Local media in Las Vegas were invited to take a look at Elon Musk’s new form of “public transportation” in Thursday. But how futuristic is this technology, which Musk’s Boring Company has dubbed a “loop”? It depends on how futuristic you think it might be a car slowly driven by a human inside a tunnel.
The $ 52 The Million Las Vegas Loop, a tunnel 40 feet underground, is approximately 1.5 miles long and has three stops around the Las Vegas Convention Center: the central station, which is underground, in addition to the ‘west station and south station, both on the surface.
Mick Akers, a journalist from the Review Journal, published a handful of videos on Thursday showing Boring Company’s Las Vegas transportation system in Las Vegas. And it seems pretty disappointing, to say the least.
The videos show a Tesla car driven by a human driver and has a top speed of just 35 miles per hour, according to the magazine’s Journal. And while yesterday’s media preview was supposed to be a special look exclusively for the Las Vegas media, it seems that field reporters weren’t getting much news.
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“Now, we’ve seen a lot on this tour. Heck, right now I’m in a Tesla, ”said journalist James Schaeffer, who tried to make it look like this tour has been worth his time.
“But there are some details we’re not so sure about … of which we’re still discovering more, such as loading and waiting times and the 16-passenger vehicles that will go through these tunnels,” Schaeffer said. “Until then, we’ll travel like everyone else.”
Whatever happened to those Vehicles for 16 people? When Musk first announced the loop, it really looked like an exciting new transportation system. Musk promised that each vehicle would fit more than a dozen people and that everything was autonomous.
But it no longer seems like much is automatic. You even have to tell your human driver where you want to go. The Boring Company uploaded a video to Vimeo with instructions for Las Vegas Loop with these precise instructions.
The big selling point is that your 15-minute walk from one side of the convention center to another is reduced to “just a couple of minutes,” according to the Las Vegas Review Journal. But again, questions about charging time are still very much in the air.
“At full capacity, Boring Company’s convention center can carry 4,400 people per hour in its fleet of 62 vehicles,” Akers said. he tweeted, in apparent contradiction with his partner who reported that it is still so unclear. Gizmodo could not confirm anything, as Musk is hostile to journalists and even closed Tesla’s public relations department late. last year.
We still have a lot of questions that Boring Company’s color videos don’t easily answer. And we hope these questions are answered when the loop opens, probably sometime in the coming months.
At the end of the day, what did the reporters get to see on Thursday? Colored lights. Lots of colored lights, it would seem. And not much else. We’re not saying Las Vegas wasted $ 50 million in a stupid tunnel, but we’re not no saying no either.