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Transportation

The Boring Company Tests Its 'Teslas In Tunnels' System In Las Vegas (theverge.com) 119

Rei_is_a_dumbass shares a report from The Verge: Elon Musk's Boring Company started shuttling passengers through the twin tunnels it built underneath the Las Vegas Convention Center (LVCC) this week, as part of a test to get the system ready for its full debut in June. Videos, images, and accounts shared around the internet by the people who showed up for the test offer the most coherent glimpse yet at Musk's solution for traversing the LVCC campus. It is quite literally just Teslas being driven through two 0.8-mile tunnels -- a far cry from the autonomous sled-and-shuttle ideas that Musk once proposed for The Boring Company.

The Boring Company says the Loop will ultimately turn a 45-minute walk into a two-minute ride, though it's not down to that level of efficiency yet (hence the test). In one video, one of the test riders said they had to wait about three to five minutes for a few of the rides, though even with a top speed of around 40 miles per hour, trips between stations appear to have taken about a minute to a minute-and-a-half. One of the things increasing that total travel time was the underground station. There were times when test riders pulled into the station only to run into some congestion. The drivers have to maneuver around other parked Teslas, people getting in and out, and cars queueing up to reenter the tunnels. It's a tight fit. There was also just some general confusion as people got used to how the system worked.

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The Boring Company Tests Its 'Teslas In Tunnels' System In Las Vegas

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  • Underground racetrack and with the Indy races coming up too, people can practice.

    • Re: (Score:2, Interesting)

      by saloomy ( 2817221 )
      Things are rarely the vision envisioned in the first go-around (no pun intended). With experience and learning, the next steps can be taken towards the vision, or the vision can be refined. He needs to dedicate a Boring staff to adapt the NOA software in Teslas to get them to drive themselves in the tracks, and he needs to work on the queueing, loading, and unloading process to make it more efficient. Hell of a start though.
      • Re: (Score:3, Informative)

        by Anonymous Coward

        Things are rarely the vision envisioned in the first go-around (no pun intended).

        Except [youtube.com] for all the people [youtube.com] that pointed [youtube.com] out every [youtube.com] single [youtube.com] flaw [youtube.com].

        • by jellomizer ( 103300 ) on Friday May 28, 2021 @10:22AM (#61431386)

          Lets paralyze progress, and throw away every attempt when things don't go 100% right.
          People should point out the flaws, and the company should work on evaluating and addressing the flaws. But I am sick of all the Stupid people seeing something tried out for the first time and it wasn't flawless, and just jumping onto a conclusion that the entire endeavor is a failure, needs to be scrapped and we go back to the old ways forever.

          The first Airplane flight was 120 feet (37 meters) at around 7 miles per hour. A human can run that faster, Automobiles at the time are far superior. If this was with the people with the 2021 mindset. They will go, well look at that an absolute failure, I can do better than that, airplanes will never be made again.

        • Having a chauffeur in every car and loading cars one at a time make this system look very unscalable.
        • Battery fire in a tunnel, mmmm.

      • by RazorSharp ( 1418697 ) on Thursday May 27, 2021 @09:18PM (#61430042)

        Or he could just use big cars that hold a lot of people. They can go along a set route and drop people off at their destinations around the city. There wouldn't be any loading or unloading of cars, they would be permanently in the tunnels. And you could link them together and only one of the cars would need to have an engine. Or maybe you could use magnets to get rid of friction and shuttle them along at ultra high speeds. It's such a crazy good idea, I wonder why no one has thought of it before. Good thing Boring will evolve this technology out of the simple idea to shuttle cars around tunnels under Vegas.

        • The Boring Company is not after the traditional underground market, with either "large/heavy" or "light trains".
          While the traditional "heavy" underground trains offer great capacity and great speed, and the "light trains" offer good tunnel/trench/surface/elevated rail possibility for smaller capacities - but both at large distances between stations - the Boring Company basically wants to offer taxi-like services but underground.

