With the "Boring Company" Musk continues to look at the *wrong problems*. If he gets down to brass tacks and starts figuring out how to speed up muck removal or how to build a hybrid EPB/hard-rock tunneling machine, then I'll pay attention.
Regardless, it's very little money for Musk. Making it all public now allows a lot of other smart people to help refine the solution.
I think the point is he realizes he doesn't have the time to sit in a warehouse and pick apart the entire machine himself and figure out new ways to do it, but he does command the attention of an enormous number of smart people now that he certainly didn't before SpaceX, so he doesn't have to do all that initial work himself anymore.
Instead of a company paying their engineering team to "do R&D for a more efficient TBM so we can sell it for more and make more money", (sounds life-inspiring, right?) he's using social capital to say "Hey, this looks possible to improve, and if we can succeed 110%, this could be the epic result. Anyone interested?" Sounds insane, but SpaceX is ultimately the same deal, except he did that first "is it possible" part himself. Elon's reputation and ability to draw in brainpower is also incredibly strong support for the people actually working on these crazy ideas - imagine how long such a startup would last without the support of his reputation behind it. They'd be ridiculed to the ends of the earth** (no offense, neroden) and because of that, would have severe problems attracting talent even if the first handful of people
did make
some progress. Then some TBM company would come along, buy them out, consume whatever they designed, and that would be the end.
Much easier to get a proverbial Tom Mueller or JB Straubel to commit to the project when there's a company they work for, rather than just some loose request to "tear that thing over there down and figure out how to make a better one".
Car lift is fine, but the platforms are ridiculous. They only way to do it would be to use the car for the propulsion. Mandatory autopilot (to avoid crashes) and inductive charging, or an electrified rail would make range a non-issue.
Laying down the infrastructure at the same time as the tunnel is being bored would keep costs fairly low. And in a tunnel you don't have the same issues with weather which makes things much more difficult above-ground.
Platforms eliminate requirements for special/validated cars, special hardware for induction charging/electrified rails, etc. Makes the tunnels more practical for "today's world", and more likely to attract funding than a tunnel that requires only Tesla cars or Tesla technology.
Tunnels are
far lower maintenance than roads anywhere that has actual weather. Wisconsin alone spends on average $100m/yr just to plow and salt roads in winter, and that ignores the yearly cost of damage to roads and highways from freezing and thawing and salt, and the accidents & fatalities from poor road conditions, and the economic cost of congestion from those accidents or even from just the weather itself.
I'll admit, I didn't put much effort into research on this or the accuracy of the data, but this page gives a good outline.
The Pothole Facts
Of approximately 33,000 traffic fatalities each year, one-third involve poor road conditions.
This source cites a range of ~$60m-300m per mile for existing tunnels.
'Typical Interstate System Cost per Mile', Document Route Symbol HNG-13 (March 21, 1997) gives "The cost per rural mile is $9.84 million and the cost per urban mile is $44.13 million."
That tells me if they can figure out how to achieve a 5-10x cost reduction, it would be
competitive with current highway costs, while ignoring all the additional benefits of tunnels like maintenance/repair/operational costs, real estate availability and cost, safety, economic savings/gain from significantly reduced travel times and ease of movement of people and goods...
** I was ridiculed by friends/family when I proposed making tunnels between buildings at home until I bought a backhoe and actually started digging. Now people tell me it's an awesome idea. Go figure.
