Musk's Hyperloop math doesn't add up

[phantom power]

The Hyperloop may very well be something that we have the skills and know-how to build. It may even be desirable in some corridors. But the technological concept is only part of what Musk has proposed.

Musk suggests that for less than 10% of the cost of building the long-planned high-speed rail line between Los Angeles and San Francisco, we can invent and build an entirely new technology. But the Hyperloop doesn't actually make it to downtown LA or downtown San Francisco. It also has a maximum passenger capacity of just 10% of the HSR line. And it bypasses all of the intermediate population centers in central California that HSR will serve.

...Every time a pod arrives, it has to decelerate and stop. Then the airlock will have to close, pressurize, and open again. Then the pod has to clear the airlock. Then the airlock can close, depressurize, and then reopen.

All of that has to happen in less than 30 seconds (if Musk is to be believed) or 80 seconds if vehicles are kept a safe distance apart.

Meanwhile, Musk says that each station can have 3 pods on the platform at once. If pods arrive every 30 seconds, then passengers and baggage have to get off within 60 seconds. One arthritic passenger or a guy who goes back for the iPhone he left behind, and pods start backing up in the tube.

...

The California High-Speed Rail will whisk passengers from Los Angeles Union Station to the Transbay Terminal in downtown San Francisco in 2 hours and 48 minutes. That's too slow for Musk, and he says the Hyperloop can get you from Los Angeles to San Francisco in 35 minutes.

But the Hyperloop won't start in Los Angeles, and it won't end in San Francisco. Instead, it's proposed to start in Sylmar, 38 minutes north of Los Angeles Union Station aboard the Metrolink commuter train. That means it takes longer to get to the Hyperloop from downtown LA than it would take to go to San Francisco.

http://greatergreaterwashington.org/post/19848/musks-hyperloop-math-doesnt-add-up/

[CBGLuthier]

1. Hey the author has a Master's degree in Community Planning

So he must be really, really smart, eh.

[phantom power]

3. I wouldn't know, I don't worship at the altar of degree titles.

Do you think he's wrong about something? That would be an interesting discussion topic.

[wtmusic]

2. But we kinda knew that, didn't we?

Electric cars, not so long ago, "didn't add up" either

[phantom power]

4. If it costs 10% of HSR, but then again also only has 10% the capacity of HSR...

while also not actually reaching downtown, and not servicing intermediate stops, I think the question is: what is the business case over HSR?

[OKIsItJustMe]

6. “I think the question is: what is the business case over HSR?”

Here’s a question: Is Musk planning to build it?
Answer: No.

http://www.navigantresearch.com/blog/hyperloop-faces-technical-hurdles

[font face=Serif][font size=5]Hyperloop Faces Technical Hurdles[/font]

Sam Jaffe — August 12, 2013

[font size=3]If a prototype of the Hyperloop – Elon Musk’s futuristic superfast train – ever gets built, it will have to overcome some very significant engineering challenges that may or may not be solvable. After reading through the published document that explains how the concept works (it reads something like a cross between a patent application and a Popular Science article), I can’t say that it will or it won’t work. But I do have opinions on the plan’s strengths and weaknesses.

I should point out that, while I’m not an engineer, I have helped design systems that use compressed air and deal with the aerodynamics of large structures. I’ll start with my opinion of what the plan has going for it, followed by important challenges that still require a solution.

The most important element of the concept paper is that it doesn’t really invent anything. Everything described in the plan has been built for other applications and proven to work. The electric engine and battery pack would be variations of what Tesla has built in the Model S. The steel tubes, through which the passenger pods would travel, would be carefully aligned versions of pipeline tubing. The compressor on the front of the pod would be similar to any industrial compressor.

…

The biggest concern with this plan has to do with temperature. The pod will be compressing air and expelling it downwards and backwards. All that air compression creates an enormous amount of heat, which can damage the pod and its machinery. Musk’s solution is to add to each pod a water tank that will capture that heat and turn it into steam to be collected at the next station. Although the thermodynamic calculations are correct, a small pod with only a few cubic feet of room for a heat exchanger leaves little space for an efficient exchange of heat. That means that the flow of water must be increased, requiring a lot more water on board. There may be an elegant solution for this challenge, but it’s not in Musk’s current paper.

