Comments by "Winnetou17" (@Winnetou17) on "CNBC Television" channel.

Well, none. Except that when using cars you can be more exclusive, as in you can travel by yourself or just with your friends. More like a premium option. But it's more expensive and more wasteful.
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Nothing. People are stupid. A subway train is better than this, and it's already a century old technology.
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@Marlow925 What you say about the car having the option to be the fastest when there are multiple stops is true. However, there's two things which actually makes this impractical and which subway trains (only more than a century old idea) solve effortlessly. 1) Throughput: 4400 passangers per hour is super low. Make another stop at a stadium and you'll have 50 000+ angry people who can't get to /out from the stadium. Ok, not everybody will have to use this, but however you want to expand this, the very very low capacity that single cars have will immediately become very painful. 2) Cost: Having a lot of cars for 1-4 people is not efficient. Not only the car themselves will be quite expensive, but the operating cost will be quite high too. A car carrying 1-4 people and weighting 1 tonne is not efficient. Also, they'll have to recharge the battery (which will wear out) several times per day, which complicates things by quite a bit. A train can have powered lines, so no need of a battery which will inevitably become waste, and the weight to people ratio is much better, effectively more efficient. However you take it, if you have to scale it, the cars won't work, and the train will be the best option. Unless you want to keep it exclusive and expensive. In the end, I really don't understand what are people so excited for. I mean, yeah, nice, a new route was made, some stuff is easier to reach. But the technology is absolutely nothing new. Some say that the tunnelling was done much cheaper, but I really don't see that either. Maybe it's on the cheap side, but surely not 10 times cheaper or anything close.
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@mrdot1126 Yeah, I concede, the price is pretty good. I'd still argue that it's a bit apples to oranges since these tunnels presented here are really small. In the car costs I don't know... it does sounds like the Teslas are better in every way, except that the subway takes, what, an order of magnitude less space ? And I don't know how much power it uses, but it surely isn't the same as 60 model 3s or Ys, since the total weight is at least several times less. Oh, and it doesn't have heavy, polluting-to-make, fast-aging batteries. No matter how you cut it, using cars only works if you have a very low to low volume of people needed to be transported. In the case presented here it works. But for a whole city ? Yeah, right. Nothing revolutionary here, sorry, this isn't the future of transportation.
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@PerErikKarlsson It's "better" if there's a low number of people using it and if they want/need privacy. Like a premium option, where you travel alone or just with your friends. For any serious transportation, the subway is the clear winner in cost and throughput.
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Money laundering.
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No need, we have something better: the subway trains!
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@Gljdr Thank you! I do try to see their side. In their defense if it's so much more expensive for a subway tunnel, the justification should also be clear enough (ie, the costs per person per mile is still lower, in the end). I just wish there were some public information about these things, some cost breakdowns. Do you know if there are any ?
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What the others have said, except that this totally does not scale. For more people that need to transit and/or at smaller costs, the subway is the clear winner.
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@Marlow925 Nice to see your civil conversation with F T :) However, I feel the need to add that the tunnels here are very very small (hence the lower cost which a lot of people sees it as a miracle when it isn't). Check at 1:41 how big the tunnel is. What's that 3 meters in the highest point eg the diameter ? No bus can enter that. And I don't think you can add longer cars either since they won't fit at turn. So... yeah, this sistem was not planned to be upgraded at all. Another small thing that I didn't saw anywhere... these cars have to recharge their batteries. So you have to make spaces for rechanging and logistics for making sure they won't all need to recharge at once. A non-existent problem for subway trains.
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@jayjohn9680 Uhm, no. And everybody is talking about the peak / best scenario, or with similar effort. What your describing is not. It's like comparing a mediocre new car to a good car that's 30 years old and badly maintained. Of course the new car will be better, but only because the old car was brought into a bad condition. This "loop" can very well get in the same situation where some cars broke and didn't got replaced, some are off to be charged, some are off because the drivers had their nature calls, and lo and behold, instead of 62 cars, you have 15, and you also have to wait 10 minutes to get one, time in which you could've simply walked to the destination without using this public beta experiment on humans that this "loop" is.
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Finally a normal comment!
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@flinx If you look at 1:41 you can see that the tunnel is quite small. What's that, 3 meters in diameter ? I don't think anything like a bus or a van would fit. Maybe a custom made vehicle which would have to be low and if longer than a Tesla to have the possibility to bend. This is part of why this was cheap, the tunnels are very small.
