Elon Musk pitches 150 MPH rides in Boring Company tunnels for $1
Earlier in the evening Musk retweeted an LA Metro tweet that said it's coordinating with The Boring Company on its test and said the two will be "partners" going forward. Much of what Musk discussed about how his concept in-city Loop would work has been answered in concept videos and the company's FAQ, but he specifically said that the plan is for rides that cost a $1, and carry up to 16 passengers through hundreds of tunnels to those small, parking space-size tunnels located throughout a city.
The big problem is digging those tunnels to start with, and while part of the session included video of a speedy test run through the tunnel Musk has already dug on SpaceX property, the plan is to pick up the pace. Davis said Musk has challenged his team to match the digging pace of a snail (0.03 MPH), and get up to 1/10th of the average walking speed of a human at about 0.3 MPH -- compared to its current top speed of about 0.003 MPH.
Previously: Elon Musk Wants to be Boring
Elon Musk's Boring Tunnel Near Los Angeles
(Score: 2, Funny) by Anonymous Coward on Saturday May 19 2018, @06:26PM (3 children)
For those having trouble grasping just how fast 0.003 mph is, it's 8 furlongs per fortnight. Likewise, 150 mph is 403,200 furlongs per fortnight.
(Score: 1, Informative) by Anonymous Coward on Saturday May 19 2018, @07:17PM (2 children)
That actually is useful because now I know that after two weeks of digging we're talking about 8 furlongs progress, which is almost the length of a horse race. You can easily picture that. Representing it in such a small number in mph (or forcing it into some other useless decimal place obsessed units) is not helpful at all.
(Score: 2) by requerdanos on Saturday May 19 2018, @07:40PM (1 child)
This assumes that the tunnel digging is linear. It isn't. It's cubic. There is a linear aspect, but only in relation to cubic volume removed.
Just because one person digging a ditch can make more linear progress per fortnight than all of Musk's Folly, Inc. workers digging a tunnel can, doesn't imply anything about who's faster or who's slower--it just means nobody thought to measure how much dirt gets removed from anything over any particular period of time.
(Score: 1) by khallow on Sunday May 20 2018, @03:03AM
Which it is. The use of the label, "tunnel" implies that.