Elon Musk paused at the prestigious TED Conference in Vancouver, chatting about his series of potentially world changing endeavors like building electric cars and trucks, rockets, a newly launched tunnel-boring company and even dabbling with super-fast mass transit.
Tunneling Business Is a MustTalking about his new urban tunneling business, he said, "It would allow cars to travel at 200km/hour underground, slashing journey times from Westwood in Los Angeles to the city’s airport to just six minutes." He sounded extremely motivated about the project.The business, which he calls the Boring Company, is initially targeting Musk's home town of Los Angeles but could extend across the US.
“We're trying to dig a hole under LA – to be the beginning of what will be a 3D network of tunnels,” he told TED curator Chris Anderson at the annual conference in Vancouver. “Traffic takes away so much of your life, and it’s particularly horrible in LA. There's no real limit to how many levels of tunnel you can have. You can eliminate any arbitrary level of urban congestion with a tunnel network.”
Elevators On The GoFor the first time, Musk also revealed details about how the network will work, explaining that cars will enter and exit the tunnel network on “elevators” built into the road. These would each require just one parking space, Musk said. Once underground, “there’s no speed limit.”
When asked about costs, Musk said the LA subway extension cost $2bn for two and a half miles so he's hoping for “at least a tenfold improvement in the cost of tunnelling per mile” with The Boring Company. If a single road needs to be 26ft to 28ft in diameter, you can shrink that diameter to 12ft, explained Musk, which cuts the cross-sectional area by a factor of four. “That's roughly half the price cut right there.”
Sharing what inspires him and his ideas, Musk started talking about his pet, “I have a pet snail called Gary, it is capable of going 14 times faster than a tunnel boring machine. We want to beat Gary, who's not a patient little fellow. Victory is beating the snail.”
Flying Cars Plans AheadContinuing, Musk argued that tunneling has advantages over flying cars. “There’s a challenge of flying cars – there'll be quite noisy, the wind force generated will be quite high. And with these things [flying] above, it’s not an anxiety-reducing situation. You'll think, did they service their hubcap – or will it come off and guillotine me?”
Tesla
On Tesla, Musk said the Model 3 was likely to start production in July. It will have autopilot using only cameras and GPS, rather than lidar. “Once you solve vision, autonomy is solved. That’s why our focus is so heavily on having a vision neural net that’s very effective for road conditions. You can absolutely be superhuman with just cameras; ten times better than humans.”
Musk believes Tesla will have a fully autonomous car cross the USA by the end of 2017 and said the firm is on track for being able to go cross country from a parking lot in LA to a parking lot in New York fully autonomously in November or December, with no controls touched at any point during the entire journey. "I'm fairly confident it will be able to do that route even if you change that route dynamically. It should be able to go anywhere on the highway system in any given country.”
But he did warn that the increasing use of autonomous cars would in fact increase traffic congestion.
“A lot of people think that when you make cars autonomous they'll go faster and that will alleviate congestion. That's to some extent true. But the affordability of [using] cars will be better than a bus, so the amount of driving will grow with the shared economy, and traffic will get far worse.”
Instead, he explained there would be a “shared-autonomy fleet”: “You buy your car, you can choose to use it exclusively, by friends or family, by others rated five star, or you can choose to share it some of the time.”
On a related topic, Musk said he had recently driven a prototype of Tesla’s semi long-range electric truck around a parking lot, describing it as crazy. “You're so nimble and you’re in this giant truck. We want to show that an electric truck can out-torque any diesel semi. If you had a tug of war, the Tesla semi will tug the diesel semi uphill. It will be a very spry truck. You can drive it around like a sports car.”
HyperloopWhen questioned about Hyperloop, Musk said he was “cautiously optimistic” that a test track would soon “go faster than the world’s fastest bullet train even in a 0.8-mile stretch”. A fast Hyperloop journey between New York and Washington DC would be possible by tunneling only a few metres below the ground – and vibration during construction would not be a problem.
The SpaceX VentureOnto SpaceX, Musk showed the audience at the Vancouver conference an image of his planned Mars spacecraft, which would have four times the thrust of Nasa’s Saturn Moon rocket, equivalent to 120 747s with all engines blazing.
“I'm hopeful [that interplanetary rockets] are in an eight to ten year time frame.”
Anderson asked why we needed to settle Mars. “It’s important to have a future that is inspiring and appealing,” Musk replied. “There have to be reasons why you get up in the morning and you want to live. If the future doesn’t include being out there among the stars and being a multiplanetary species, I find that incredibly depressing.
“The value of giving inspiration is very much underrated. But let's be clear,” Musk said. “I’m not trying to be anyone's saviour. I just want to think about the future and not be said. You'll tell me if it ever starts getting genuinely insane, right?”
Talking about Donald Trump AdvisoryBeyond his commercial interests, Musk was asked about his controversial role on two advisory councils for the Trump administration. “There are people in the room arguing in favour of doing something about climate change or social issues,” he said. “I've argued in favour of immigration and in favour of climate change. That wasn’t on the agenda before. Maybe nothing will happen but at least the words were said.”
"I'm not trying to be anyone's savior," Musk said while discussing colonizing Mars and other dreams. "I am just trying to think about the future and not be sad.
BW Reporters
Soumya is a young writer and journalist, with bachelors in Multimedia and Mass Communication. She is an alumini of the Asian College of Journalism, and finds politics and sustainability intriguing beats to work with.
