Tesla Teases a Big Rig; Musk Wants Your Car to Go Sledding
Break out the acai berry juice — there’s another futuristic transportation vision emerging from the fevered mind of Tesla CEO Elon Musk.
During a TED talk in Vancouver on Friday, Musk teased an image of his company’s upcoming electric big rig. The vehicle, scheduled for a September reveal, isn’t the only truck bound for Tesla showrooms — the automaker expects to debut a pickup in the next 18 to 24 months.
While we’ve known about the impending semi truck for some time, Musk also choose Friday to drop a video showing what he feels is the Next Big Thing in efficient transportation: underground electric sleds for your car.
If you’re the type who doesn’t follow the latest Tesla/Musk news with breathless anticipation, you’ve probably never heard of The Boring Company. No, not Hewlett-Packard. The Boring Company is Musk’s latest venture, designed to bring about an underground solution to above-ground gridlock.
The company, which is already testing a tunnel boring machine at Musk’s SpaceX headquarters, wants cars to drive onto elevator platforms disguised as roadside parking spots, after which the vehicle and platform is lowered into a tunnel. The Tron-like platform — basically a wheeled, electrically powered sled — then transports the vehicle via an automated underground highway at speeds reaching 124 miles per hour.
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Is this underground sled BS? Sure. But Musk isn't the first visionary/entrepreneur type to indulge in futuristic BS. Everyone from Thomas Edison to Jeff Bezos has done it. If you make your living selling cutting-edge technology, then it pays to dream up stuff like this, even if it's pure vaporware.
Any idiot can see that this tunnel system would have far less capacity than an existing roadway, let alone the subway train (GASP! mass transit!) that you could put into the exact same tunnel. Capacity would dictate that it would be a scandalously expensive way for a few of the very richest of the rich to bypass normal city traffic, and accomplish nothing for anyone else. Let's be generous and assume that his six-mile LA tunnel costs about as much as an equivalent subway tunnel to build, so in the neighborhood of $10 billion. For that $10 billion, he's going to get capacity for maybe 500 cars an hour (and that's if his tunnel access systems are many times faster than what's pictured in the video). If each of those cars has the average of 1.2 people in it, we're benefiting 600 people an hour. Meanwhile, a subway train in the same tunnel would carry that many people on EVERY SINGLE TRAIN, with as many as 30 trains hourly.