WASHINGTON (Reuters) - The U.S. Congress will not vote on a bill to speed the introduction of self-driving cars before it adjourns for the year, a blow to companies like General Motors Co and Alphabet Inc’s Waymo unit, key senators said on Wednesday.
A sign marks part of a route used to test a driverless electric shuttle at the University of Michigan in Ann Arbor, Michigan, U.S. March 7, 2018. REUTERS/Paul Lienert
Congress will also not take up a proposal pushed by GM and Tesla Inc to extend or expand a $7,500 tax credit for electric vehicles, the aides said.
To win passage in the final days, the measures had to be attached to a bill introduced Wednesday to fund government operations, but they were not. Senators conceded the funding bill, which could be approved as early as Wednesday by the U.S. Senate, was the only way forward before Congress adjourns.
Republican Senator John Thune, who chairs the Commerce Committee, and Senator Gary Peters, a Michigan Democrat, led the battle to win approval for more than a year and vowed Wednesday to try again next year.
Thune said it is a “problem” if Congress does not act in 2019. “The technology is going to keep going,” Thune said. “We’ll start this up again.”
Peters warned that the United States could get surpassed on self driving vehicles by China, South Korea and others who “are betting big on the technology and they are developing the regulatory framework to accommodate it.”
Automaker lobbyists say the measures will face tougher odds in 2019 when Democrats and Republicans will share control of Congress.
The Alliance of Automobile Manufacturers, a trade group, called the bill’s failure “a setback for the development and ultimate deployment of potentially life-saving technologies, and leaves many unanswered questions on how this technology will be regulated.”
The tax credit for Tesla buyers will fall to $3,750 on Jan. 1 and will phase out entirely by the end of 2019, the Internal Revenue Service said on Friday. Senator John Barrasso a Republican who chairs the Senate Environment and Public Works Committee, proposed ending the EV tax credit entirely and plans to reintroduce the measure in 2019, while automakers plan to press for the credit’s extension.
The U.S. House of Representatives passed legislation in 2017 to speed the adoption of self-driving cars and bar states from setting performance standards, but the legislation stalled in the Senate. Despite concessions by automakers, the bill could not overcome objections from some Democrats who argued it did not do enough to resolve safety concerns.
Automakers may instead turn to the National Highway Traffic Safety Administration (NHTSA), which has said it plans to make it easier to test self-driving vehicles.
In October, NHTSA said it was considering a pilot program to allow real-world road testing for a limited number of vehicles without human controls.
GM in January filed a petition seeking an exemption to use fully automated vehicles as part of a ride-sharing fleet it plans to deploy in 2019, but the agency has not yet acted on it. On Tuesday, the agency said it was revising its rules to no longer first declare petitions “complete” before publishing a summary of the request.
Reporting by David Shepardson; Editing by Steve Orlofsky and Alistair Bell
WASHINGTON (Reuters) - The U.S. Congress will not vote on a bill to speed the introduction of self-driving cars before it adjourns for the year, a blow to companies like General Motors Co and Alphabet Inc’s Waymo unit, key senators said on Wednesday.
A sign marks part of a route used to test a driverless electric shuttle at the University of Michigan in Ann Arbor, Michigan, U.S. March 7, 2018. REUTERS/Paul Lienert
Congress will also not take up a proposal pushed by GM and Tesla Inc to extend or expand a $7,500 tax credit for electric vehicles, the aides said.
To win passage in the final days, the measures had to be attached to a bill introduced Wednesday to fund government operations, but they were not. Senators conceded the funding bill, which could be approved as early as Wednesday by the U.S. Senate, was the only way forward before Congress adjourns.
Republican Senator John Thune, who chairs the Commerce Committee, and Senator Gary Peters, a Michigan Democrat, led the battle to win approval for more than a year and vowed Wednesday to try again next year.
Thune said it is a “problem” if Congress does not act in 2019. “The technology is going to keep going,” Thune said. “We’ll start this up again.”
Peters warned that the United States could get surpassed on self driving vehicles by China, South Korea and others who “are betting big on the technology and they are developing the regulatory framework to accommodate it.”
Automaker lobbyists say the measures will face tougher odds in 2019 when Democrats and Republicans will share control of Congress.
The Alliance of Automobile Manufacturers, a trade group, called the bill’s failure “a setback for the development and ultimate deployment of potentially life-saving technologies, and leaves many unanswered questions on how this technology will be regulated.”
