Boring Company financial discussion (Out of MA)

[Fact Checking]

Shorty meltdown on Twitter is insanely great

Shorts are melting down about what - the Boring tunnels increasing the utility of every Tesla sold?

Just kidding ...

Tunnels & Tesla:

Even with 4-seat vehicles a single tunnel's traffic throughput is comparable to a subway line (15,000 persons per hour) - while it's much faster at 100+ mph and much better integrated into existing traffic infrastructure. It's also ,, cheaper to build and operate - so the network can scale much better.

With mini shuttle buses a single Boring tunnel has the throughput of several subway lines, in the 50,000 people per hour range.

Ingenious design - both subways and other forms of city railway systems just got obsoleted. Wondering what @neroden thinks about this.

Edit, random additional thoughts:

• The "Car Elevator Entrance/Exit" is not a bottleneck, as these would use short "acceleration tunnels" which would branch into the main loops.
• Speculation: the "guard wheels" only need to be present in the front of the vehicle, and I suspect it might also be offered as an aftermarket option, for the existing Tesla fleet. Buying the option would give free access to the tunnels for 1-2 years. Early adopters might get life time access.
• The Boring Tunnels would be fundamentally EV only: even autonomous ICE vehicles cannot use it, they'd pollute tunnel air.
• Crazy energy efficiency at even 150 mph: with dense traffic the main tunnels would form "loops of high speed air", so even though the vehicles are separate, air resistance is similarly efficient to trains - perhaps more efficient with special, low friction tunnel wall coating. Far more efficient than highway travel, and no traffic jams.

 

[Carl Raymond]

Shorts are melting down about what - the Boring tunnels increasing the utility of every Tesla sold?

Just kidding ...

Tunnels & Tesla:

Even with 4-seat vehicles a single tunnel's traffic throughput is comparable to a subway line (15,000 persons per hour) - while it's much faster at 100+ mph and much better integrated into existing traffic infrastructure. It's also ,, cheaper to build and operate - so the network can scale much better.

With mini shuttle buses a single Boring tunnel has the throughput of several subway lines, in the 50,000 people per hour range.

Ingenious design - both subways and other forms of city railway systems just got obsoleted. Wondering what @neroden thinks about this.

Edit, random additional thoughts:

• The "Car Elevator Entrance" is not a bottleneck, as these would use short "acceleration tunnels" and branch into the main loops.
• The Boring Tunnels would be fundamentally EV only: even autonomous ICE vehicles cannot use it, they'd pollute tunnel air.
• Crazy efficiency at even 150 mph: with dense traffic the main tunnels would form "loops of high speed air", so even though the vehicles are separate, air resistance is similarly efficient to trains - perhaps more efficient with special, low friction tunnel wall coating.

So we're in a user maintained car, travelling at 200km/hr, with 62.5 cars passing a given point every minute i.e. less than once second apart. You go first. No, please, I insist.

 

[Fact Checking]

So we're in a user maintained car, travelling at 200km/hr, with 62.5 cars passing a given point every minute i.e. less than once second apart.

Boring Tunnel Safety:

1 second separation at 200 km/h is ~55 meters separation, better than the trailing distances on the German Autobahn in practice ...

Furthermore, unlike the Autobahn, vehicles in a Boring Loop:

• Are never user controlled, but always software controlled,
• are on a fixed track,
• are part of an in-tunnel traffic control network which can slow down all affected vehicles within milliseconds if a vehicle slows anomalously,
• the weather is constantly favorable 24/7: no rain, snow, ice, dust storm, cross-wind, hail, fog or blinding sunlight - and it's always daylight,
• good weather means no potholes, cracks or construction or maintenance (such as vegetation trimming) interruptions and hazards,
• no animals or pedestrians crossing, no random hazards in a closed, monitored, secured tunnel,
• no wrong-way driving: in the U.S. alone there are ~300 fatalities per year from WWD accidents,
• no slow vehicles unexpectedly entering your lane, causing emergency braking or worse.

