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The Las Vegas visitors authority on Tuesday picked Elon Musk's tunnel-making startup "The Boring Company" to build an underground "people mover" as part of a massive convention center expansion.
The Las Vegas Convention and Visitors Authority (LVCVA) board of directors touted its choice as a "monumental decision that will revolutionize Southern Nevada's transportation."
The Boring Company will design, construct and operate a convention center transport system consisting of a loop of express-route tunnels capable of carrying passengers in autonomous electric vehicles at high speeds, according to LVCVA.
Travellers of the Vegas underground are advised to keep an eye out for Deathclaws, Mirelurks, Mole rats, and Feral Ghouls.
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Elon Musk Startup Picked to Build Las Vegas 'People Mover'
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* m2 stares at the monitor... it looks like a hamburger...
m2 - that's a bad sign
(Score: 3, Insightful) by Immerman on Thursday March 14 2019, @03:16PM
Hell, the electric car was invented before the internal combustion engine. Nobody alive is claiming to have invented the electric car. What Musk did, was develop an electric car with a range and power to appeal to affluent Americans and Europeans, and proved that it could be manufactured cheaply enough to have a mass-market appeal. Any of the major major car manufacturers could have done the same thing, and we're seeing them begin to do so, but none were interested in leading that charge.
It's not a major technological innovation, but like Apple, his team put together existing technology in a way that had a lot more "sex appeal" than anything else in the market at the time, and in the process created a new
As for tunneling, it seems Musk claims that the 1.14mile test tunnel cost $10 million to dig, which from what I can find is in fact dramatically cheaper than the norm - for contrast, in this post claiming the primary costs for rail tunnels are stations, etc., they compare to the much cheaper cost of a 3km(1.86mile), ~3.9m diameter water tunnel in New York that cost only $134m per mile https://pedestrianobservations.com/2012/04/20/quick-note-how-much-tunnels-really-cost/ [pedestrianobservations.com]
That's a slightly smaller diameter tunnel, at well over 10x the cost per mile. Now, maybe more than 90% of the cost is installing the waterproof lining, but that seems unlikely.
Now it could be that Musk is lying through his teeth about the cost, but while he's overly optimistic about timelines, and a definite showman, I can't think of any examples of him outright lying about technical and economic accomplishments on that scale.