A First Look At Elon Musk's Plan To Beat Traffic By Digging High-Speed Underground Tunnels

Elon Musk, billionaire founder of Tesla, Solar City, and SpaceX, has a new enterprise: “The Boring Company.”

Literally. He announced back in January that he was going to make a company that drills tunnels for cars underground. Most people thought he was joking when he tweeted about the idea in December 2016 while stuck in traffic.

Now, we have a first look at how Musk's driving tunnel startup will work:

Musk talked about his new company and shared an animation of how he imagine it's projects will work at the TED 2017 conference on April 28. According to Business Insider, it's more of a side project: Tesla interns and employees are working on it part-time. SpaceX engineer Steve Davis is leading the Boring Company.

youtube.com

In the video, you'd start your journey by driving onto a special car elevator that will lower you and your Tesla (of course) into subterranean tunnels.

The tunnel looks…super clean? Which seems unrealistic, given how rancid current subway tunnels get.

Also, the video says that the car carts will pull your Tesla along a track at 124 miles per hour. In Elon's underground car world, cars don't even do any driving.

This tunnel will be part of a vast underground network that resembles a web of highways.

We are car moles.

Once your mole odyssey is over, you'll pop up above ground at a similar car elevator, where another Tesla will be waiting behind you to descend into the depths.

The machine that Musk plans to use to dig the tunnels looks like this:

Instagram: @elonmusknews

Like Musks' other moonshot idea, the hyperloop high-speed train, it's still unclear how ~feasible~ the idea is.

Boston's Big Dig construction project, which bored a 3.5-mile tunnel in the city and rerouted a major highway, took 16 years and cost $14.6 billion. It was the most expensive construction project ever in the USA.

Quelle: <a href="A First Look At Elon Musk's Plan To Beat Traffic By Digging High-Speed Underground Tunnels“>BuzzFeed

Uber To Court: Waymo Is Looking For “A Red Herring”

A self-driving Uber Ford Fusion in Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania.

Jeff Swensen / Getty Images

Uber's legal battle with Waymo over of self-driving car technology is growing increasingly more heated by the day. In a Friday court filing, the ride-hail giant dismissed Waymo's allegation that it had intentionally concealed a secret, second self-driving technology called “Spider” as legal theatrics in its effort to halt a competitor’s efforts.

“Waymo’s newfound focus on Spider is a red herring, intended as a face-saving move and to distract from Waymo’s failed allegations against Fuji,” Uber’s lawyers wrote in a filing, referring to another self-driving technology at issue in the case. “Spider was a design idea that never evolved into a working prototype and was abandoned in October 2016, months before this lawsuit was filed … A preliminary injunction cannot be properly granted based on an abandoned idea.”

“Waymo is not entitled to the extraordinary relief it seeks,” Uber said, arguing that there is not a “scintilla of actual evidence” that it has misappropriated “Waymo's alleged trade secrets.”

Uber's filing is the latest development in its nasty legal battle with the Alphabet-owned Waymo over allegedly stolen self-driving car technology. Waymo sued Uber in February, accusing its former employee Anthony Levandowski — who later joined Uber and became the leader of its self-driving team — of downloading stealing some 14,000 proprietary files before departing. The lawsuit between the two companies centers around LiDAR, or Light Detection And Ranging, a technology that uses rapid pulses of laser light to help self-driving cars measure distance and navigate the world around them.

On Thursday, Levandowski stepped down as head of Uber's Advanced Technologies Group and recused himself from all work and discussion of the company's work on LiDAR.

“… making this organizational change means I will have absolutely no oversight over or input into our LiDAR work,” Levandowski wrote in an email announcing the move. “Going forward, please make sure not to include me in meetings or email threads related to LiDAR, or ask me for advice on the topic.”

Next week, US District Judge William Alsup will hold a hearing about whether to grant Waymo’s request for an injunction to halt Uber’s self-driving program pending a trial. That motion had asked that Levandowski be removed entirely from Uber’s self-driving program until a trial takes place.

Uber has emphatically denied Waymo's allegations, slamming them as “baseless attempt to slow down a competitor.” In its latest filing, Uber sounded that note again, saying Waymo's lawsuit is based on “speculative harm” that Uber could bring its self-driving cars to market first. “Waymo has cited no cases in which fears about future commercialization in a market that does not yet exist supported a finding of irreparable harm,” Uber wrote.

Quelle: <a href="Uber To Court: Waymo Is Looking For “A Red Herring”“>BuzzFeed