…[/font][/font]

[BlueStreak]

8. His "announcement" is not a serious proposal. It is just a self-promotion piece that

checks off a long list of trendy buzzwords, such as his nonsensical claim that this would be solar powered.

More attention on Musk = more people buying Tesla stock = more money in Musk's pocket.

He is a very smart guy, and a whole lot more likable than Donald Trump.

[XemaSab]

14. It's way faster and way cheaper than flying

There's also no reason why only one should be built.

Why not build a hyperloop that will get you from SF to Sacramento in 10 minutes? Or SF to Fresno in 10? Or SF to San Jose in 5? Or LA to San Diego in 10? Or LA to Vegas in 25? Or LA to Phoenix in 30?

I like the idea of HSR, but it costs a LOT, it's slower than flying, the route is weaksauce, and the environmental hurdles are huge. Finally, I'm not sure who would ride the thing.

If the hyperloop is built and it's a flop or a novelty, we're only in the hole for 1/10th the cost of HSR.

[BlueStreak]

5. They still don't. He is a world class con artist

So far he has been selling his Tesla electric cars to the super-riich status seekers. It is not a product that works in the mainstream and won't be for another 5 years at least. But he has convinced a bunch of people to buy his stock based on an endless list of promises and undelivered claims, further adding to the guy's net worth -- which is always the goal, after all.



And in this case, he isn't even committing any resources to this "project". What is the point, other than for a huckster to keep his name active? Don't be surprised if Donald Trump comes out and announces a New York to LA tube next week.

[wtmusic]

7. ok

And sales continue to set records, and that's a chimera parked in my garage.

You don't know what you're talking about.

[OKIsItJustMe]

10. “And sales continue to set records” (for electric cars)

http://www.nbcnews.com/business/chevy-volt-drops-5k-auto-industry-aims-boost-electric-6C10858850

[font face=Serif][font size=5]Chevy Volt drops $5K as auto industry aims to boost electric[/font]

Ben Klayman Reuters
Aug. 6, 2013 at 12:58 PM ET

[font size=3]DETROIT - General Motors said on Tuesday it is slashing the price of its Chevrolet Volt electric car by $5,000 to boost demand for the plug-in hybrid in a segment still struggling to gain a foothold in the U.S. auto market.

…

Several automakers have slashed prices on their electric cars to help overcome consumer qualms about high costs and fears about driving range, and are pushing to develop the technology in hopes the vehicles could become a bigger seller as fuel-efficiency requirements rise globally.

Through July, sales of electric vehicles in the United States had more than doubled from last year to almost 49,000 vehicles, according to website hybridcars.com, but still only 0.54 percent of the overall market. In the same period, Volt sales were up 9 percent to 11,643 vehicles.

In January, Nissan Motor cut the price of its Leaf EV by more than $6,000, and in May Honda Motor slashed the lease price of its electric-powered Fit subcompact car by one-third. In July, Ford Motor reduced the price of its 2014 electric Focus by 10 percent.

…[/font][/font]

[joshcryer]

17. They have a sub 100 mile range.

That's why they're not selling as well as the Model S.

In fact, Tesla specifically decided to scrap the 160 mile model because its range was not that great. Demand for that model was simply too low.

(Note: the Volt is a hybrid and has a longer range but wtmute was talking about all electric as far as I'm concerned.)

[BlueStreak]

18. Right, leaving them with a $90,000 car. This is not mainstream

What part of the word "mainstream" is hard to understand?

He is selling to early adopters and status seekers -- very successfully. That's not a crime. Steve Jobs made quite a business out of that. He was another guy cut from the same cloth, convincing large numbers of people to pay twice as much for their computers while offering them mostly generation-behind software and hardware technology.