          Just like you could build electric vehicles that hold a lot of people and are ch

          • Re: (Score:3, Interesting)

            by hattig ( 47930 )

            This just needed to be a frequent shuttle service through the tunnels, in regular (2 minute interval) short metro trains.

            Why? Because everyone at the first station is going to get off at a later stop, so you can scale up the capacity of each transport vehicle to cope with the limitation of vehicle throughput. Additionally the wide, tall doors on metro services allow rapid loading and unloading, far faster than cars.

            These tunnels are narrow (which is why they can be dug a little big quicker), so I doubt that

          • He isnâ(TM)t after reinventing the subway. The long term vision is to make roads you can drive on underground. For that, development needs to take place so the cars donâ(TM)t crash in a unique setting like a tunnel. One day you will be able to hop through traffic by going into a tunnel.
            • Just like a flying car, but underground.

            • The long term vision is to make roads you can drive on underground. For that, development needs to take place so the cars donâ(TM)t crash in a unique setting like a tunnel. One day you will be able to hop through traffic by going into a tunnel.

              Funny, there has been such a tunnel, not far from me, for about the last 50 years. The Brynglas Tunnel [wikipedia.org]. That was also to enable people to "hop through traffic". The trouble is they also have traffic; in fact they are congested just like the roads are that they by-passed and every other road around here.

        • Or he could just use big cars that hold a lot of people. They can go along a set route and drop people off at their destinations around the city. There wouldn't be any loading or unloading of cars, they would be permanently in the tunnels. And you could link them together and only one of the cars would need to have an engine. Or maybe you could use magnets to get rid of friction and shuttle them along at ultra high speeds. It's such a crazy good idea, I wonder why no one has thought of it before. Good thing Boring will evolve this technology out of the simple idea to shuttle cars around tunnels under Vegas.

          Its called public transportation. In some cities it works, because the city taxed the parking garages to make downtown parking very very expensive. Cheap parking was provided at train and terminals so that the polution /air and noise / was minimized For a tube/tunnel, being sealed, there is a tremendous amount of air in front of the vehicle that must be pushed aside, that pushing is like running into a body of water from the shore. -- slow is OK, high speed needs energy. A 1 mile tube (1.6km) would not be

      • Re: (Score:2, Insightful)

        by AmiMoJo ( 196126 )

        It's just an extremely ordinary tunnel, dug by an ordinary boring machine, using the very old idea of running small cars (or pods as they are often known) along it on tyres instead of rails. It's reproducing century old technology.

        Deeply unimpressive.

        • It will become impressive when his electric cars can run around in those tunnels dug much cheaper than they used to, and the pods are your car that can autonomously traverse those tunnels and then get you back on the roadway without having to exit your vehicle. He has to develop the driving tech to make that happen in a tunnel.
          • So you will pop up in front of the cars that you were queueing behind and they will then be queueing behind you. Brilliant. Jumping the queue in other words, or robbing Peter to pay Paul, society gaining nothing. People do that already using side streets as rat runs.
  • by Richard_at_work ( 517087 ) on Thursday May 27, 2021 @08:38PM (#61429966)

    This is possibly one of the most controlled environments possible for automated driving, with ample opportunity to put lots of stationary assistance beacons, sensors etc all the way along the route, controlled access for vehicles so all vehicles can do vehicle-vehicle communications, and they still went with human drivers? Why?! This is a perfect opportunity to to show off fully automated driving and they arent doing it?!

    • by MrLogic17 ( 233498 ) on Thursday May 27, 2021 @08:42PM (#61429970) Journal

      Have mod points but, I'll bite...

      This *is* automated driving. All past demos have been. (Look 'em up - there's lots of videos) The human "driver" is there for liability and show. The general public & law isn't ready for unsupervised full self driving. There's no way a human driver could do that precision all day long.

      Beacons? Have you seen how Tesla's work? There are no beacons or extra sensors on public roads. It's using pure vision. Note that there are road lines in the the tunnel. Those are for the machine, not the human.