So in practice the Boring Tunnels should be significantly safer than high speed highways such as the Autobahn.

Eventually insurance companies might even exempt Boring Loop miles from "miles driven" and offer other bonuses (such as a free subscription to the Boring Loop), creating a financial incentive for people to use safer methods of transportation.

Beyond the mandatory in-tunnel traffic control safety I'd also expect various additional safety measures:

• Initial trailing delays would be set more conservatively: 2 seconds would be 110 meters, 4 seconds 220 meters separation.
• Boring Loop subscriptions might require more frequent vehicle inspections.
• External cargo like open roof racks, or damaged vehicles would be detected at the entrance.
• Car windows and doors would only open in the tunnel in emergency situations.
• Certain vehicle classes could be allowed closer trailing distance to each other - such as Tesla or Boring Company operated and maintained shuttles/buses, and taxis subject to a stringent maintenance regime.

Prediction: the Roadster 2 might also, in addition to the SpaceX Option Pack, offer a Boring Option Pack.

 

[Fact Checking]

Existing Teslas have mechanical steering and brakes which can not be disabled. The frunk could hold a hundred pounds of CEMTEX. Or just dropping roofing nails as you drive along plugs the tunnels by disabling following cars.Then there's the Tokyo Sarin attack, London subway attack, or jebus wot else in the list of vulnerabilities...

I disagree:

Firstly, this affects pretty much every single existing tunnel as well, and the thousands of kms of high speed train networks in Europe that are even more exposed and which travel even faster.

Secondly, the Boring Tunnel would arguably be safer in most of these scenarios:

• the integrated traffic control system could quickly stop or redirect traffic if anything anomalous happens, be it an accident or maliciously triggered,
• single vehicle exposure is lower, which lowers the victim count,
• Bioweapon Defense filters are pretty efficient and buy time, and vehicle air is more isolated than a single air volume subway train,
• I'd expect the tunnel ventilation system to already be able to handle smoke from vehicle fires to avoid smoke-trapping people - gas attacks have similar diffusion properties.
• The many entrances and exits offer many emergency egress routes, compared to more centralized train/subway networks.

In particular the low victim count would make it a less spectacular and less desirable target than pretty much any other public transportation system.

The low cost of boring these tunnels would also create a lot of "parallel" tunnels that are physically isolated.

I.e. by distributing and isolating members of the public into separate vehicles and a highly redundant, parallelized tunnel network we increase safety not just against accidents and weather, but against malicious acts as well.

 

[Ellec]

OT

There is absolutely ZERO chance that 3rd-party user-owned vehicles will ever be allowed near a publicly-used tunnel in the USA. Homeland Security (DHS) would never tolerate such a risk.

Existing Teslas have mechanical steering and brakes which can not be disabled. The frunk could hold a hundred pounds of SEMTEX. Or just dropping roofing nails as you drive along plugs the tunnels by disabling following cars. Then there's risks like the Tokyo Sarin attack, or the London subway attack, or jebus wot else in the long list of vulnerabilities...

Musk is a blue sky thinker. Public infrastructure is a soft target. The two do not mix. Sorry Elon.

https://www.washingtonpost.com/news...-protect-a-public-transit-system-from-terror/

So, dedicated, secured, company maintained and controlled access only, if this system has any hope to see the light of day in the USA. And there will still be incidents. Lots of nutbars out there in the wild looking to make the front pages. Your system will need to be robust enough to handle attacks. Outages are key.

But there can be no private access allowed to these tunnels. I do think the Autonomous transport tech is suitable to get better use from existing Interstate freeways in large centers. Dedicated lanes like HOV, except restricted to autonomous-use only.

It's not just the speed, its the average speed. Instead of stop'n'go traffic, you get centrally-planned computer-network managed traffic flow, like a good router does on the internet.

Cheers!

What about all the existing tunnels that cars drive through?