[joshcryer]

19. The $30k mainstream car will have a 200+ mile range.

And there will be enough supercharging stations that it becomes an option for the upper middle class. We may have to wait for Ford or Chevy or Toyota to bring a lower tier car into the mix ($15-20k) but the entire business practice is sound.

It's not like Tesla is planning to only cater to "early adopters and status seekers." That's a stupid business model.

BTW, the super charging stations will be solar powered. And at least for the early adopters, recharging your car is free (in fact some people did the math and the car pays for itself in about 5 years if you're a business person and using the car for deliveries or whatever).

[BlueStreak]

26. I agree with all of that (except the solar power)

That is just more of Musk BS crap. He really is a modern PT Barnum. There is no way any photovoltaic device can provide the amps needed for a fast recharge. PVs are "slow and steady wins the race". He will throw a little PV panel on each charging station and then claim the stations are "solar powered". 99.999% of their juice will come from the grid while they are fast charging a car.

This is the kind of thing that makes me not trust the guy and refer to him as a con artist.

But I completely agree with you about the mainstream product. Mainstream is still 5 years away, but Tesla is forcing that to happen faster than it would have otherwise. The only slight quibble I would have is to suggest the BMW I3 looks a lot more like the mainstream electric car than the Tesla -- at least through 2022. With the I3, most people could get by using only a couple of gallons of gas a month and never have any range issues or concerns about finding a charging station.

[joshcryer]

32. I don't disagree.

He won't have the capacity / storage to actually store all of the power the PV plants gather, but he will be able to sell it to the grid as needed. So whether he plans to actually build PV plants large enough, at each station, to pay for itself, I can't say, I have to see the supercharging stations to make that determination. But obviously they would want to do this as the cost to power Model S cars for free, forever, is pretty damn high, especially since people will be reselling them and they will likely last 20 years or more. The free forever thing is a gimmick, but it only works if solar PV prices come down to a level that's super cheap, which Musk is clearly counting on (and will likely happen).

I actually don't like to credit Tesla for making EVs happen faster simply because that would be acknowledging a kind of trickle down type of thing. eg, rich people buy expensive cars so the poor plebs can buy cheaper cars. No, I think more that it's a closed business model that you have to use if you don't have a lot of investment capital. Think about it this way, you want to build small fishing boats for people to go out and enjoy their weekends fishing. You have zero capital so you put almost all of your money into building a luxury yacht that uses the materials of maybe 5 fishing boats but can be sold for 100x more. That's how you'd jump start such a business and that's what Musk did with Tesla. Small team first, larger team next, even larger team after that.

From my POV all Musk did is offer a secondary player and a minor competition, since the other players have mainstream options already (they just don't have the range that Tesla's cars do; which is why they are not selling as well). I actually suspect that by the time the Model M (mainstream; my naming) comes out, the other players, GM and Ford and Toyota, will have a vehicle in the same category, and for cheaper. So I don't think we should credit Tesla too much there for that. I would say fuel prices and economics are more going to be the driving force for that in the late 20-teens.

edit: if Tesla really wants to win they should license their supercharging connectors for free, to GM, Ford, and Toyota and other car manufacturers. Get it over with and get a standardized EV charging adapter out there.

[BlueStreak]

34. I see the solar thing a little differently.

To have enough amps to do the supercharging thing, he would need a half acre per charging port and of course offer that only during the daytime on sunny days. That is clearly not going to happen. These things will get their juice from the grid, and if they have a little PV unit on each station that sells a little juice back to the grid, that's fine. I'm not anti-solar at all. Far from it.

But this guy is a bundle of marketing tricks. "Con man" is a little extreme a description, because he actually provides a product that works for some people. "World class marketing hype" is about as charitable as I can be though. I do think there is a danger of people like him putting out so much complete nonsense about solar power that it will turn off the general public if they learn that those claims were so wildly exaggerated. That makes it very easy for a person to conclude that ALL solar claims are grossly exaggerated, and that would be very unfortunate.

