> An underground autonomous system which otherwise would have cost hundreds of millions for $50 million risk free is a perfect win-win for Boring and Vegas.
How do you think the boring company is going to be able to achieve these cost savings? If this system is otherwise going to cost hundreds of millions how the hell is the boring company going to achieve orders of magnitudes improvement?
For now, Boring company uses the $50mm to subsidize their R&D cost as they move up the “learning curve” toward the realization of an order of magnitude in cost savings.
I would guess the engineers at Boring have a list of a hundred things they think they could do differently that would lower overall cost. I imagine the biggest ROI is automation which removes humans from the vicinity and therefore the presumably huge cost of allowing humans to safely coexist with the machine while the tunnel is being dug.
Boring will surely spend a lot more than $50mm building this thing in Vegas. Investor dollars (which in this case I think is mostly checks from Elon) make up the rest. But rather than subsidizing glorified taxi rides like investors in Uber/Lyft where the learning curve is questionable, here the theory is there’s a lot of learning to be done in construction of a reusable and highly automated boring machine that isn’t just entombed in the tunnel at the end of the project.
I think the biggest cost savings initially is smaller bore tunnels using much smaller scale transport pods (e.g. reworked Model 3s).
Also, who else would be able to develop the custom small scale transport pods or the autonomous software that they will run on for just this project? Elon has access to all the Tesla IP as a starting point. They can build TM3s without the steering wheel or pedals pretty easily, and they already demo’d the software for driving in the tunnel.
Handling the pickup, drop off, and coordinating multiple vehicles I’m sure is not trivial but depending on exactly how they design the loading/unloading zones could be contained.
I’m just as interested as anyone in how they will be handling safety, and particularly what happens when a vehicle ends up stopped midway in the tunnel.
> For now, Boring company uses the $50mm to subsidize their R&D cost as they move up the “learning curve” toward the realization of an order of magnitude in cost savings.
What makes the Boring company have the exclusive monopoly on R&D? There is billions of dollars available for R&D. If it was just a question of money anyone could idealize those cost savings. Your entire post is mere speculation. There is not a shred of actual fact based evidence to support anything you have said.
How do you think the boring company is going to be able to achieve these cost savings? If this system is otherwise going to cost hundreds of millions how the hell is the boring company going to achieve orders of magnitudes improvement?