Even if some of his ideas seem impractical, he’s a breath of fresh air from other superwealthy who only want to hunker down with their billions, and if they’re like the Koch’s, destroy society AND the Earth. People with visions of the future and the means to work towards them are rare. Gates has tackled some serious problems of our past, but has not set himself to shaping the future in a creative way like Musk has.
Bottom line is he’s made himself resemble the hero of many classic SF stories, and that tickles a lot of us.
Hear, hear. I’ve always found him to be kind of like a 3rd rate Steve Jobs (sans talent) or Richard Branson. The kind of person with half baked ideas and obscene amounts of money and capital to throw at them.
I’ve said before that, baring disruptions that take transportation in a unforeseeable direction, I think the logical end-point of transportation is going to be small light-weight aerodynamic fully autonomous electric cars with comfortable work-space interiors and maybe an emergency deployable steering consul that rarely gets used. The cars will charge from ubiquitous power stations and act as the battery reservoir for homes. They might be able to attach to simplified power rails in high-traffic areas for increased speed. They’ll stack in vertical underground parking garages not unlike hanging bike racks (somewhat similar to the bike garages at certain stations in Japan). They’ll have less horsepower and weight than my motorcycle as they’ll have less metal (the heaviest components will by far be the batteries).
Trains are nifty, but when you get right down to it, they’re not very efficient compared to such pod cars. Over the long run, pod cars have significant advantages in efficiency, flexibility, costs and apparent privacy (note I said apparent), so the economics will favor them for transporting people. Some trains will still have an edge in moving cargo. Granted economics as we know it has about four decades left at the absolute most, but the wholly mechanized economy will still favor efficient transportation.
Some people will own their pod cars. Some will rent. I suspect the dominant sales model will be a lease-until-upgrade one like that increasingly used for cell phones. Fleets of rental pod cars will be readily available at most airports and in most cities. The last hold outs will be motorcycle and scooter riders who will not want to surrender control of their vehicles; and an open-air self-driving two-wheeler, while possible, sort of defeats the purpose. There will be autodrive only areas in some cities, and eventually all motor vehicles will be mandated to have an emergency autopilot that can assume control to prevent a collision.
This isn’t some fantasy I look forward to. While I don’t like driving in traffic any more than the rest of you, I loathe this future Musk seems to be trying to hurry along.
When I dream of a future of transportation, my dreams are infinitely cooler and, although I normally eschew speculative physics likes teleportation, I typically write about transport in the deep future because the only way I can conceive of the bad-ass transportation systems I’d like to see ever having a chance to exist is after several major revolutions in economics, manufacturing, housing, privacy, and the relationship of users to technology. Without those, we wind up with pod cars.
If we’re talking about a transit system that could plausibly grow out of the infrastructure we already have while maximizing efficiency and minimizing traffic then I’m envisioning
Autonomous car service takes you from starting point to train station
Train takes you most of the way to your destination (trains still beat even electric cars for human-mile-traveled per unit of energy)
Autonomous car service you from train station to final destination
The main advantage of autonomous cars in this scenario (especially as a networked service rather than privately owned) is that they needn’t spend most of their time sitting idly and taking up valuable space on city streets.
That’s true in general. But when they’re not much bigger than their occupant, the space savings will be less. Still significant in densely populated areas though.
Only if the trains can be made as small and light-weight per occupant as pod cars can. So sure, but then you basically have trains of pod cars. I’m talking short range electric cars lighter per person than a Smart car. Why bother with the electrified track that can only go one route? True you save a bit by not having to move the battery storing the power, but you also lose some of that power to resistance (unless someone finally invents a room-temperature superconductor, which isn’t entirely unlikely, but isn’t assured either and probably won’t be cheap to produce if it can be done).
If you divided the mass of a reasonably full light rail train up by the number of occupants you’d still probably end up with significantly less mass per occupant than a Smart car. You can only make individual passenger vehicles so light before sacrificing collision safety.
Collisions will be rare and pod cars will be mostly energy-absorbing polymers. Still…
That would be a calculation I’d be interested to see. You could be correct. My intuition is that the limit for individual passenger vehicles and trains is about the same less the batteries the cars need. I doubt a car really needs to be made from aluminum if collisions are rare and software controlled. In fact the largest danger will be to pedestrians, so the lighter and softer the better for them. Current cars are made with metal crumple zones to protect them from the metal bodies of other cars. When those are history, the passenger needs only be protected from stationary obstacles and pavement. The pod design provides the latter. Air bags and strong bendy polymers provide the former. The biggest danger will be the passenger and lose items in the vehicle flying around inside when it bounces in the event of a collision. Air bags and immobilizing foam could help with that.
Also, pod cars and trains will all eventually have regenerative breaking, and traffic flow software will reduce energy lost to the inefficient driving of humans.
My thinking is one big vehicle that can transport several people will always be more efficient than several small vehicles that can transport one person each because you don’t have to worry about all those redundancies. When you build ten pod cars you need ten motors and ten consoles and ten airbags and 40 wheels. If you build one 10-passenger vehicle that follows the same principles you can do it with the same console and one somewhat bigger motor and 4 slightly bigger wheels and so forth.
That’s a good point. After the motor, the main weight of any vehicle is the frame. But you wouldn’t need nearly as much attached to a pod car, so the body and frame could be a single piece of polymer. I think you’d be fine with three wheels per pod car, but it would be interesting to see if ultralight train wheels can be made as they’ll eventually be on pod cars. Hmmm…I think you’re starting to convince me you’re probably right. The train certainly needs less safety features given its fixed route. Now I want to think about how to make ultralight trains. I’m wondering if it would be more efficient to electrify the track or give the trains batteries of their own. Probably depends track distance as well as the weight and bulk of next-gen battery technology.
As an exercise, I wonder if a light rail train or my motorcycle (which weighs about 400 lbs) is more efficient, as I would expect pod cars to be no heavier than a mid-sized motorcycle to be practical.
BTW: Really enjoying this discussion. This sort of thing is why I come to BB. Thanks.
If any system like this gets built i’d like to see it handle a wide range of container types.
ferry - people in cars to reduce pollution and traffic congestion, or facilitate long distance travel.
passenger - cars that carry people place to place similar to buses or subway cars.
package - package and freight delivery.
cargo - shipping containers.
utility - industrial.
commercial - business and delivery.
special - fire, police, whatever.
the more flexible the system the better. an internet of physical delivery that accepts all types of packets.
Does anyone recall how FEDEX’s idea for a central hub, integrated air/ground delivery system was initially criticized as being unworkable? Well, that idea worked out beautifully. So, I’ll give Musk the benefit of the doubt and study his plan. Okay. I’ve studied his plan. It sucks.