I don't think any of this has anything to do with his promise of lifetiime juice for the early S owners. The cost of the juice from the grid is not a big factor in the overall scheme of things for such a small number of consumers. Remember, this is an Internet start-up guy at heart. You promise anything to get up to critical mass. You don't worry about the bottom line. You try to get customers and top line dollars as fast as you can -- to hell with any future liabilities. Then you try to sell the whole thing to somebody else before the excitement wears off. That is how the game is played. If we had a good look at the Tesla books, I'm sure we'd find all sorts of future obligations that the next owner will be responsible for.

[OKIsItJustMe]

20. I’m afraid your comparison to Jobs is based on a misunderstanding of the facts

The facts are that Apple technology (especially software technology) was always more advanced. (Trust me. Microsoft Windows may have looked like the Mac OS, but it wasn’t even technologically equivalent, let alone a generation ahead. It was a cheap knock-off, pure and simple.)

[joshcryer]

22. That's slightly misleading. They both took from Xerox Alto.

And Windows 3.1 and further ushered in a sort of back and forth copying of feature sets from both companies. The main key is that if it wasn't for Apple appropriating NEXTStep they probably would've gone into obscurity because the Windows platform marched on.

What's important to note is that the Windows platform is quite possibly the longest running platform of compatibility ever devised. It's insane how much effort they put into backwards compatibility. Indeed, solely as a software company that's what Windows had to do.

See this video on upgrading Windows:

[OKIsItJustMe]

25. Have you seen an actual analysis of what Apple “took” from Xerox?

http://www-sul.stanford.edu/mac/parc.html

[font face=Serif][font size=5]The Xerox PARC Visit[/font]

[font size=3]The closest thing in the history of computing to a Prometheus myth is the late 1979 visit to Xerox PARC by a group of Apple engineers and executives led by Steve Jobs. According to early reports, it was on this visit that Jobs discovered the mouse, windows, icons, and other technologies that had been developed at PARC. These wonders had been locked away at PARC by a staff that didn't understand the revolutionary potential of what they had created. Jobs, in contrast, was immediately converted to the religion of the graphical user interface, and ordered them copied by Apple, starting down the track that would eventually yield the Lisa and "insanely great" Macintosh. The Apple engineers-- that band of brothers, that bunch of pirates-- stole the fire of the gods, and gave it to the people.

It's a good story. Unfortunately, it's also wrong in almost every way a story can be wrong. There are problems with chronology and timing. The testimony of a number of key figures at Apple suggests that the visit was not the revelation early accounts made it out to be. But the story also carries deeper assumptions about Apple, Xerox PARC, computer science in the late 1970s, and even the nature of invention and innovation that deserve to be examined and challenged.

…

In the case of the relationship between the work at PARC and the development of the Macintosh, this blindness leads us to underestimate the originality of Apple's own work, and the differences between the Alto and Macintosh. The story of the Apple mouse in particular shows how much work was involved in moving a technology from the laboratory to the living room, and how different the skills required for that work were from those used in pure research.[/font][/font]

http://folklore.org/StoryView.py?story=On_Xerox,_Apple_and_Progress.txt

[font face=Serif][font size=5] On Xerox, Apple and Progress[/font]

…

[font size=4]Where It All Began[/font]

[font size=3]For more than a decade now, I've listened to the debate about where the Macintosh user interface came from. Most people assume it came directly from Xerox, after Steve Jobs went to visit Xerox PARC (Palo Alto Research Center). This "fact" is reported over and over, by people who don't know better (and also by people who should!). Unfortunately, it just isn't true - there are some similarities between the Apple interface and the various interfaces on Xerox systems, but the differences are substantial.

Steve did see Smalltalk when he visited PARC. He saw the Smalltalk integrated programming environment, with the mouse selecting text, pop-up menus, windows, and so on. The Lisa group at Apple built a system based on their own ideas combined with what they could remember from the Smalltalk demo, and the Mac folks built yet another system. There is a significant difference between using the Mac and Smalltalk.

