Motronic posted:

Combustion.

I know this is your thing, but come on, you can't really be this dense. These are "fair weather" tunnels. Everything is fine right up until there is a failure, then things quickly cascade into a horrible mess.

Mr. Fall Down Terror posted:

e: really the saving grace here is that because the LVCC loop only exists beneath a convention center and is functionally useless, there are going to be very few individuals in wheelchairs or mobility scooters trying to use the thing anyway

Mr. Fall Down Terror posted:

the tunnels are short enough now as designed that they can be ventilated by just moving cars through them, and picking up fresh air at the stations which are only a few minutes stroll apart at best. there is one underground station and both other ends of the tunnel are open air

if the tunnels were longer, the narrowness of their diameter would be a much larger problem in terms of ventilation, for lack of space to put in-tunnel fans and such

you can see the length of the entire system here, its quite tiny

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=xUoZCUqbCNg

quote:

Platform 9 was 21 metres (70 ft) underground, and fire and ambulance crews had to carry all the equipment they needed through the station and down to the scene of the accident. The depth at which they were operating, and the shielding effect of the soil and concrete, meant their radios could not get through to the surface. Messages and requests for further supplies were passed by runners, which led to mistakes: one doctor requested further supplies of the pain-killing gas Entonox, but by the time the request reached the surface, it had been garbled to "the doctor wants an empty box".[38][39] The fire brigade deployed a small team with "Figaro", an experimental radio system that worked in deep locations.[34] Working conditions for the emergency services became increasingly difficult throughout the day.[34] The crash had thrown soot and dirt into the air from the sand drag, and from between the two metal layers of the tube carriages. Everything was covered with a thick layer of the residue which was easily disturbed.[40] The lamps and cutting gear used by the fire brigade raised the temperature to over 49 °C (120 °F) and oxygen levels began to drop. In the deep lines at Moorgate, ventilation is produced by the piston effect, created by trains forcing air through the tube lines. With services stopped since the crash, no fresh air was reaching platforms 9 and 10.[41] A large electric fan was placed at the top of the escalators in an attempt to remedy the situation, but soot and dirt was disturbed and little draught was created; the machine was soon turned off.[42]

...

The use of the flame cutting equipment had a detrimental effect on the atmosphere on the platform. Oxygen levels dropped from the norm of 21 per cent to 16 per cent and the smell of decomposition from the bodies trapped in the wreckage was noticed by workers.[49] Those working on the platform or tunnel were restricted to 20-minute spells working, followed by 40 minutes' recovery time on the surface. All workers had to wear gloves and masks; any cuts had to be reported, and no-one with a cut was allowed to be involved in the extrication of a body.[50] Temperatures improved after a company donated an air conditioning unit, which was installed at ground level, and the air piped down into the tunnel.[51]

Volmarias posted:

Not sure what the problem is, the self driving AI won't let an accident happen anyway???

Volmarias posted:

Not sure what the problem is, the self driving AI won't let an accident happen anyway???

HootTheOwl posted:

"Well our laws and codes only cover roads and tunnels built with government assistence. We did not expect some rich idiot to just say gently caress it and build a mile long death tube."

Bazinga twitter explodes. Musk is not just some guy!

Nebrilos posted:

I suspect what a lot of musk supporters do not grasp is that musk's vision of "saving the planet" only involves saving people like him, ie: very rich people. Obviously building a tunnel to act as an extra lane of traffic is a terrible idea, since an extra lane just induces more demand and traffic won't get any better. However, he isn't thinking about the effect of this extra lane on traffic in general; to him, the poor can wait in traffic, this sleek, extra-fast lane will only be used by rich people, like him. If the richest can escape to Mars, who cares if the bottom 99.99% of humans die scavenging for scraps on a dying Earth? It is a similar mindset to those who support scalping necessities during an emergency: as long as rich people can easily get whatever they want, who cares if the poor are suffering?

Mega Comrade posted:

There's a big one coming in 2038
https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Year_2038_problem

HootTheOwl posted:

It's a gimmick and attraction, people will use it not because of it's utility but to say they did.

Owlofcreamcheese posted:

The tunnel isn't THAT narrow.

