Why can't they put electric vans or buses in these tunnels? shuttling everyone in 4 person cars seems inefficient... Lay down a track, and they can be autonomous very easily (compared to relying on tesla self driving tech)
In some ways using Teslas as the cars is nice. If the system is lightly loaded the waiting time is always short. There's no "waiting for the next train/bus to arrive". The downside is that if it gets busy the system doesn't scale well, maximum capacity is low, but that's a future problem and it is trivial for Tesla to swap out the cars with higher capacity vehicles once they are building them. One of the nice things is that the per-car cost is far lower than it is for a train car (which typically cost on the order of $2 million[1] each), and the cars can be sold on the secondary market to make back some of the capital costs. The secondary market for metro cars is far smaller.
[1] https://wamu.org/story/20/02/27/metro-just-received-the-last...
This is comedy gold.