      • Well I just posted the same dumb thing, so I can't mod you up, but thanks for the correction.
      • by Richard_at_work ( 517087 ) on Thursday May 27, 2021 @09:01PM (#61430000)

        The lady on the video linked in the summary at about 11 minutes and 10 seconds as they pull away reacts with surprise that the driver is operating the vehicle, and asks if it will be self driving in the future, the driver responds "no" and that he will be operating the vehicle at all times.

        Its not self driving. The driver is there to drive, not for liability reasons. You can see in the video the other drivers also driving the vehicle.

        And I made specific comment about beacons etc because this is literally the perfect controlled environment for self driving - they dont need to rely on only the Tesla determining its surroundings, its surroundings can literally tell the car exactly where the walls are, where the other cars are, where the next bend is etc. Cars can tell each other when they are milling around in those pick up and drop off places so theres communication and collaboration between vehicles. This is about the easiest environment to get full self driving perfected.

        But thats not happening. They aren't even using Teslas self driving capability it seems. Why not?

        • by blitz487 ( 606553 ) on Thursday May 27, 2021 @11:10PM (#61430220)

          That sounds like far more work than just putting some track down and steel wheels on the Tesla.

          • by hattig ( 47930 ) on Friday May 28, 2021 @04:35AM (#61430682) Journal

            Indeed, and maybe redesign the Tesla a little, because with a few stops it seems to me many people would be sharing the same source and destination stations, so maybe a more extended design would work. Also those low doors won't do, they slow down vehicular access, so maybe you would want a wider, taller door you can just walk in and out of (also disabled access), and maybe an aisle down the centre so you don't need so many doors on the vehicle. Then maybe to solve congestion issues you could connect a few of these vehicles together, even if they now have to stop at every station on route, because the capacity improvement makes it worthwhile, and the congestion time-saving makes up for those extra stops.

        • The reality is: Self driving simply isn't there yet and it's doubtful it can ever be done properly with the hardware present in all current Teslas. If selff-driving doesn't work in this environment, it will not work on public roads, with much more variables to account for. Have you ever driven in a Tesla with auto-pilot enabled? It's hardly more sophisticated than automated lane-assist, which other car manufacturers have offered for quite a while now. If there is one company I expect to be able to deliver
        • by AmiMoJo ( 196126 ) on Friday May 28, 2021 @02:50AM (#61430538) Homepage Journal

          Because Tesla's self driving is massively over-hyped and under-delivering, and won't be out of beta for many many years.

          For example, imagine if one of these cars got some dirt over one of the cameras. It has no self-cleaning beyond the windscreen wipers that only cover the front facing cameras. Nothing for the front facing radar either, which will eventually get covered in smootz. It would suddenly be unable to operate, potentially stuck in a tunnel with other cars approaching from behind at 40 MPH. The tunnel is very small and there is barely room to open the doors, let alone for someone in a wheelchair to get their equipment out and make an escape.

      • by quantaman ( 517394 ) on Thursday May 27, 2021 @10:32PM (#61430168)

        Have mod points but, I'll bite...

        This *is* automated driving. All past demos have been. (Look 'em up - there's lots of videos) The human "driver" is there for liability and show. The general public & law isn't ready for unsupervised full self driving. There's no way a human driver could do that precision all day long.

        Beacons? Have you seen how Tesla's work? There are no beacons or extra sensors on public roads. It's using pure vision. Note that there are road lines in the the tunnel. Those are for the machine, not the human.

        The human driver is there because Tesla's are legally blind. Just look at the HUD display [youtu.be]. Vehicles literally meters away from the Telsa warp in and out of existence. And that isn't me hunting around for a bad example, that is literally the first shot of the HUD + road I found on Youtube.

        Would you trust a driver with that poor an view of their surroundings?

        Computer Vision is simply not reliable enough to drive with, hence, Telsa's will need a human driver from now until they add LIDAR or someone has a breakthrough in Computer Vision.

        • by AmiMoJo ( 196126 )

          Tesla is removing front facing radar from its cars and is going to rely entirely on cameras.

