The man may have some engineering chops but this is the kind of “traffic solution” that could only have been dreamed up by a person whose entire business model depends on selling lots and lots of privately owned cars.
TL;DR: It’s a subway system… but to move cars instead of people! Because that’s totally more plausible than building the kind of mass transit system that just moves actual human beings from place to place!
The closest analogy I can think of is someone designing an entire highway system around the idea of trucks that transport people on horseback.
it does seem like a stretch, but try thinking of it more like containerized cargo being transported multimodaly. That it ends up on wheels on the road doesn’t mean the ship & rail parts of its journey were unimportant in terms of efficiency.
Still massively inefficient since the cargo in this case (commuters) makes up a small percentage of the mass & volume of the container (the car). Particularly if a commuter is traveling alone. There’s just no way to get anywhere near the efficiency of a regular subway.
I dunno, it’s hard to believe he could actually get enough rich folks to use that system for it to make financial or logistical sense. Besides, what’s the point of being an entitled 1%er if you don’t get to look down on everyone else? Better to just build a network of luxury zeppelins and private monorail networks.
If it is anything like his other business ventures he will schmooz for tech investments to float the high concept for a decade or more before it even comes up with the real business plan.
have them all be generic flying / monorailing modules that can have cheap skins snapped on for different period pieces (periods future, past and alternate) and you could have the whole thing written off as part of a movie set! Or maybe it would be cheaper and more flexible to just paint all of them bright green…
That’s one part of the plan that isn’t insurmountable. Lots of cities in earthquake-prone areas (including LA) have subway systems. They just require a bit more structural engineering.
He seems to be quite clever as far as “designing/building cool machines” goes, less so in “finding a logical justification for why these machines should exist.” So kind of like Tony Stark in that sense.
You forget that “genius” and “common sense” seldom go together.
When your brain is flying high on all sorts of ideas, it’s hard to come down to Earth and realize that just because you can visualize it in your mind’s eye doesn’t mean it makes any practical sense whatsoever.
You all seem to be laboring under the assumption that this technology is intended for Earth.
That phase is just the proof of concept.
Step one: Finance plan. Creates PayPal
Step two: Power. Creates Tesla, develops battery and solar technology.
Step three: Transportation. Founds SpaceX
Step four: Lunar Base. Digging is better than building.
…
…
Step ???: Colonize galaxy.
Because anyone can write a book and talk about colonizing Mars. Actually formulating a plan and accomplishing even the first step, let alone three or four- SO FAR- Each of which involve major technological development?