Megillah Gorilla posted:

Crain posted:

Safety issues and technology issues and efficiency issues and all the other stuff aside: Even for a proof of concept demo it's so boring.

PVC panels and some Ikea RGB lights on a basic cycle. For someone who relies on feeding into people's sci-fi fantasies about potential technology, Musk couldn't be bothered to hire a decent designer?

Why Tesla Soared as Other Automakers Struggled to Make Cars posted:

The yawning disparity between the performance of the electric car company and established automakers last year reflects the technological change roiling the industry.

For much of last year, established automakers like General Motors and Ford Motor operated in a different reality from Tesla, the electric car company.

G.M. and Ford closed one factory after another — sometimes for months on end — because of a shortage of computer chips, leaving dealer lots bare and sending car prices zooming. Yet Tesla racked up record sales quarter after quarter and ended the year having sold nearly twice as many vehicles as it did in 2020 unhindered by an industrywide crisis.

Tesla’s ability to conjure up critical components has a greater significance than one year’s car sales. It suggests that the company, and possibly other young electric car businesses, could threaten the dominance of giants like Volkswagen and G.M. sooner and more forcefully than most industry executives and policymakers realize. That would help the effort to reduce the emissions that are causing climate change by displacing more gasoline-powered cars sooner. But it could hurt the millions of workers, thousands of suppliers and numerous local and national governments that rely on traditional auto production for jobs, business and tax revenue.

Tesla and its enigmatic chief executive, Elon Musk, have said little about how the carmaker ran circles around the rest of the auto industry. Now it’s becoming clear that the company simply had a superior command of technology and its own supply chain. Tesla appeared to better forecast demand than businesses that produce many more cars than it does. Other automakers were surprised by how quickly the car market recovered from a steep drop early in the pandemic and had simply not ordered enough chips and parts fast enough.

When Tesla couldn’t get the chips it had counted on, it took the ones that were available and rewrote the software that operated them to suit its needs. Larger auto companies couldn’t do that because they relied on outside suppliers for much of their software and computing expertise. In many cases, automakers also relied on these suppliers to deal with chip manufacturers. When the crisis hit, the automakers lacked bargaining clout.

Just a few years ago, analysts saw Mr. Musk’s insistence on having Tesla do more things on its own as one of the main reasons the company was struggling to increase production. Now, his strategy appears to have been vindicated.

Cars are becoming increasingly digital, defined by their software as much as their engines and transmissions. It’s a reality that some old-line car companies increasingly acknowledge. Many, including Ford and Mercedes-Benz, have said in recent months that they are hiring engineers and programmers to design their own chips and write their own software.

“Tesla, born in Silicon Valley, never outsourced their software — they write their own code,” said Morris Cohen, a professor emeritus at the Wharton School of the University of Pennsylvania who specializes in manufacturing and logistics. “They rewrote the software so they could replace chips in short supply with chips not in short supply. The other carmakers were not able to do that.”

“Tesla controlled its destiny,” Professor Cohen added.

Tesla sold 936,000 cars globally in 2021, an 87 percent increase for the year. Ford, G.M. and Stellantis, the company formed from the merger of Fiat Chrysler and Peugeot, all sold fewer cars in 2021 than they did in 2020.

Measured by vehicles delivered globally, Tesla vaulted past Volvo and Subaru in 2021, and some analysts predicted that it could sell two million cars this year, as factories in Berlin and Austin, Texas, come online and a plant in Shanghai ramps up production. That would put Tesla in the same league as BMW and Mercedes — something few in the industry thought possible just a couple of years ago.

G.M. and Ford, of course, sell many more cars and trucks. Both companies said last week that they sold around two million vehicles last year just in the United States.

Tesla, which rarely answers questions from reporters, did not respond to a request for comment for this article. It has said little publicly about how it managed to soar in a down market.