          Front facing radar is used for collision avoidance, which is mandatory in many jurisdictions, and for traffic-aware cruise control.

          This is going to be interesting, in a horrific car-crash kind of way.

      • by havana9 ( 101033 )
        I have a driverless underground station where the wagons are fully automatic. People are using it without hassle. A new undergound is in project and the type of train will be different because this model was obsoleted by the manufacturer. I admit there are people controlling the system and security patrolling the station, but the operation is automatic.
    • Someone has to tell them to put their mask on.
    • by pesho ( 843750 )
      May I suggest Elon check out the Morgantown PRT [wikipedia.org]. No AI, no station congestion, more passengers per vehicle than Tesla on the same general track setup. Has been self driving since the 1970's. When you are on a track you do't need complicated self driving arrangements.
  • ... do they let them self-drive. Telling....
  • Yep, it's pretty boring. In other news, cities around the world have subways with actual trains.
    • Yep, it's pretty boring. In other news, cities around the world have subways with actual trains.

      Or if you want a fancier version of the moving walkway [wikipedia.org] that people have talked about forever.

      I'm all for doing fun stuff in tunnels but I don't understand how this idea scales to anything interesting.

      • by hattig ( 47930 )

        TBH I think installing a moving walkway (slow and faster lanes should be possible) in these tunnels will be the best way to salvage this project. I give it 5 to 10 years.

      • Real progress is often not interesting.
        Running an old mainframe, swapping tapes, constant monitoring and code tweaking, made old school system administration an interesting job, Today the System Administer will need to maintain hundreds of servers for each person, and it is mostly just paperwork to let people know when the patches are going to be put in.
        As the new computers are better than the old mainframes, it has gotten far more dull to work on a server.

    • by SuricouRaven ( 1897204 ) on Friday May 28, 2021 @12:49AM (#61430368)

      I always got an impression that all Musk's transport visions are designed for a very specific target customer: Musk himself. One of the most important criteria is that he must not be required to share an enclosed space with the lower classes. He won't want to ride a train, because trains are full of poor people, and poor people might be dangerous criminals. A personal isolated pod feels much safer.

      • by jeremyp ( 130771 ) on Friday May 28, 2021 @06:39AM (#61430856) Homepage Journal

        They're all designed to sell more Teslas. Most of Musk's wealth s bound up in Tesla, so it's vitally important that everybody buys one.

        The hype loop was designed to sabotage the Californian high speed rail project. Why have trains when you can have pods whizzing around at 700mph? Good point: cancel the train and everybody buy a Tesla until the Hype Loop has been built (which will be never).

        The original loop concept was also designed to sell more Teslas. Other kinds of cars would not have been allowed in it.

        The LV Loop has achieved its purpose in selling Teslas. They're going to need something like a hundred when you factor in the 62 needed plus replacements for when they're being charged/cleaned/serviced.

        The only moronic mass transport proposal from Musk that I can't figure out is the point to point Starship idea. I can't find an angle with that one where he sells more Teslas.

      • > poor people might be dangerous criminals

        Or have a communicable virus?

        • by Viol8 ( 599362 )

          Oh no! Quick, you better go put on your hazmat suit and hide under the bed!

          Not everyone is a neurotic wetwipe still pissing their panties over covid.

          • Covid-19 is on its way out, but what about Covid-20, Covid-21, etc.?

            • by Viol8 ( 599362 )

              A bit late for Covid-20 given its 2021 already wouldn't you think? But anyway, you go away and worry about them if it makes you happy, some of us will just get on with life.

              • Didn't realize that was the naming scheme - seems rather inflexible.

                I won't go away and worry, but I will avoid crowds and public transport, and so will many others— I don't think the general public is as over this as you think, so I think the Boring Co. has a promising future.

                • by Viol8 ( 599362 )

                  WHo cares if people like you are over it or not. I have nothing but contempt for neurotics like yourself. God help us if something serious happened such as a war, not a virus with a 99.5% survival rate.

