Local media in Las Vegas were invited for a brief look at Elon Musk’s new form of “public transportation.” Thursday. But how futuristic is this technology, which Musk’s Boring Company called “Loop”? It depends on how futuristic you think a car could be driven slowly by a man inside a tunnel.
The $ 52 The Million Las Vegas Loop, a tunnel 40 meters underground, is about 1.5 miles long and has three stations around the Las Vegas Convention Center: Central Station, which is underground, as well as West Station and Station South, both above ground.
Mick Akers, a reporter for the Journal magazine, posted on Twitter a handful of videos showing Boring Company’s Las Vegas transportation system on Thursday. And, to say the least, it seems pretty disappointing.
The videos show a Tesla car driven by a human driver and has a top speed of only 35 miles per hour, according to Review Journal. And while yesterday’s media preview was supposed to be a special issue exclusively for the Las Vegas media, it seems that field reporters haven’t received much new information at all.
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“Now we have seen a lot in this tournament. Heck, now I’m in a Tesla going through it, “said reporter James Schaeffer, trying to make it seem like this tour would have been worth a long time.
“But there are some details that we are not so sure about … that we still know more about, such as the time of the loading and waiting procedure and the 16-passenger vehicles that will come through these tunnels,” Schaeffer continued. “Until then, we’ll go for a walk like everyone else.”
Whatever happened to those Vehicles with 16 people? When Musk first announced the Loop, it really seemed like an interesting new transportation system. Musk promised that each vehicle could seat more than a dozen people inside and that everything was autonomous.
But nothing seems to be automatic anymore. You even have to tell your human driver where you want to go. The boring company uploaded a video to Vimeo with instructions for those Las Vegas Loop with those precise instructions.
The big selling point is that the 15-minute walk from one side of the convention center is shortened to “just a few minutes,” according to Las Vegas Review Journal. But again, the questions about charging time are still very high in the air.
“At full capacity, the Boring Company Convention Center can carry 4,400 people per hour in its fleet of 62 vehicles,” Akers posted on Twitter, apparently contradicting his colleague who reported that he is still hazy. Gizmodo could not confirm anything, given that Musk is notoriously hostile to journalists and even shut down Tesla’s public relations department late. last year.
We still have a few questions that Boring Company’s colorful videos don’t easily answer. And we hope that these questions will be answered when the loop opens, probably sometime in the next few months.
At the end of the day, what did the reporters manage to see on Thursday? Colored lights. Many colored lights, it would seem. And not too much. We’re not saying Las Vegas wasted $ 50 million on a bad tunnel, but we’re not not saying either.