Boring Company Elevator Test Completed, Tesla Model S Back On Top With Consumer Reports
This story about Tesla and the Boring Company was first published on Gas2.
In the world of Tesla and Elon Musk, it’s all news, all the time and not one iota of it is fake. Give Elon his due. The man gets things done. He has been pushing his idea of boring tunnels beneath America aggressively lately. Yesterday, a video of the car carrying elevator in action appeared on Instagram for the first time.
Boring Company Elevator Test
https://www.instagram.com/p/BW_-mlYAMrs/?taken-by=elonmusk
The test apparently went well, although the driver inside the car may have had some anxiety. Functioning much like a trap door in the stage at a Broadway play, the elevator is designed to lower a vehicle down to the network of underground tunnels where it will be loaded onto an electric sled and inserted into the flow of other cars speeding toward their destination in the city center or across town where another elevator will bring them back to the surface.
There is some ambiguity surrounding Elon’s latest tunnel Tweets. Will The Boring Company tunnels be used for transporting vehicles or as conduits for Hyperloop pods? The answer, as best as anyone can figure out, is “both.” As underground tunnels must be built to be able to withstand the water table, they will also be capable of holding the near vacuum that is required to make the high speeds envisioned for the Hyperloop feasible.
There are some who question the real world throughput capability of Musk’s tunnel plan. Imagine a tollbooth on a busy highway on Memorial Day weekend. Drivers might be able to cruise along at 75mph all day until the toll booth. Then traffic backs up, tempers flare, and horns blare. It’s not hard to imagine the lines leading to one of Mr. Musk’s fabulous elevators stretching back for miles. But then again, the great ones like Musk are always challenged by the lack of vision exhibited by the masses.
Consumer Reports Puts Model S Back On Top
In other Tesla news, Consumer Reports has completed testing the Tesla Model S sedan after a software upgrade fixed the problem with automatic emergency braking the testers discovered earlier this year. Now that the issue has been resolved, CR has restored the Model S to its list of top ranked large luxury cars.
Tesla experienced significant delays in getting its new Autopilot system with the Hardware 2 suite of sensors to work as well as the older version of the system. It promised parity before the end of last year, but didn’t actually get the software right until several months later. CR’s lower ranking occurred in April in an attempt to spur Tesla to deliver on its promise.
The important thing here is not the rating but the ability of Tesla to update its cars wirelessly over the air, something it has been doing since the beginning but other manufacturers are only now emulating. The wait was tedious for many Tesla owners who purchased cars back in October of last year when the new hardware package first became available, but at least they didn’t have to bring their cars to a dealer to get the updated software installed. The changes all took place seamlessly in the background while they slumbered. The number of automakers who can duplicate that feat is extremely small.
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