      • I always got an impression that all Musk's transport visions are designed for a very specific target customer: Musk himself.

        Kind of. My thought is that all of his visions, transportation or otherwise, are designed for a very specific environment: Mars. Trains are cool for earth, but you don't have as many people to move on Mars and you don't have as much gear to build the infrastructure. He wants to be able to efficiently make small tunnels for life on Mars. He wants to make Rockets to go to/from Mars. He wants to make electric vehicles for getting around Mars. He wants to make solar panels to collect energy on Mars. He wants to

      • Not to mention much more comforatable and comfort is worth paying for.

        Much love for mass transit but it's not the poverty of other passengers, it's what they do and often smell like that's problematic. Being crammed like cattle into a subway or bus with bottom feeders just isn't fun EVEN IF YOU ARE ONE which is why the poor with any sense work to ESCAPE their peers.

        Idealism is so cute. If you struck it rich would you buy a Section 8 complex so you could live there and share the group experience? Have you ev

      • He [Musk] won't want to ride a train, because trains are full of poor people, and poor people might be dangerous criminals.

        You need to be rich to buy a train ticket in the UK. But Musk has a phobia about trains (as do many Americans) - notice the avoidance of any train terminology in the context of the Hyperloop and the Boring tunnels - it's excruciating.

    • In America people love their cars, if they can go from point A to point B without having to get out of their car they will do this. That way they don't need to leave the feeling of safety of being in their car, with all their luggage and other crap available.
      I have a long commute, and I often envisioned, for the long part of my trip, if they had a flat bed train where I can park my car, while the train does the distance. Still working on that, I would need a way to not drain my 12v battery in my car, to ke

  • Who walks in 100 degree weather. It is like saying take the bus across the country because it is faster than a bicycle.
  • by retchdog ( 1319261 ) on Thursday May 27, 2021 @10:08PM (#61430148) Journal

    just saying, communism took literal dirt-farming slavs to space in like 50 years.

    • Just saying, only because they could also use the space rockets to deliver nuclear bombs as well as slavs.
      • by cusco ( 717999 )

        You need to read about Sergei Korolev, who once told a general that was attempting to siphon resources away from the space program, "What we are doing is much more important than your bombs."

    • And 100 years showed conclusively that communism could take millions of those Slavs who disagreed with such âoeprogressâ and turn them prematurely into 6 foot of dirt in those deprecated farms. No thanks. Not buying your prototalitarian baloney.
    • Speaking of space, have you been following what Musk is doing recently [google.com]?

      Yes, the Boring Company is a scam built on a cult of personality. But it's a lot more harmless than cults of personality in communism [wikipedia.org]. And alongside his scams, Musk does have some remarkable accomplishments in fields like space travel and electric vehicles.

    • by hawk ( 1151 )

      just saying, only the ones that were left and not starved to death or otherwise "liquidated".

  • needs to go to airport and downtown and like the monorail the taxis will put up an big fight to stop it.

  • Just say no to Boring Company.

    noboring.com

  • Anyone who bought anything from Elon would have expected something just like that. There is quiet a gap between Elon's hype and what he actually delivers. It's still impressive on some levels (diggings the tunnels for that price for example), but nowhere near the dream he sold. Same goes for his cars, full self driving, or even simple "summon" feature of Teslas which in 2014 Elon told people "will be able to find you anywhere on private property", 7 years later, those 2014 cars can in fact be summoned, but

    • Re:As expected (Score:5, Interesting)

      by spazmonkey ( 920425 ) on Friday May 28, 2021 @01:07AM (#61430388)
      It is -never- the dream Musk sells. But it still works, because he does have one very useful superpower - If you can build a cult dedicated to ignoring and covering for your mistakes, you can still fail upward at a rapid rate, even if nothing else you build works as advertised. The fact this will get modded down faster than people can read it is a good example of this power.
  • Elon the newest member? Surely you get the reference?
  • Just place behind the pedestrian this device [boringcompany.com], produced and sold by the very same company that drilled the tunnel.
  • The problems described are exactly what public transport experts predicted would happen with this ridiculous transport system.

