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0 pointskjksf4y ago0 comments

Yes and no.

Yes, because they no longer plan to use the original design proposed by Musk (pods in vacuum in tubes installed on the ground).

No because long term they still plan to do hyper loop but the latest iteration of the idea is electric cars driving really fast in under-pressurized underground tunnel.

See https://www.boringcompany.com/hyperloop

That being said, Boring Company is still in very early stages.

They made significant progress (built Las Vegas tunnel and are in building more of it; created prufrock-1 i.e. v1 of boring machine designed by Boring Company).

The hyperloop is something they want to do and most likely can do. The limiting factor is more permitting and politics (for example: they had a deal to do a long tunnel in Chicago with one mayor and then the next mayor said it's stupid and scrapped it).

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tsimionescu4y ago

Well, the Vegas loop is just a short, expensive, small tunnel that took a very very long time to build (more than 1 year per mile) in a straight line with all permitting sorted out, so I'm not sure what it proves except incompetence.

Look at some Swiss alpine tunnels or the underwater Channel tunnel if you want to see advanced tunnel boring technology.

Edit: to give exact numbers: boring for LVCC Loop started on November 15 2019, and the tunnels opened to the public in April 2021, 1.5 years later for 1.7 miles (2.7km) of tunnel. In contrast, boring for the Channel tunnel started in June 1988, and the tunnels were opened to freight trains in June 1994 - 6 years for 50 km (31 miles) of much larger undersea tunnels, which allow transport up to 160km/h in real use (200 km/h being the highest designed speed). That's 5.2 miles per year, versus TBC's 1.1 miles per year, comparing like with like.

panick21_4y ago

That's an absurd comparison. The actual tunnel was build far faster. The eventual opening had a lot to do with other factors including covid. Convention centers were not exactly in high demand. Doing everything around the actual tunnel took longer. Its also the literally first project ever done by a start up company so of course its not perfect.

And if its so amazingly expensive as you claim, why was the only commercial competitor 2x as expensive?

The investment for the kind of things like the Channel tunnel or the Base tunnel in Switzerland are 100x that of a Boring company tunnel. Those are incredibly expensive dedicated machines, years of planning beforehand.

Boring company is trying to innovate on small tunnel machines and make them more operationally efficient. Moving to electric powered drills, vertical launch and other practical improvements. Those kinds of things you could actually operate and launch in a lot a lot of places.

The amount of hate that get thrown because a company wants to improve a technology is just incredible. So we shouldn't try to improve some machine because potentially in another country they already some technology? Apparently the commercial machines that TBC bought to start with clearly didn't have many of those features they wanted on a machine of the size they wanted. So clearly the technology didn't actually exist.

So I guess that means the US will also never do Li-Ion battery as Koreans already have better technology. So why try to innovate. SpaceX doing Falcon 1, why Arianespace already has Vega. What's the point?

As long as the company is not somehow using massive government funds and they have paying costumers, what is the problem?

tsimionescu4y ago

> That's an absurd comparison. The actual tunnel was build far faster.

So was the Channel tunnel. It takes quite a bit of time after physically digging the tunnel until you can actually open it to the public.

> And if its so amazingly expensive as you claim, why was the only commercial competitor 2x as expensive?

Perhaps because other tunnels left space for potentially saving someone from the tunnel in case of an emergency?

Hopefully this never comes to pass, but it seems very hard to believe there is any chance to escape in case of a tunnel fire.

> The amount of hate that get thrown because a company wants to improve a technology is just incredible.

It's the other way around. They're just a tunnel boring company, but are constantly being hailed as some futuristic transportation solution. They're particularly a company that seems to bet on reducing costs (all the way down to European levels as far as I understand, American tunnel boring prices are apparently hugely inflated) beyond anything else, such as comfort, speed and most importantly safety.

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0 pointskjksf4y ago0 comments

Yes and no.

Yes, because they no longer plan to use the original design proposed by Musk (pods in vacuum in tubes installed on the ground).

No because long term they still plan to do hyper loop but the latest iteration of the idea is electric cars driving really fast in under-pressurized underground tunnel.

See https://www.boringcompany.com/hyperloop

That being said, Boring Company is still in very early stages.

They made significant progress (built Las Vegas tunnel and are in building more of it; created prufrock-1 i.e. v1 of boring machine designed by Boring Company).

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tsimionescu4y ago

Look at some Swiss alpine tunnels or the underwater Channel tunnel if you want to see advanced tunnel boring technology.

panick21_4y ago

And if its so amazingly expensive as you claim, why was the only commercial competitor 2x as expensive?

As long as the company is not somehow using massive government funds and they have paying costumers, what is the problem?

tsimionescu4y ago

> That's an absurd comparison. The actual tunnel was build far faster.

So was the Channel tunnel. It takes quite a bit of time after physically digging the tunnel until you can actually open it to the public.

> And if its so amazingly expensive as you claim, why was the only commercial competitor 2x as expensive?

Perhaps because other tunnels left space for potentially saving someone from the tunnel in case of an emergency?

Hopefully this never comes to pass, but it seems very hard to believe there is any chance to escape in case of a tunnel fire.

> The amount of hate that get thrown because a company wants to improve a technology is just incredible.

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