‘Genius Inventor’ Elon Musk’s Newest Futuristic Idea is Cars and Tunnels
Before the rise of Twitch, podcasting was popular and live-streaming was kind of an idea. And occasionally you’d hear people say “Yeah, the future of podcasting is going to be getting the podcasts live as they’re being recorded, they’ll just beam it out like that.” Today you’ll sometimes hear someone pitch a concept that’s in the ballpark of “What if you got an Uber that could carry a lot of passengers at once and just drove along a set route and people could get on and off as it drove around that loop.”
Congratulations, you just invented live radio and the city bus line.
Elon Musk’s newest bold, futuristic idea is “individualized mass transit.”
Individualized mass transit is the future
— Elon Musk (@elonmusk) July 22, 2020
Individualized mass transit is a car. Elon Musk invented the car.
I’m not done.
His big innovation is putting the cars underground.
Yes, Elon Musk has invented driving a car on a road but introduced the the concept of it becoming a lightless coffin buried under literal tons of earth in the event of an emergency.
He also invented the city bus.
Wow, 1200 people per day in an underground shuttle? That’s amazing. Hey, how many people ride the subway in New York City every day?
Oh, 5.6 million. Hunh. Seems like a lot.
Basically, the big innovation here is that instead of paying a small amount of money to a publicly-maintained service you’d pay a larger amount of money so that Elon Musk makes a profit.
The part that always amazes me with these schemes is how complicated they are to do tasks we can already do better and cheaper. Musk has two one-mile long tunnels in Nevada where you can take a taxi that goes 35 miles and hour. This started out off as a tunnel going from New York to DC with vehicles moving at 600 miles per hour.
That’s the real genius of Elon Musk; he promises you the moon and the stars and then gives you a really futuristic-looking fork and spoon and hangs up the mission accomplished banner.
The kicker is that Elon Musk’s underground Tesla shuttle costs more than taking the bus. Genius.