Elon Musk is Really Boring and has a Hole in his Head (originally published 6.1.2017)

Many of you may not know this, but I harbor animus toward Elon Musk that dates back to late 1999 early 2000.

To be clear, it’s a “feigned” animus, as I admire all that he’s accomplished, not from his current successes, but for the risks he took. After selling PayPal, he took his winnings, and reinvested back into himself; even having to borrow money for rent. With big risk comes Big reward.

See, I started an internet transaction processing company for e-commerce in 1996, which was acquired by a public company in 1999. After we fought to change Visa’s rules and business processes that regulated the type of payment transactions they were willing to honor, we became one of a few companies in the world that performed financial transaction processing for e-commerce. Our company was the first master merchant in the world. When I left the company in March 1999, we had three deals on the table for transaction processing, one with Sprint, one with Nascar, and one with a nascent company called eBay. The new management of my business did not pursue eBay. Why is this important you ask? Another brash startup filled eBay’s need for a processing agent between buyers and sellers. That company was PayPal, and the rest, as they say, is history. Yes, in many ways, my company was the precursor to PayPal. We fought to change the way business was done, and PayPal reaped the rewards.

This brings us to today.

Elon, as we all know, has gone on to become a living embodiment of Iron Man, with companies in finance, space, cars, rocket, and solar markets, making a tremendous impact on many of our daily lives.

His latest project is a boring project, not as in you-bore-me-to-death project, but a bore-a-hole-in-the-earth project. If you’re not familiar with it, you can read about it here. Now, I’m not one to poo-poo one’s dreams, especially one from the likes of Elon Musk. However, this current project, boring holes under Los Angeles to improve transportation, I believe is a fool’s errand. See, the objective of the boring company (at least as publicly stated) is to put the traffic underground where you can have more lanes and improve traffic flow. If you want to add “more lanes,” you can simply go deeper and lower. As you might imagine, this excursion is expensive and fraught with risk. Never mind the environmental issues, such as earthquakes, the magnitude of building underground tunnels, as well as the urban planning studies that would be needed to determine where arrival/departure stations might be best placed to serve the most people without creating congestion above ground than it alleviates, are costly, complex, and a complete nightmare. This project is only sweeping the problem underground at a tremendous expense.

I could go on and on, but there exists a simpler solution. This is the same solution I wrote about in 2012, and I will reiterate here.

Self-Flying Cars are a simpler and superior solution that can quickly become a reality since there already exist analogous infrastructure and technology that can be repurposed. Here is the modus operandi:

1. Take a drone type vehicle (think simple quad-copter drone), and equip it with autopilot control and guidance systems that every airplane already has installed. Then use a waze type navigation software, except this would route the drones to “lanes” created in the sky. The software would show where the other drones are and be able to navigate more easily. The routes would most likely be over existing major highways so you would easily have air rights to different locations.

2. Order a drone taxi, the same way one orders an Uber or Lyft today.

3. Type in the destination, sit back and let the self-flying car take off into the sky.

4. Think of it more like Bus Routes, than actual point to point. In LA for instance, you might catch a drone in Santa Monica, it would loop out over the 10 Freeway, zoom downtown to land in a designated area. From there, you would do local transportation (walk, bike, scooter, ride share, bus, etc.).

This does not mean that you would be driving haphazardly, but rather in a seamless line of drones lined up in an orderly fashion in an invisible lane in the sky. If you needed to increase capacity, another lane could be added at will at another altitude in the sky with no additional cost. A fleet of drones could go into almost any geographic area (there will, of course, be governmental interference on landing zones, etc.) and the simplicity of creating a landing space anywhere would make this mode of transportation flexible, easily accessible for everyone.

By comparison, adding another lane to a tunnel or fixing a mistake would require another costly earth boring operation and determining where to build stations for a tunnel system would require traffic studies, urban planning, and approvals. I hope you can see the potential error in calculations. Mistakes are set in stone.

I have similar reservations and criticisms with self-driving cars. I am doubtful that a fleet of self-driving cars will be the solution for congested traffic.

Theoretically, self-driving cars will be safer and more regulated at high speeds. So, if all the cars in the HOV or Fast Lanes were self-driving, you could safely drive at speeds of say 90mph. But, how would fast moving self-driving cars exit from the fast lane, if all the traffic on the 405 is at a stop, and there is no way to get in and out of the lanes? It is unlikely that every car on the highway is self-driving and thus easily routed during our lifetime. Besides, in what would you choose to travel, a car going 90mph or a flying taxi going 180mph? My guess, the self-flying taxi. They are coming faster than you might think. Check out this article about Uber and flying taxis.

Speaking of speed, at the beginning of the article, I talked about the public reasons for the boring project. What is the non-public reason? My guess for Elon, it has more to do with Hyperloop and Hyper Speed.

While I believe the self-flying cars will be a great option, if Hyperloop technology can operate at speeds approaching 700 miles an hour, well, that just might be a game changer.

At the end of the day, it still won’t solve some of the problems on cost, capacity, and prolonged public planning, but, this is Elon Musk, so I would not bet against him.

However, when it comes to the boring project, I’d say he’s pretty boring and he just might have it wrong.

PS- in closing, I don’t think Elon is really “trying” to build tunnels for transportation. The current cost per mile for digging a tunnel is, I believe, around $1 Billion. Again, that is One Billion per MILE!

With the Boring project, you could “LEARN” how to drive down the cost per mile and perfect the underground drilling.

But, what is the REAL purpose of the Boring project? For Mars of course!!! I think if Elon and Boring Co. can perfect underground boring, then the colonization of Mars becomes that much more feasible.

Am I right? Who knows. But again, I would never bet against Elon.