Smalltalk has no Finder, and no need for one, really. Drag-and- drop file manipulation came from the Mac group, along with many other unique concepts: resources and dual-fork files for storing layout and international information apart from code; definition procedures; drag-and-drop system extension and configuration; types and creators for files; direct manipulation editing of document, disk, and application names; redundant typed data for the clipboard; multiple views of the file system; desk accessories; and control panels, among others. The Lisa group invented some fundamental concepts as well: pull down menus, the imaging and windowing models based on QuickDraw, the clipboard, and cleanly internationalizable software.

Smalltalk had a three-button mouse and pop-up menus, in contrast to the Mac's menu bar and one-button mouse. Smalltalk didn't even have self-repairing windows - you had to click in them to get them to repaint, and programs couldn't draw into partially obscured windows. Bill Atkinson did not know this, so he invented regions as the basis of QuickDraw and the Window Manager so that he could quickly draw in covered windows and repaint portions of windows brought to the front. One Macintosh feature identical to a Smalltalk feature is selection-based modeless text editing with cut and paste, which was created by Larry Tesler for his Gypsy editor at PARC.

…[/font][/font]

[joshcryer]

27. Yeah, they used less advanced aspects of Xerox Alto.

This doesn't mean that they didn't try to rip off Xerox.

They just couldn't, because Smalltalk and the OO GUI was superior (and in many ways still is).

In the end OSX is NEXTStep which Apple didn't make, they just bought it out.

Kind of how Microsoft bought out DOS and licensed the GUI of Macintosh for Windows 1.0.

[OKIsItJustMe]

28. Odd that you mention that Apple bought NeXTSTEP/OpenStep

The original claim regarded Steve Jobs, who founded the NeXT computer company (creators of NeXTSTEP.)

So, I guess you’re agreeing that the technology he peddled was superior?


As for Microsoft licensing the Mac GUI: This too is a distortion.

http://www.folklore.org/StoryView.py?project=Macintosh&story=A_Rich_Neighbor_Named_Xerox.txt&topic=Microsoft&sortOrder=Sort%20by%20Date&detail=medium

…

Aside from intellectual curiosity, there was no reason to care about the system internals unless you were trying to implement your own version of it. I told Steve that I suspected that Microsoft was going to clone the Mac, but he wasn't that worried because he didn't think they were capable of doing a decent implementation, even with the Mac as an example.

…

Unfortunately, it turned out that while the agreement that Microsoft signed in 1981 stipulated that they not ship mouse-based software until a year after the Mac introduction, that ended up being defined in the contract as September 1983, since in late 1981 we thought that the Mac would ship in the fall of 1982, and we foolishly didn't let the ship date float in the contract. So Microsoft was within their rights to announce Windows when they did. Apple still needed Microsoft's apps for the Macintosh, so Steve really couldn't cut them off.

Microsoft didn't manage to ship a version of Windows until almost two years later, releasing Windows 1.0 in the fall of 1985. It was pretty crude, just as Steve had predicted, with little of the Mac's thoughtful elegance. It didn't even have overlapping windows, preferring a simpler technique called "tiling". When its utter rejection became apparent a few months later, Bill Gates fired the implementation team and started a new version from scratch, led by none other than Neil Konzen.

Neil's version of Windows, released a couple of years later, was good enough that Apple filed a monumental copyright lawsuit against Microsoft in 1988, but they eventually lost on a technicality (the judge ruled that Apple inadvertently gave Microsoft a perpetual license to the Mac user interface in November 1985).

[joshcryer]

29. Fair enough, but it still required Sun Microsystems.

Regardless, I do not think things like "user interfaces" should be patentable, nor are they novel, as your own initial response noted "everyone knew about it." I think that both Apple and Microsoft stole shit from each other, but I think Apple is a lot more picky about its "innovations" being stolen.

Oh wow, swiping, what a novel concept... except mouse gestures were being used by Opera for many years before... etc, etc.