The tax credit for Tesla buyers will fall to $3,750 on Jan. 1 and will phase out entirely by the end of 2019, the Internal Revenue Service said on Friday. Senator John Barrasso a Republican who chairs the Senate Environment and Public Works Committee, proposed ending the EV tax credit entirely and plans to reintroduce the measure in 2019, while automakers plan to press for the credit’s extension.
The U.S. House of Representatives passed legislation in 2017 to speed the adoption of self-driving cars and bar states from setting performance standards, but the legislation stalled in the Senate. Despite concessions by automakers, the bill could not overcome objections from some Democrats who argued it did not do enough to resolve safety concerns.
Automakers may instead turn to the National Highway Traffic Safety Administration (NHTSA), which has said it plans to make it easier to test self-driving vehicles.
In October, NHTSA said it was considering a pilot program to allow real-world road testing for a limited number of vehicles without human controls.
GM in January filed a petition seeking an exemption to use fully automated vehicles as part of a ride-sharing fleet it plans to deploy in 2019, but the agency has not yet acted on it. On Tuesday, the agency said it was revising its rules to no longer first declare petitions “complete” before publishing a summary of the request.
Reporting by David Shepardson; Editing by Steve Orlofsky and Alistair Bell
TORONTO (Reuters) - Facebook Inc plans to open an artificial-intelligence laboratory in Montreal, which will be run by prominent AI researcher Joelle Pineau, two people familiar with the plan said on Friday. Tech
FILE PHOTO - A 3D printed Facebook logo is seen in front of displayed cyber code in this illustration taken March 22, 2016. REUTERS/Dado Ruvic/Illustration/File Photo
WASHINGTON (Reuters) - The attorney general for Washington, D.C. said on Wednesday the nation’s capital city had sued Facebook over the scandal that broke earlier this year involving Cambridge Analytica’s use of data from the social-media giant.
“Facebook failed to protect the privacy of its users and deceived them about who had access to their data and how it was used,” said Attorney General Karl Racine in a statement. “Facebook put users at risk of manipulation by allowing companies like Cambridge Analytica and other third-party applications to collect personal data without users’ permission.”
The lawsuit comes as Facebook faces new reports that it shared its users’ data without their permission.
Cambridge Analytica, which worked for President Donald Trump’s political campaign at one point, gained access to personal data from tens of millions of Facebook’s users. The D.C. attorney general says in the suit that this exposed nearly half of the district’s residents’ data to manipulation for political purposes during the 2016 presidential election, and alleges Facebook’s “lax oversight and misleading privacy settings” had allowed the consulting firm to harvest the information.
Facebook did not immediately respond to a request for comment
Reporting by Lisa Lambert; Editing by Phil Berlowitz
FILE PHOTO - A 3D printed Facebook logo is seen in front of displayed cyber code in this illustration taken March 22, 2016. REUTERS/Dado Ruvic/Illustration/File Photo
WASHINGTON (Reuters) - The attorney general for Washington, D.C. said on Wednesday the nation’s capital city had sued Facebook over the scandal that broke earlier this year involving Cambridge Analytica’s use of data from the social-media giant.
“Facebook failed to protect the privacy of its users and deceived them about who had access to their data and how it was used,” said Attorney General Karl Racine in a statement. “Facebook put users at risk of manipulation by allowing companies like Cambridge Analytica and other third-party applications to collect personal data without users’ permission.”
The lawsuit comes as Facebook faces new reports that it shared its users’ data without their permission.
Cambridge Analytica, which worked for President Donald Trump’s political campaign at one point, gained access to personal data from tens of millions of Facebook’s users. The D.C. attorney general says in the suit that this exposed nearly half of the district’s residents’ data to manipulation for political purposes during the 2016 presidential election, and alleges Facebook’s “lax oversight and misleading privacy settings” had allowed the consulting firm to harvest the information.
Facebook did not immediately respond to a request for comment
Reporting by Lisa Lambert; Editing by Phil Berlowitz
TORONTO (Reuters) - Facebook Inc plans to open an artificial-intelligence laboratory in Montreal, which will be run by prominent AI researcher Joelle Pineau, two people familiar with the plan said on Friday. Tech
Physicists are remarkably frank: they don’t know what dark matter is made of.
“We’re all scratching our heads,” says physicist Reina Maruyama of Yale University.
“The gut feeling is that 80 percent of it is one thing, and 20 percent of it is something else,” says physicist Gray Rybka of the University of Washington. Why does he think this? It’s not because of science. “It’s a folk wisdom,” he says.