“We have used alternative parts and programmed software to mitigate the challenges caused by these shortages,” the company said in its third-quarter earnings report.

quote:

It also helps that Tesla is a much smaller company than Volkswagen and Toyota, which in a good year produce more than 10 million vehicles each. “It’s just a smaller supply chain to begin with,” said Mr. Melsert, who is now chief executive of American Battery Technology Company, a recycling and mining firm.

quote:

Tesla software, which can be updated remotely, is considered the most sophisticated in the auto business. Even so, the company’s cars likely use fewer chips, analysts said, because the company controls functions like battery cooling and autonomous driving from a smaller number of centralized, onboard computers.

quote:

Tesla vehicles still suffer from quality problems. The company told regulators in December that it planned to recall more than 475,000 cars for two separate defects. One could cause the rearview camera to fail, and the other could cause the front hood to open unexpectedly. And federal regulators are investigating the safety of Tesla’s Autopilot system, which can accelerate, brake and steer a car on its own.

“Tesla will continue to grow,” said Stephen Beck, managing partner at cg42, a management consulting firm in New York. “But they are facing more competition than they ever have, and the competition is getting stronger.”

The carmaker’s fundamental advantage, which allowed it to sail through the chip crisis, will remain, however. Tesla builds nothing but electric vehicles and is unencumbered by habits and procedures that have been rendered obsolete by new technology. “Tesla started from a clean sheet of paper,” Mr. Amsrud said.

Konstantin posted:

That sounds like an absolute nightmare to me. Now, instead of having to target their software to one hardware platform, they need to update it across several. Unless they have planned this very carefully, they've increased the complexity of their software update cycle by several times. That's a future problem though, got to meet those quarterly sales targets! Of course, they could just sunset support early for some hardware patforms, but then you get angry customers asking why their 2022 model has fewer features then the neighbor's 2019 model.

OctaMurk posted:

Well, is it really an absolute nightmare? Windows and all its programs runs on everything ranging from a Pentium to a Ryzen Threadripper with countless combinations of hardware.

hobbesmaster posted:

Windows isn’t a safety critical RTOS.

eXXon posted:

Speaking of predictably terrible Tesla takes, the NYT has one:

quote:

The bolded bits seem to be largely nonsensical. What is "the automakers lacked bargaining clout" supposed to mean? From what I can tell, Tesla doesn't fabricate any of its own chips, and there's nothing here that isn't just paraphrased from their own reports.

Megillah Gorilla posted:

Freakazoid_ posted:

I could see this ending up as the equivalent of Seattle's monorail: A cool piece of tech that goes through periods of being just barely funded or granted huge funds for expansions that don't happen due to cost overruns and the money just disappears somewhere.

Assuming there isn't a collapse or a fire, of course.

Ghost Leviathan posted:

I hear that thing is awfully loud.

eXXon posted:

The bolded bits seem to be largely nonsensical. What is "the automakers lacked bargaining clout" supposed to mean? From what I can tell, Tesla doesn't fabricate any of its own chips, and there's nothing here that isn't just paraphrased from their own reports.

WAR CRIME GIGOLO posted:

Why the hell is he deadset on this death tunnel other than the stock price to up. I mean what happen when his child fans all have heart attacks or claustrophobia and jam up traffic in a TUNNEL OF DEATH

Random Integer posted:

I may be misremembering but wasn't the hyperloop originally supposed to be some sci-fi sealed vacuum tube with trains that could get up to high speed because no air friction? And what they actually built is just a small tunnel?

Volmarias posted:

And yes, I have to imagine that much like a steam summer sale he saw a tunnel boring machine for $100k, said to himself "for that price it would be foolish to a NOT buy it," and then needed to figure out exactly what was supposed to happen next.

Freakazoid_ posted:

I could see this ending up as the equivalent of Seattle's monorail: A cool piece of tech that goes through periods of being just barely funded or granted huge funds for expansions that don't happen due to cost overruns and the money just disappears somewhere.

Assuming there isn't a collapse or a fire, of course.

pairofdimes posted:

If I remember the hype correctly, the Boring Company sort of started that way, in that they began with a used boring machine to start boring and make a tunneling company to learn about the technology. The problem is I think they expected it would be like Tesla or Space-X where there were big incumbents ignoring technologies or new advancements that they could take advantage of and leap ahead. Instead it turns out tunneling is pretty well understood and there's no easy way to tunnel much faster. So far their main innovation seems to be making smaller tunnels.

OJ MIST 2 THE DICK posted:

Las Vegas already has that monorail though