I don't know. It looks like a public transit system to me.
a public transit system... that requires a car
It doesn't. It's shown in the video.
... except in the crucial way of "getting people to buy more Teslas", which is the metric Musk is most concerned about.
Well, Tesla is getting into the large vehicle industry, so it's not crazy to think they'd make autonomous vehicles for public transit if there was a market for it.
Yeah, proposing a massive engineering and infrastructure effort with an insane upfront cost in order to be the exclusive provider of the commodity trains for a few years until other manufacturers lobby for manufacturing rights is the real business venture here.
And worse in others. This at least has the advantage that people might actually want to use it since it's zero latency and you have your car for local driving.
Europe and Japan seem to have solved that problem with public transit.
If you think this is zero latency you're out of your mind. People can't merge or parallel park without causing traffic on normal streets and you think they'll be able to do it on elevators?