Peering through telescopes, researchers have found a deluge of evidence for dark matter. Galaxies, they’ve observed, rotate far faster than their visible mass allows. The established equations of gravity dictate that those galaxies should fall apart, like pieces of cake batter flinging off a spinning hand mixer. The prevailing thought is that some invisible material—dark matter—must be holding those galaxies together. Observations suggest that dark matter consists of diffuse material “sort of like a cotton ball,” says Maruyama, who co-leads a dark matter research collaboration called COSINE-100.
Jay Hyun Jo/DM-Ice/KIMS
Here on Earth, though, clues are scant. Given the speed that galaxies rotate, dark matter should make up 85 percent of the matter in the universe, including on our provincial little home planet. But only one experiment, a detector in Italy named DAMA, has ever registered compelling evidence of the stuff on Earth. “There have been hints in other experiments, but DAMA is the only one with robust signals,” says Maruyama, who is unaffiliated with the experiment. For two decades, DAMA has consistently measured a varying signal that peaks in June and dips in December. The signal suggests that dark matter hits Earth at different rates corresponding to its location in its orbit, which matches theoretical predictions.
But the search has yielded few other promising signals. This year, several detectors reported null findings. XENON1T, a collaboration whose detector is located in the same Italian lab as DAMA, announced they hadn’t found anything this May. Panda-X, a China-based experiment, published in July that they also hadn’t found anything. Even DAMA’s results have been called into question: In December, Maruyama’s team published that their detector, a South-Korea based DAMA replica made of some 200 pounds of sodium iodide crystal, failed to reproduce its Italian predecessor’s results.
These experiments are all designed to search for a specific dark matter candidate, a theorized class of particles known as Weakly Interacting Massive Particles, or WIMPs, that should be about a million times heavier than an electron. WIMPs have dominated dark matter research for years, and Miguel Zumalacárregui is tired of them. About a decade ago, when Zumalacárregui was still a PhD student, WIMP researchers were already promising an imminent discovery. “They’re just coming back empty-handed,” says Zumalacárregui, now an astrophysicist at the University of California, Berkeley.
He’s not the only one with WIMP fatigue. “In some ways, I grew tired of WIMPs long ago,” says Rybka. Rybka is co-leading an experiment that is pursuing another dark matter candidate: a dainty particle called an axion, roughly a billion times lighter than an electron and much lighter than the WIMP. In April, the Axion Dark Matter Experiment collaboration announced that they’d finally tweaked their detector to be sensitive enough to detect axions.
The detector acts sort of like an AM radio, says Rybka. A strong magnet inside the machine would convert incoming axions into radio waves, which the detector would then pick up. “Given that we don’t know the exact mass of the axion, we don’t know which frequency to tune to,” says Rybka. “So we slowly turn the knob while listening, and mostly we hear noise. But someday, hopefully, we’ll tune to the right frequency, and we’ll hear that pure tone.”
He is betting on axions because they would also resolve a piece of another long-standing puzzle in physics: exactly how quarks bind together to form atomic nuclei. “It seems too good to just be a coincidence, that this theory from nuclear physics happens to make the right amount of dark matter,” says Rybka.
As Rybka’s team sifts through earthly data for signs of axions, astrophysicists look to the skies for leads. In a paper published in October, Zumalacárregui and a colleague ruled out an old idea that dark matter was mostly made of black holes. They reached this conclusion by looking through two decades of supernovae observations. When a supernova passes behind a black hole, the black hole’s gravity bends the supernova’s light to make it appear brighter. The brighter the light, the more massive the black hole. So by tabulating the brightness of hundreds of supernovae, they calculated that black holes that are at least one-hundredth the size of the sun can account for up to 40 percent of dark matter, and no more.
“We’re at a point where our best theories seem to be breaking,” says astrophysicist Jamie Farnes of Oxford University. “We clearly need some kind of new idea. There’s something key we’re missing about how the universe is working.”
Farnes is trying to fill that void. In a paper published in December, he proposed that dark matter could be a weird fluid that moves toward you if you try to push it away. He created a simplistic simulation of the universe containing this fluid and found that it could potentially also explain why the universe is expanding, another long-standing mystery in physics. He is careful to point out that his ideas are speculative, and it is still unclear whether they are consistent with prior telescope observations and dark matter experiments.
WIMPs could still be dark matter as well, despite enthusiasm for new approaches. Maruyama’s Korean experiment has ruled out “the canonical, vanilla WIMP that most people talk about,” she says, but lesser-known WIMP cousins are still on the table.
