Tesla uberbulls often like to say that Tesla is the leader in self-driving because while it doesn’t have a commercially available autonomous ride-hailing service like Waymo, it doesn’t rely on geo-fencing and mapping like Waymo.
They argue that if Tesla wanted to do that it could, but it prefers to focus on an autonomous system that could drive anywhere, anytime, without mapping.
However, it is questionable that they could do it if they wanted to because they still haven’t done it on a project much simpler than Waymo’s operations in Pheonix and other cities: the tunnels under Las Vegas.
The Las Vegas Convention Center Loop is The Boring Company’s first full-scale loop project currently in commercial use.
Elon Musk’s tunneling start-up completed the $50 million project in just over a year.
A Boring Company Loop system consists of tunnels in which Tesla electric vehicles travel at high speeds between stations to transport people within a city. The Boring Company said that it was working with Tesla to use its self-driving system inside those tunnels, which would enables to get rid of the current drivers and lower the cost of operation.
However, 2 years and several more tunnels connected to the Loop later, The Boring Company is still using drivers in the tunnels.
The idea of being able to make tunnels faster and cheaper is super exciting, though there’s some serious doubt that is actually what was accomplished. Still, maybe if it works out a better company can mimic it more efficiently.
I think a lot about this sci-fi race in an Anne McCaffrey book that put most of their infrastructure underground to preserve the natural beauty of their planet. I want that for us so bad. I mean, we can still have buildings and such above ground but imagine if transport was almost exclusively underground, the amount of space we’d save for building things we actually use and the amount of wildlife we’d preserve.
Burying highways would make such a difference. Things would be so quiet.