this post was submitted on 27 Aug 2024
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Electric Vehicles
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I'll be the first to acknowledge that I'm a moron on this and many other topics but...
This is an environment that doesnt include weather, pedestrians, many other cars, or other obstacles. I feel like my 4 year old Honda could almost manage that. It can follow a lane at a set speed without me actually driving. It can't manage obstacles or signs or anything like that so it clearly isn't self driving and I'm not claiming it is. The only hard part would be the intersection between two tunnels but I feel like that part has already pretty much been addressed by Tesla FSD tech.
Part of the problem is to meet their quoted throughput of passengers they would need to fully load/unload each vehicle in ~30 seconds. 4 adults in, 4 out, with luggage, with no delays or struggling. That's... not very feasible for a commercial passenger car. They're not designed for quick loading and unloading.
The tunnels are a single lane without a service tunnel, which the Victorians used in the 1800s for their subways. Because if a single car has mechanical issues the entire service has to stop and empty to clear it. They're electric, so there are less mechanical systems, but they are still putting a significant amount of wear and tear on tires/axels/steering systems, all the mechanical systems they still have. Even without meeting the their goal throughput, they're putting orders of magnitude more use on each vehicle, which are consumer cars. They're meant to spend most of their lives parked.
If they made a "Tesla train/trolly" where the engine car was pulling a simple enclosed cart with seats it would significantly improve their throughput and loading times, and require less maintenance per passenger. But at that point you've just invented a train that uses significantly less efficient rubber tires on asphalt.