It’s important to remember, as physicists clutch onto their favorite theories—regardless of how refreshing they are—that they need corroborating data. “The universe doesn’t care what is beautiful or elegant,” says Farnes. Nor does it care about what’s trendy. Guys, the universe might be really uncool.
TORONTO (Reuters) - Facebook Inc plans to open an artificial-intelligence laboratory in Montreal, which will be run by prominent AI researcher Joelle Pineau, two people familiar with the plan said on Friday. Tech
TORONTO (Reuters) - Facebook Inc plans to open an artificial-intelligence laboratory in Montreal, which will be run by prominent AI researcher Joelle Pineau, two people familiar with the plan said on Friday. Tech
If you want to know how to keep your car running, ask a mechanic. If you want the lowdown on caring for your pipes, call your plumber. Why? Because people who deal with things when they"re broken often know the most about how to keep them in good repair. James J. Sexton thinks the same principle applies to divorce lawyers.
And when you read a recent interview with Sexton in Vice it makes even more. In a long chat with Sean Illing, Sexton offers incredible insights into why marriages fail (social media is nearly always involved these days, he reports) and what that says about how to keep them strong. The whole piece is well worth a read in full but much of Sexton"s wisdom can be boiled down to just four insightful words.
We fall out of love "very slowly, then all at once."
If you asked people to name common reasons for couples to get divorced you"d probably hear a lot about dramatic conflicts -- infidelity, financial disagreements, sexual mismatch, differing visions for the future. And Sexton confirms that these sorts of big, gnarly issues are indeed the immediate reason most people find themselves in his office. But he insists they aren"t the real reason marriages break down.
"From my perspective, these big reasons have their origins in a succession of smaller choices that people make that take them further and further away from each other," Sexton says, adding:
"In Tom Wolfe"s Bonfire of the Vanities one of the characters is talking about how he went financially bankrupt and one of the other characters says, "Tim, how did you go bankrupt?" He said, "Well, I went bankrupt the way that everyone does, very slowly and then all at once." I think that"s how marriages end. Very slowly and then all at once. There are lots of little things that happen and then the flood comes."
What sort of "little things" does he mean? "That annoyed look on your face, that time you ignored your partner when they needed you, all those times you couldn"t bother to give that person your full attention. These are the small things that become big things over time," he offers later in the interview.
"Love is a verb."
This is a beautiful description of how relationships work that accords with how so many big changes in life really happen. Success doesn"t happen overnight, neither does physical fitness, and neither does relationship breakdown. Nearly all big goals come from weathering small setbacks and making steady forward progress over days and months and years. And then there"s often one big breakthrough. Outsiders only see the dramatic final stages of the process, but the roots are generally deep.
The best part of Sexton"s interview isn"t his explanation of how marriages decay, however. It"s the solution he offers couples. It"s only four words long, so no one has any excuse for forgetting it: "Love is a verb."
"I"m a romantic, but I don"t believe in fairy tales. I think that we sell people a bill of goods about what love is supposed to look like. Love is a verb," he insists. "Falling out of love is very slow. It"s a very gradual process. You put on weight slowly.... You don"t just wake up one day and you"ve gained 20 pounds. You very slowly gain weight, but sure enough, it happens. It"s the same thing with love."
And not falling out of love, like not gaining weight, isn"t about dramatic gestures or heroic acts. It"s about a relentless daily commitment to small actions. It"s about doing things -- not clamming up to avoid the fight, not complaining about how the towels are folded, reaching out a hand in a tense conversation. It"s, in other words, a verb.
"If you want to keep your love alive, you have to be attentive to all the little things that go wrong along the way, and constantly course-correct. If you can do that, you"ll never set foot in my office," Sexton concludes.
You"re unlikely to hear better marriage advice anytime soon.
In other words, the office is not where your employees or your clients want to be. If you have an office-based business, it"s time to consider shutting down between Christmas and New Year"s day--with pay. (If you can"t afford to offer it as extra paid days off, your employees will resent having to take a pay cut at Christmas more than they will appreciate the time off.) Here"s why:
Your employees don"t want to be there anyway.
While some enjoy working when it"s quiet, or prefer to get out of the house when the kids are home from school, many would prefer to be at home, or at Grandma"s house. Or at the beach. Basically anywhere but the office.
This may be true for the 10 percent of people who don"t celebrate Christmas as well. The kids are still out of school, so if you want to travel in the winter, this is the only time to do it if you want to avoid the school flipping out on you for pulling your kids out.