    And who takes 45 minutes to walk 0.8 miles?

  • An actual shuttle bus. Something that is fast to board / unboard, that carries perhaps a dozen people and is designed for the wear & tear of so many passengers. Or given the simplicity of the route, just a fast travelator.

    Using Teslas is a gimmick that makes no sense. Even if they were automated, they are limited to 4 or 5 passengers and the added effort of boarding just makes the system less efficient and more prone to failure. It won't be long either before passengers start trashing the cars or they

    • by hattig ( 47930 )

      Absolutely. This entire projects is a massive joke that the rest of the world is laughing at.

      They can't even be bothered to design more suitable vehicles than using Teslas as-is! If you are going this route, you would think a higher-capacity pod design (maybe build upon an extended Tesla chassis) would have been the obvious choice? I'm guessing the funding ran out for that work, and I'm also guess what has been delivered was at a loss to the boring company. I truly hope this will come eventually to salvage

  • by sonoronos ( 610381 ) on Friday May 28, 2021 @07:24AM (#61430914)

    This may be a bit tongue in cheek, but I wonder how many additional Tesla vehicles need to be sold per Tunnel in order to break even.

    The description of how the Boring tunnel works is always filled with visions of Tesla cars driving through them - never any other vehicle. On the surface of it, this seems natural given the relationship between The Boring Company and Tesla. However, the deeper message is that this is about selling more Teslas. So how many Teslas actually need to be sold to pay for a tunnel?

  • Feels pretty similar to the automated electric train that's been under the Atlanta airport since I was a kid (with super cool "Short Circuit Movie Robot" voices). I mean maybe it's cheaper than a train in that you can just swap out an off-the-shelf car every time they wear out.
  • This is a gross misuse of public funds. Local government subsidized this expecting a ground-breaking people mover with output significantly better than just building a subway (which would move millions of people per day). What they got is a toy tunnel that moves a couple thousand people per day for the same price. Fucking treason if you ask me.
    • by cusco ( 717999 )

      Local government is run by a Trumper and COVID-denier who attempted to reopen the casinos this time last year. Her interviews are only slightly more coherent than a conversation with a lifelong wino, and she's been elected three times (last time by 60% of voters). Don't look for anything like sanity from the Las Vegas government.

      • by hawk ( 1151 )

        >Local government is run by a Trumper

        ???

        The Goodmans are liberal democrats.

        • by cusco ( 717999 )

          Not according to the two interviews that I tried to decipher, I think their political alignment is "Which party is more likely to get me elected?" The woman is a hot mess, I wouldn't be surprised if it eventually comes out that she's got a meth habit. That's what she most reminds me of.

          • by hawk ( 1151 )

            no, really.

            They are longtime hard-core liberal democrats.

            I know and respect her, but I think she's *nuts* on that one issue.

            They have *not* been partisan, though, in their running of the city, which will be 24 years as her third and last term ends.

  • by Malays2 bowman ( 6656916 ) on Friday May 28, 2021 @11:52AM (#61431708)

    Those batteries really worry me. Just one battery fire can lead to a catastrophe in this system.

    I didn't see any fire safety devices in this video except for some marked exit doors in the tunnel.

      I hope that barring much safer battery technology being readily available, that they will have these cars
    get their power via inductive coupling with a power system built under the road (this was discussed here not long ago IIRC).

  • by TRRosen ( 720617 ) on Friday May 28, 2021 @01:56PM (#61432078)

    A complete and total failure. I canâ(TM)t believe the delusional musk lovers here. Absolutely no element of what must promise was delivered here. Itâ(TM)s an embarrassment. And it shouldnâ(TM)t even be functioning now it has to break hundreds of safety laws.
    Itâ(TM)s amazing that when Elon makes ridiculous promises that violate the laws of physics people just lap it up like heâ(TM)s the second coming.

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