 

[Ellec]

Do you mean tunnels like the Holland Tunnel in NYC? Its considered to be one of the most at-risk terrorist targets in America:

Holland Tunnel - Wikipedia

And it's all Publicly owned. No company to sue when *sugar* happens.

All tunnels that cars drive through, and there have been no major terror incident's. Whereas London Tube Terror attacks were on trains operated by the company.

 

[AudubonB]

Has Mr Musk tunneled his way through all the regulations of the Subterranean Excavation Commission?

 

[AudubonB]

.....and a few tens of millions of miles Off Topic....

How do you say "subterranean" in Martian? "subareanean®" looks highly, uh, weird. But I just registered its copyright, if anyone's interested.

 

[Artful Dodger]

.....and a few tens of millions of miles Off Topic....

How do you say "subterranean" in Martian? "subareanean®" looks highly, uh, weird. But I just registered its copyright, if anyone's interested.

"subarean" should work.

 

[neroden]

OT

Even with 4-seat vehicles a single tunnel's traffic throughput is comparable to a subway line (15,000 persons per hour)

Show your math, because you have done it wrong.

I state for the record that this is flat out false. Remember to put a suitable safety distance between vehicles in case one of them has a sudden catastrophic failure which causes it to halt in place.

You can't safely run a vehicle per second in a single tunnel, and that's what you just claimed.

Wondering what @neroden thinks about this.

What I think is that you have not done the calculations correctly. Do your homework or shut up.

 

[KarenRei]

1 vehicle per second is literally the stated plan (and the reason that autonomy is a requirement to use the tunnel), and a moving object does not "halt in place" (inertia), but I agree that this is OT. Hmm... we apparently don't have a Boring Company subforum here like we do with SpaceX? Where does Boring Company chat go?

 

[neroden]

OT

Boring Tunnel Safety:

1 second separation at 200 km/h is ~55 meters separation, better than the trailing distances on the German Autobahn in practice ...

The German Autobahn trailing distances you refer to are, for want of a better word, illegal. As well as unsafe. Anyone who gets in a crash on the Autobahn due to following too close is guilty, civilly and criminally liable.

So in practice the Boring Tunnels should be significantly safer than high speed highways such as the Autobahn.

You have made a good point about the extreme danger of the Autobahn, which has lots of deadly crashes.

The only reason it's tolerated is that individual drivers carry the criminal and civil liability for their illegal and unsafe following distances, so the corporations always get off scot-free.

Now think about that: Who's going to be criminally liable for the cars following too closely in the Boring Tunnel? Answer: The Boring Company.

This isn't going to happen.

Or maybe Musk will be stupid enough to do it, since he has officially stated that he intends to be that stupid. And maybe regulators will authorize this level of stupidity. In that case, he will face company-bankrupting liability payouts from the Boring Company after the first crash. And quite possibly prison for reckless endangerment of human life. There *will* be a mechanical failure sooner or later, he won't be able to blame the person who took the car into the tunnel, and he'll get nailed by any jury.

I'd like to point out that if regulators legalize these unsafe following distances for cars, they can legalize 'em for trains too, and carry 200 times as many people. Do your goddamn homework.

P.S. Go to this calculator and plug in for the safe stopping distance at 200 km/h assuming 0 second thinking time. 235 meters.

Car Stopping Distance Calculator

You need 4.3 second separation. Even if you get better brakes, you're going to need 4 second separation, period.

 

[Fact Checking]

OT

The German Autobahn trailing distances you refer to are, for want of a better word, illegal. As well as unsafe.

The reality is that trailing distances well within 1 second are commonplace on the Autobahn. (Source: I often drive there.)

But if you don't believe me, here's the first random '200 km/h on the Autobahn' video I found on YouTube:

at the 3:00 timestamp there's barely any 30 meters of trailing distance. The two cars in front are separated by maybe 10 meters - they too are going ~200 km/h.

Second random video:

2 meters trailing distance at the 2:20 timestamp ...