Your clients don"t want to do any work either.
Set up a big meeting? Nope. Not going to happen. No one wants to be there. And even when businesses don"t shut down, many, many people take the time off anyway. There"s no one around.
So, while you may be able to put your head down and get some quality work done, there"s no one to sign off on things, and if you"re messaging and emailing clients, they are answering while on vacation. Not exactly the best way to endear you to them.
No more fights about time off.
People want to take this time off and it"s always a balancing act when you try to figure out who gets the first choice of these coveted days off. When you just make it everybody, there"s no conflict. Whew! One more problem off your plate.
It"s a great benefit.
As long as it"s paid time off, and you don"t skimp on the rest of your PTO plan, it"s a great benefit. If it"s unpaid, or you only offer this week off plus 5 more days, then it"s a huge burden for your employees. But, done as part of a good benefits plan, it will be something that your employees will look forward to. It also relieves a lot of stress. For families with school-aged children, they have to take time off anyway (or cobble together sitters) and this can be a huge stress relief.
Consider shutting your business down in this week and save yourself and your employees a ton of stress.
(Reuters) - U.S. chipmaker Micron Technology Inc (MU.O) gave on Tuesday quarterly sales and profit forecasts well below Wall Street estimates, citing a market glut of memory chips as consumer and business demand for phones and computers is weakening.
Memory chip parts of U.S. memory chip maker MicronTechnology are pictured at their fair booth at an industrial fair in Frankfurt, Germany, July 14, 2015. REUTERS/Kai Pfaffenbach/File Photo
Micron said it expected industry output, including from South Korean rivals Samsung Electronics Co Ltd (005930.KS) and SK Hynix (000660.KS), to outstrip demand from the makers of phones, PCs and servers, pushing down Micron chip prices.
Samsung had already warned of a slowdown in demand and drop in chip prices, flagging an end to a two-year boom in memory chips as global demand for mobile and other electronics devices wanes and fresh supplies from Hynix and Toshiba Corp (6502.T) hit the market. Hynix has also offered a downbeat outlook.
Micron Chief Executive Sanjay Mehrotra told investors on a conference call on Tuesday that the company was taking “decisive actions in terms of reducing our production output” to hold the line on prices.
“We are always reviewing how to best align our output with market demand to focus on delivering healthy profitability,” Mehrotra said in an interview.
But the glut will hammer Micron in the short term, with the company estimating revenue of $5.7 billion to $6.3 billion for its fiscal second quarter and gross margins of 50 to 53 percent, compared to analysts’ estimates of $7.3 billion and 55 percent, according to I/B/E/S data from Refinitiv.
Shares of the Boise, Idaho-based company fell as much as 8.5 percent in extended trading after the forecast, before paring losses to 2.8 percent.
Asked about Micron’s comments, Hynix told Reuters that in the short term, the memory chip sector would struggle through a period of relatively low growth due to weak demand in the smartphone and PC markets, but the outlook would brighten in the long term.
Hynix shares were down 1.6 percent in late morning trading in South Korea. Samsung shares were up slightly.
“The worse may not be over yet if the end-market demand weakens further,” said analyst Kinngai Chan of Summit Insights Group.
Micron is responding to the oversupply of DRAM and NAND memory chips by investing more in its next generation of chips. Major suppliers to smartphone makers such as Apple Inc (AAPL.O) have lowered their sales forecasts, citing weak demand from device makers.
Data centers, which have been a boon for Micron as cloud computing providers like Amazon.com’s (AMZN.O) Amazon Web Services have become massive businesses, were a weak spot in Micron’s earnings. On the post-earnings call, Mehrotra cited “inventory adjustments” at data centers for the pressure on revenue.
Several chipmakers have cited strong demand in the months before U.S. tariffs were imposed on some Chinese goods, leaving analysts wondering if data center owners had tried to get in orders ahead of the levies.
“We expect this headwind will persist for a couple of quarters. We are seeing some cloud customers go through a digestion period following very strong growth over the last two years,” Mehrotra said.
Stifel analyst Kevin Cassidy said Micron was making the right move by slashing output instead of cutting prices to gain market share as it had in the past.
“We see today’s announcements as prioritizing profitability over market share gains,” he said.
Micron’s gross margin was 59 percent for the fiscal first quarter, and executives said U.S. tariffs on Chinese goods cut its gross margins by about half a percentage point, at the lower end of the negative impact it told investors in September.