[OKIsItJustMe]

30. Whether a “User Interface” should be patentable or not is a different discussion

Personally, I think they should be. The idea of a patent is to allow an individual or a company to recoup their investment in research and development.

Apple Human Interface Designers put an awful lot of work into making the Mac “user friendly.” Then, Microsoft produced something that kinda looked like the Mac.

I explain it like this:

• In our culture, we start looking at a printed page in the upper-left-hand corner first, move across the top, and wind up in the lower-right-hand corner. So, the Macintosh team placed the “Apple Menu” in the Upper-left-hand corner (the place of greatest prominence) and the “Trash Can” in the lower-right-hand corner (the place of least prominence.)
• The Windows interface was not designed for ease of use, it was designed to be defensible in a court of law, so the “Start menu” (the rough equivalent to the Apple menu) was placed in the lower-left-hand corner (instead of the upper-left-hand corner.) The trash can recycle bin has no fixed location.

(I can go on…)

[joshcryer]

31. GUI R&D is pretty simple.

It's not particularly costly. You just pop some users in a room and see what they find most intuitive or easy to use. It's a pure copy-testing behavior.

What's difficult is figuring out what features that a GUI should have, and both MS and Apple have evolved to take each others' design components. The Dock, for example, clearly takes some design elements from from the Taskbar, which is why the Start Menu made more sense to be at the bottom left. The Taskbar then took some features from the Dock, such as pinning and jumplists (stacks) and improved upon them further. No lawsuits over these incremental feature changes, just they both accepted these are features users want. "Oh, we'll sue over putting an icon in a specified location that launches programs." Such absurdity.

To get us back on topic here, this is why I like Elon's approach to the Hyperloop. He's open sourcing the whole design (though under what license it's not clear, it's definitely unpatented as a general mode of transport though). Basically you'll be able to figure out the underlying details in due course.

[OKIsItJustMe]

33. “It’s so easy, when you just don’t care.” — Leonard Bernstein, Mass

Last edited Fri Aug 16, 2013, 03:39 PM - Edit history (1)

The belief that “(G)UI R&D is pretty simple” is one reason why there are so many bad UI’s in the marketplace.

How was the original iPod able to come into a preexisting market with multiple “MP-3 Players” and dominate it so quickly and utterly? Its UI.

How was the iPhone able to revolutionize the cell phone market? Its GUI.

What made the Lisa and the the Macintosh different? Their GUI.

Good interface design takes time and effort.
http://www.folklore.org/StoryView.py?project=Macintosh&story=Busy_Being_Born.txt&topic=User%20Interface&sortOrder=Sort%20by%20Date&detail=medium

[font face=Serif][font size=5]Busy Being Born[/font]

…

[font size=3]The Macintosh User Interface wasn't designed all at once; it was actually the result of almost five years of experimentation and development at Apple, starting with graphics routines that Bill Atkinson began writing for Lisa in late 1978. Like any evolutionary process, there were lots of false starts and blind alleys along the way. It's a shame that these tend to be lost to history, since there is a lot that we can learn from them.

Fortunately, the main developer of the user interface, Bill Atkinson, was an avid, lifelong photographer, and he had the foresight to document the incremental development of the Lisa User Interface (which more or less became the Mac UI after a few tweaks) with a series of photographs. He kept a Polaroid camera by his computer, and took a snapshot each time the user interface reached a new milestone, which he collected in a loose-leaf notebook. I'm excited to be able to reproduce and annotate them here, since they offer a fascinating, behind the scenes glimpse of how the Mac's breakthrough user interface was crafted.

The images are scaled so they easily fit onto a typical screen, but you can click on them for larger versions that show more detail.

…



…

The middle picture shows the very first scroll bar, on the left instead of the right, before the arrow scroll buttons were added. It also has a folder-tab style title bar, which would persist for a while before being dropped (Bill says that at that point, he was confusing documents and folders). The right most photo shows that we adopted the inverse selection method of text highlighting.