And yes, it's illegal, and yes there will be fines if caught - 100 meters would be the legal minimum trailing distance at 200 km/h, and essentially nobody follows that rule, because if you did you couldn't go 200 km/h as people would permanently block the inner lane as you meekly follow them at the large, legal 70-80 meter distance.

And yes, it's dangerous AF, especially at night when people's vision is limited and when they often under-estimate speed.

So the legal trailing distance on the Autobahn is a bit like the 65 mph speed limit on California highways - it's something nobody follows.

Hence my point: in practice tunnels would be inherently safer than even highways, which are one of the safer types of roads in terms of fatalities per vehicle miles traveled.

 

[ggr]

Mod: I extracted some of the Boring discussion, and moved it here. I probably missed some intermediate posts though.

There is already a Boring Company thread, but it is cryptically stored over in the SpaceX sub-forum:
Boring Company

It seems time to have a thread here.
--ggr.

 

[mongo]

OT


Show your math, because you have done it wrong.

I state for the record that this is flat out false. Remember to put a suitable safety distance between vehicles in case one of them has a sudden catastrophic failure which causes it to halt in place.

You can't safely run a vehicle per second in a single tunnel, and that's what you just claimed.



What I think is that you have not done the calculations correctly. Do your homework or shut up.

At one 4 person car per second (the value provided from the presentation), that is 4*60*60 = 14,400.
If you want to argue about the base assumptions, that is one thing, but @Fact Checking 's math is not wrong

So let's look at the 150 MPH, car a second use assumption:

Regardless of the failure, a car is not going to stop instantaneously. Great tires can get you 1 G or so. At 150 MPH, that is 7 seconds to stop or a distance of 756 feet. Say a failure caused a 2 G deceleration (by grabbing both sides of the track). That is 3.4 seconds and a distance of 378.2 ft. One seconds of travel at 150 MPH is 220 feet, so the trailing car has 598.2 ft to stop in which is about a 1.26G stop rate (it can also grab the track to E-stop).

Not seeing a problem.

 

[KarenRei]

At one 4 person car per second (the value provided from the presentation), that is 4*60*60 = 14,400.
If you want to argue about the base assumptions, that is one thing, but @Fact Checking 's math is not wrong

So let's look at the 150 MPH, car a second use assumption:

Regardless of the failure, a car is not going to stop instantaneously. Great tires can get you 1 G or so. At 150 MPH, that is 7 seconds to stop or a distance of 756 feet. Say a failure caused a 2 G deceleration (by grabbing both sides of the track). That is 3.4 seconds and a distance of 378.2 ft. One seconds of travel at 150 MPH is 220 feet, so the trailing car has 598.2 ft to stop in which is about a 1.26G stop rate (it can also grab the track to E-stop).

Not seeing a problem.

And a catastrophic accident (say... "wheels fall off") would take even longer to stop. Tires with brakes are the best case for stopping quickly, short of rocket engines.

As I posted in the other thread, re. the comparison to 1 second spacing on the Autobahn:

• All tunnel vehicles are driven autonomously, centrally controlled, with an instantaneous response to any slowdowns for any reason.
• Weather does not affect tunnel drivers
• Nobody is going to spontaneously change lanes; all entrances and exits from the tunnels are centrally planned, with space created for the merging vehicle well ahead of time.
• There's no need for the driver to pay any attention whatsoever. I seriously doubt the system will even let them take control.
• Even if you did manage to have some "incident" in one vehicle go unnoticed that caused the vehicle behind it to crash, at the very least, the second vehicle would detect that it was in an accident and transmit that, causing vehicles behind it to stop. Essentially rendering "many-car accidents" impossible unless every single one of them had an error in which they did not notice and transmit the fact that they were in an accident.

It's nothing like the Autobahn; it's orders of magnitude safer.

 

[neroden]

So the legal trailing distance on the Autobahn is a bit like the 65 mph speed limit on California highways - it's something nobody follows.

Hence my point: in practice tunnels would be inherently safer than even highways, which are one of the safer types of roads in terms of fatalities per vehicle miles traveled.

