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Comment by danso | Hacker News Reader

What was the "proof of concept"? When Boring was first unveiled, it was sold not as a tunnel for cars to drive through, but a system that included "electric skates" and subway-car-like pods: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=u5V_VzRrSBI

I doubt Boring would have gotten much hype at all if Musk had admitted up front that it'd be little different than an underground highway, something which people have been using for decades.

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I admit the skates were missing from this demo and no mention of them was made. Maybe the infrastructure for the electric skates (deployment, onloading, etc) is just too impractical. Building a self driving pod that transports passengers through these tunnels...would be relatively trivial for Tesla or any other electric car manufacturer.

If you were doing an iterative design, you would probably start with the tunnel.

"Electric skates" sound cool, but if you've already got autonomous vehicles with perfectly good wheels why are they necessary?

Yes each tunnel is limited by the speed of the slowest vehicle, but if the tunneling cost is low enough (it certainly would be lower without skates and special tracks) you could have a "slow lane" and a "fast lane"

I pay a lot of attention to my car's maintenance and tire wear, but that wouldn't be true for everyone in the tunnels. High speeds are also more stressful on wheels and ancillary parts. The idea of skates seems like it would help normalize capabilities/limits of cars in the tunnels.

I will just quote myself here:

> The Boring Company seems to be trying with different thoughts and ideas for making these tunnels a reality and they have been quite open to the public with these ideas. It feels to me that the author is taking advantage of this transparency and using it as a weapon for his own agenda.

Uh OK. I'll ask again, what is the ostensible proof of concept. You assert that Musk/Boring has been "quite open", so it should be quite easy to describe what the proof of concept is, if it is something else besides a tunnel for cars to drive through.

They built a 1.2 mile tunnel in LA and revealed it the other day: https://www.digitaltrends.com/cool-tech/boring-company-tunne...

Let me be more specific, what concept is the tunnel supposed to prove or prototype? If it's that he can build a tunnel that a car can drive through, then OK, it's certainly not nothing. I don't see what's wrong with a blog post pointing out how Boring has deviated from its original promise, barring any details from Boring about how they've improved upon the process when building out this tunnel. I mean, I'm not the biggest Musk fanboy, but I don't think I would've ever bet against him if the bet was, "Can Elon Musk dig a tunnel?"

Why does it have to prove anything? Sometimes prototypes are just about experimentation and inspiring people. They had to dig the tunnel anyway, why not show it off in a fun way?

Why does Musk have to hold a big media event (i.e. free advertising) for a pre-alpha tunnel? No one forced him to, so to complain when the attention is of the disappointed and negative variety strikes me as a bit strange.

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