…[/font][/font]

http://www.asktog.com/columns/022DesignedToGiveFitts.html

[font face=Serif][font size=5]A Quiz Designed to Give You Fitts[/font]

[font size=3]So you think you are an interaction designer? Not if you cannot answer all the following questions quickly and with authority.

If you're not an interaction designer, but you know one—or you are thinking of hiring one—slip them just the questions, and see how well they do. I've used variations of this quiz for years during the interview process to good effect.

These questions and answers assume that you have total control over all screen real estate, the OS, etc. Just pretend you are chief designer for Microsoft or Apple.

If you are new to matters Fitts, take the quiz before looking at the text the follows anyway. The answers are going to thoroughly teach the principles involved, but taking your best shot at the quiz first will make clear to you what assumptions you have been using in the past. You can then measure those assumptions against the answers that follow. And don't feel bad with your initial results: The overwhelming majority of people, even those that have been involved with computers for years, do poorly on their first time around. The good news is that they do great on the retake, and many have found this the most valuable single article on this website, immediately and permanently applicable to their future design work.

…[/font][/font]

[BlueStreak]

36. If the argument is that the various Apple UIs have historically been more intuitive

I don't buy it. That niche of the market was a cult. There were all kinds of "secret handshakes" in that UI. A person coming from outside that world did not necessarily find it intuitive or inviting at all. Personally any time I am near a Mac app, I start to get very uncomfortable. The most simple tasks always seem to be such an ordeal to me.

[OKIsItJustMe]

21. GM disagrees of course

While, arguably, the Volt is a series/serial hybrid, GM says it is an electric car, with a gasoline engine to extend its range.

http://www.chevrolet.com/volt-electric-car.html

[joshcryer]

23. It's certainly clever branding.

But I'll hand it to the other poster, the people who buy Tesla's want long range all electrics, and the others you cite just don't cut it for them.

[OKIsItJustMe]

24. I think GM actually has a valid point

If I drove a Volt™ the vast majority of the time, I would drive it as an electric vehicle.

[joshcryer]

16. Have you ever started a car company?

Let me give you a hint, out of the big three, you need billions and billions of investment money to even begin a project like that. He started with high end luxury vehicles for the sole reason of expanding the company. It is working. They are planning to make a $35k model of the car after the Model X launches. It'll come in 2015-2016.

This in turn will force GM, Ford, and Toyota's hand to do the same, as they're already planning to do.

Electric cars use less electricity to go the same distance as gasoline power cars.

The reason that stock price is so high? Because he's got a damn good business model.

Disclaimer: I own Tesla stock.

[Mother Muckraker]

35. Hyperloop Red Herring

Exactly. Hyperloop was never meant to be operational. Note the timing of the release is right after the reports of a Q2 non-GAAP profit. The Hyperloop is a red herring to coverup the GAAP loss of $31 million.

The latest lies are the "strong roof" lie and the "highest rating ever" lie.

[OKIsItJustMe]

9. Yes, and they said we’d never go to the moon too

Last edited Wed Aug 14, 2013, 04:26 PM - Edit history (1)

However, just because one thing which is dismissed as impractical/impossible is accomplished, that does not mean that all things which are dismissed as impractical/impossible will be accomplished.



http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ford_Nucleon


The hyperloop is hardly a new idea:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pneumatic_tube#In_public_transportation
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Vactrain

[phantom power]

12. btw I love that mushroom cloud in the background of the "atom car"

Because nothing adds positive vibes to a sales pitch like allusions to war and radioactive fallout.

[OKIsItJustMe]

13. Yes, I loved it too. It was marketing for that period (you know) “Science has harnessed the atom!”

[madrchsod]

11. sort of a nice idea but .....

it`s not going to happen because it is to expensive to build.

[joshcryer]

15. His proposal takes that route to meet his costing.

Obviously you could build one somewhere else but you'd have to get right of way permission which makes the costs go up considerably.

The whole environmental objection completely ignores that it's proposed to be in the median. They basically wanted to get the biggest arguments against it out of the way (right of way, environmental impact), just to make the paper napkin point that it could be done.