The thing is, do you really see a legal arrangement where The Boring Company isn't liable for every single car crash in their tunnels? Because I don't.

It's one thing to say "yeah, everyone does this illegal and unsafe thing" and have random unsafe drivers lose their homes because they caused a crash. It's messed up, but the way the liability lands, it never hits the corporations; random individuals who are somewhat guilty get hung out to dry. Much like with bad *driver assist* systems.

It's another to have the Boring Company, which will be perceived by juries to have deep pockets even if it doesn't, totally *controlling* cars at this illegal and unsafe speed... the liability costs will be astronomical for even *one* crash. Financially, it doesn't matter that it's safer than highways, or safer than demolition derby, or safer than skydiving -- what matters is who's responsible.

If Musk has worked out some ingenious legal method of evading legal responsibility, then I suppose that would be a business plan. Maybe he'll have individual drivers controlling the accelerator on each car?

Uber seems to be the experts at evading legal responsibility for their actions, having devoted large amounts of staff time to figuring out how to do so in numerous ways, from avoiding picking up cops and safety inspectors to concealing rapes to pretending that employees are independent contractors to claiming that they aren't providing transportation services. To me, Musk doesn't seem to be the sort of person who would do all of that, and I don't think he has a sufficiently crooked legal team to do it even if he wants to.

 

[mongo]

Then consider the 12-16 person passenger cars....

Yup, could have 3-4 second spacing with same throughput.

And a catastrophic accident (say... "wheels fall off") would take even longer to stop. Tires with brakes are the best case for stopping quickly.

Yup, grabbing both side of the tunnel to increase frictional force is the only way to stop at 2Gs. (excluding leaving part of the vehicle on the track).

 

[mongo]

The thing is, do you really see a legal arrangement where The Boring Company isn't liable for every single car crash in their tunnels? Because I don't.

It's one thing to say "yeah, everyone does this illegal and unsafe thing" and have random unsafe drivers lose their homes because they caused a crash. It's messed up, but the way the liability lands, it never hits the corporations; random individuals who are somewhat guilty get hung out to dry. Much like with bad *driver assist* systems.

It's another to have the Boring Company, which will be perceived by juries to have deep pockets even if it doesn't, totally *controlling* cars at this illegal and unsafe speed... the liability costs will be astronomical for even *one* crash. Financially, it doesn't matter that it's safer than highways, or safer than demolition derby, or safer than skydiving -- what matters is who's responsible.

If Musk has worked out some ingenious legal method of evading legal responsibility, then I suppose that would be a business plan. Maybe he'll have individual drivers controlling the accelerator on each car?

Uber seems to be the experts at evading legal responsibility for their actions, having devoted large amounts of staff time to figuring out how to do so in numerous ways, from avoiding picking up cops and safety inspectors to concealing rapes to pretending that employees are independent contractors to claiming that they aren't providing transportation services. To me, Musk doesn't seem to be the sort of person who would do all of that, and I don't think he has a sufficiently crooked legal team to do it even if he wants to.

Each OEM is responsible for their own autonomous car's vehicle following system. From the car's POV it is on adaptive cruse control. Need some interaction for the merges/ off ramps, but that is it for custom work. If they have a road rated system, it is a tunnel rated system.
Now, what density you can get with other OEMs is a tossup.

 

[neroden]

At one 4 person car per second (the value provided from the presentation), that is 4*60*60 = 14,400.
If you want to argue about the base assumptions, that is one thing, but @Fact Checking 's math is not wrong

So let's look at the 150 MPH, car a second use assumption:

Regardless of the failure, a car is not going to stop instantaneously.

I would like to point out the "bridge fell on it" or "tunnel roof collapse" case, which has happened. Yes, a car CAN stop instantaneously, although it may seem to be an unusual case: put a large enough mass in front of it, it stops. Being able to stop before a fixed obstacle which "dropped out of the sky" is the basis of all safety design in transportation

And again, if you decide to loosen and weaken safety standards for an autonomous, governed tunnel, you can loosen them for trains too.