Yes, perhaps. It's kind of nearing vehicle to vehicle communication.
I think it's worth noting that at this point in Tesla's development, they were talking about developing vehicles that were either something like the Volt's drivetrain or plug-in hybrids (don't remember which, but, definitely an offering that was not pure EV). It's early... last night they dropped the "sled" idea for these guide wheels. It will be years before we have much of a picture of what a large scale tunnel system might be, or, if it happens at all on a large scale.
While I like that they are going down this path, it seems reasonable that what I see as Neroden's basic point is well taken... there's so much they don't know about this. Musk has talked about trying to become "less stupid" over time, like trying to work off a Lotus rather than start from scratch with the Roadster was "stupid" (or trying to automate so much at once in Model 3 manufacturing). For now, jumping in eagerly with basic research at low cost for Musk is probably fine. Kind of a big new playground for Musk and some of his engineering friends. When it comes to actually delivering something for a major city for billions of dollars that public safety will be impacted by... at that point, yeah, hope they have some Nerodens in the room.
I agree; nothing wrong with Musk playing around. In regards to treating this as a real company, I guess I have two real concerns.
#1. If the plan is to actually do this as a profitable private venture, they really need to do their homework. Profits in transportation are difficult, and largely depend on economies of scale, and you can be shut down for one safety violation, even if it seems like an unreasonable overreaction, and getting approval at all requires navigating difficult political waters (he's *already* getting complaints from local businesses who have been evicted because he bought their property, and that's just for the test tunnel).
#2. If the plan is to get government contracts -- which doesn't seem like Musk's style, but then there's SpaceX -- I don't want the government wasting money on less efficient, poorly tested options.
#3. (Sort of a combination of #1 and #2). The worst-case scenario is that city governments use Musk's *vaporware* as an excuse to not build the subways they actually need, and then the vaporware fails to address the problems which the subways would have addressed. This actually seems like a likely outcome based on Musk's fooling around so far. And we've seen this happen *over and over again* in mass transportation. I can point you to "Bus Rapid Transit" nonsense, "podcars" such as the Miami Metromover/Detroit Peoplemover, monorails, claims that Uber & Lyft would replace mass transport, and on and on and on; dumb *sugar* is used as an excuse to not build subways, repeatedly, and it takes a couple of decades to admit that it didn't really work and they should have spent the money on subways. There's *100 years* of this sort of destructive nonsense.
The pitiful part is that it is quite feasible to make tunnel-digging, and heavy construction in general, cheaper and faster. Why the obession with reinventing the wheel? The conical wheel works very well, for first-principles physics reasons which Musk probably doesn't actually understand. Although I could explain it to him in five minutes.
(Oh. Another example: BART, where aircraft engineers thought they could make a better train. They couldn't. They used cylindrical wheels. They ended up with trains which cost twice as much and were many times louder. This is only being fixed *now*, this year. Moral: do your homework.)
P.S. You can even build cars & buses which run on steel wheels on tracks & on rubber wheels on asphalt, using a similar, but better and more foolproof, technology than the retractable rubber wheels Musk was showing off. They were being tested for commercial use in Japan a couple of years ago.
