery hubs and disgorging thousands of shipping pods into a robotic receiver. From there they either get picked up, droned, Starship'ed, cycled, whatever to the eventual front door. It's still possible just having then self-drive right to the door would turn out cheaper.

Sounds very sterile as an experience, but really it's only an optimisation of the small, but highly distributed, remaining segment of inefficiency in the existing global machine that already converts raw materials to a widget or food and gets it to within 100 miles of your house.

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tstrimple 2 days ago | parent [-]

> Sure, but "we're going to cut the costs of horizontal drilling to a tiny fraction" was the Boring Company's original stated goal.

Sounds like the sort of idea a con man would pitch. Oh wait...

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georgefrowny 2 days ago | parent [-]

To be fair, he did do that for kilos to orbit via reusable rocket, so there was a moment when everyone went "hmm maybe there is a TBM equivalent of the Falcon 9".

But presumably it turned out that actually Herrenknecht and Hitachi aren't stupid, whereas, say, Boeing had been leaving opportunity for radical cost reduction on the table.

	▲	marcosdumay 2 days ago \| parent [-]
		There existed a well known path for reducing costs to orbit, and the market was non-competitive and highly non-optimized for decades. One single company made a single experiment in that path, and it was somewhere on the middle between success and failure. That's not the case for drilling. The Boring Company has no clear proposition about how they would reduce their costs.