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@papalegba6759 Well, it can work in places where there's not many people needed to be transported and where people don't mind the premium cost (or where somebody else pays it). But yeah, nothing revolutionary here. 40 places in the town, linking multiple cities, uh-hum, right, won't happen.
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Have you ever head of subway trains ? They don't cause emissions either, and haven't done so in more than 50 years! What's even better they don't need to recharge or carry heavy, polluting, short-lifespanned batteries. What a time to be alive!
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@PerErikKarlsson Is less expensive in the same way that a sidewalk for pedestrians is less expensive than a 2 lane proper road with all the signals.
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Finally a sensible comment. In Elon's defense, he is getting nice contracts for his Boring company, so it's not that stupid for him.
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@Marlow925 Hmm, yeah, I can see how a modular bendable minibus could be made, so it fits that tunnel and could carry 6-20 people.
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@Marlow925 Hmm, I read somewhere that this would to the almost one mile in 15 minutes. That would be 4 miles/h edit: no, it's one ride in 2 minutes which is more like 30 mph. Still, a charge could be enough for one day and in the timespan of a day, surely there will be a time to recharge without interfering, even with 62 cars. Didn't knew about the metal pollution and the need for ventilation, that's interesting. Anyway, thanks for actually providing arguments, it's refreshing :)
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@neeljavia2965 Except that any normal person will be just as unimpressed. Unemployed nobodies like you make Must richer when it shouldn't. He created and hyped this so he can get nice contracts for his Boring company. Which he totally did, because, yeah, he is very smart. But it's still overhyping something which isn't new nor revolutionary and actually downright worse than the tech we already have: subway trains! Cars work only in pretty small scale like this ALMOST AN ENTIRE MILE of a track when you don't have many people to transport and when they're happy to pay the extra (don't kid yourself, unless there's very very few people travelling, a subway train is more cost effective too). People getting excited that "this is the future" are, sorry to say, stupid.
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@jayjohn9680 Dude, what the hell, what subway connections ? What you just said had nothing to do with what I said. I was comparing the technologies, because everybody is super hyped over this nothingburger that is this tunnel ride. As if it's some marvelous futurist thing when it totally isn't. The argument was that if INSTEAD of this miniscule completely-lacking-safety-features tunnel with cars was a normal subway tunnel with a subway train (or even buses, truth to be told) it would be able to carry much more and be more efficient. Okay, the top speed would be lower, but not by that much, trains can very well accelerate too. The idea of having individual cars only works for low amounts of people. Which for this ride is okay, 3 whole "stations" and almost one mile. Scaling to a city would be a disaster. I don't get it why people fail to realize this trivial thing.
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While I find this system totally stupid, I would think that on CO2 scale it would fare just as well as a subway, that is 0. Both are fully electric. Ok, if the electric power is from coal or things like that, then it's not 0. And yeah, a subway is more efficient, unless the number of people riding is really low. In any case, I don't think that the CO2 is actually a problem for this project/thing.
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@specialopsdave Musk came with the Hyperloop idea public in 2012. That's 9 years already. You make a nice point with the ICE engine, except that hyperloop is simply insanely expensive (because it needs insanely high amounts of energy to maintain a near vacuum) and really not that new. Before Musk others had the same idea, and it can be traced up to the begging of the 20th century. Thing is neither MagLevs nor vacuums are new stuff, so I'm totally not optimistic. I see this just as a 1) hyping idea for Musk to get contracts for the Boring company and 2) ways for other players to pump the hype up to do money laundering. Because what we have here and what we'll have in the next decade will be nothing really new. Unless we make a dyson sphere soon, I can bet that we won't have a commercial hyperloop of more than 10 Km in the next 50 (read: fifty) years. That is, it will still be "future" in 2071. Well, maybe then it won't be future for the normal folk, by that time they might realize what it actually is: economically (totally) not viable. Not even close.
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@specialopsdave Okay, fair point.
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@6681096 The subway is actually cheaper. Don't kid yourself. The figures you saw are for tunnel for subways which are safer and can carry much more than the measly 4400 pph. If you convert the cost to be cost per pph, and include the annual costs of running, the subway will be a clear winner. Because that's how physics work. Having cars only make sense if you want to provide premium, exclusive services (and, of course, expensive). If you need to be actually efficient at getting many people to different locations, trains are the way, both in the cost and space needed.
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@jeffmorris5802 Well, if those destinations are at most 1 mile in length and they're not connected, then 40 destinations * $50 = $2 billion. Soo... even with this (inefficient and expensive) system, you're talking about billions.
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