Micron is ahead of schedule in addressing the expected impact of U.S. tariffs on its products, Manish Bhatia, Micron’s executive vice president of global operations, said in an interview.
“We made very good progress across multiple sites in our (factory) network taking the products that were being made in China and destined for the United States and quickly transferring them to other sites outside of China,” he said.
Net sales rose 16 percent to $7.91 billion, short of analysts’ expectations of $8.02 billion.
Excluding items, Micron earned $2.97 per share, narrowly beating the analyst average estimate of $2.96, according to I/B/E/S data from Refinitiv.
Reporting by Sonam Rai in Bengaluru and Stephen Nellis in San Francisco; additional reporting by Heekyong Yang in SEOUL; Editing by Richard Chang and Muralikumar Anantharaman
LOS ANGELES (Reuters) - Billionaire entrepreneur Elon Musk made a brief public appearance late on Tuesday to unveil the first tunnel completed by the underground transit venture he launched two years ago as an ambitious remedy to Los Angeles’ infamously heavy traffic.
Tesla Inc. founder Elon Musk speaks at the unveiling event by "The Boring Company" for the test tunnel of a proposed underground transportation network across Los Angeles County, in Hawthorne, California, U.S. December 18, 2018. Robyn Beck/Pool via REUTERS
But contrary to some of his own hype from several months ago, free rides were not part of the grand opening.
In a 30-minute presentation carried by live webcast, Musk touted the newly finished 1.14-mile (1.83 km) tunnel segment as a breakthrough in low-cost, fast-digging technology being pioneered by his nascent tunneling firm, the Boring Company.
Musk has advertised the proof-of-concept tunnel as a first step toward developing a high-speed subterranean network capable of whisking vehicles and pedestrians below the “soul-destroying” street traffic of America’s second-largest city at up to 150 miles per hour. But such a system has a long way to go.
The new tunnel was excavated along a path that runs not through Los Angeles but beneath the tiny adjacent municipality of Hawthorne, where Musk’s Boring Company and his SpaceX rocket firm are both headquartered.
Musk, best known as head of the Tesla Inc electric car manufacturer and energy company, launched his foray into public transit after complaining on Twitter in December 2016 that L.A.’s traffic was “driving me nuts,” promising then to “build a boring machine and just start digging.”
In May, the company gave the world a preview of the Hawthorne tunnel, posting a fast-forward video of its interior shot by a camera traveling the length of the cylindrical passageway, which measures about 12 feet (3.7 m) in diameter.
On Tuesday, Musk put the total price tag for the finished segment at about $10 million, including the cost of excavation, internal infrastructure, lighting, ventilation, safety systems, communications and a track.
By comparison, he said, digging a mile of tunnel by “traditional” engineering methods costs up to $1 billion and takes three to six months to complete.
FASTER THAN A SNAIL?
Musk boasted of several cost-cutting innovations, including higher-power boring machines, digging narrower tunnels, speeding up dirt removal, and simultaneous excavation and reinforcement.
He also invoked his favorite comparison with a snail, a creature he said moves 14 times faster than the speed of a typical tunneling machine. “Aspirationally, we should be slightly faster than a snail,” he said.
Musk did not say how long it took to burrow his new tunnel, which ended up running short of the 2-mile easement his company originally requested for the project.
But he showed pre-recorded video footage of a newly built elevator station designed to carry passengers from street level to the tunnel’s subterranean entryway. The video featured a modified Tesla Model X luxury car on the elevator.
When fully operational, the “loop” system as Musk envisions it will consist of passenger- and automobile-carrying platforms called “skates” that can zip through the tunnels by way of electric power once they descend into the underground network.
Alternately, he said, passenger cars could be outfitted with retractable side wheels allowing them to travel through the loop autonomously.
Musk arrived at Tuesday night’s event in a Tesla vehicle so equipped, emerging from the car at one end of the tunnel - bathed in green and blue interior lights - as he was cheered by a small, enthusiastic crowd gathered for the presentation.
Musk created a stir earlier this year by promising free trips through the tunnel once it opened. However, no such rides were in the offing on Tuesday night. A company message posted online beforehand said tunnel tours “are by invitation only,” citing “unbelievably high demand.”
If successful, the Hawthorne tunnel is envisioned as eventually connecting to a network of other tunnels, yet to be built.
Slideshow (19 Images)
Last month, the Boring Company scrapped plans for a 2.7-mile segment under a West Los Angeles neighborhood, settling litigation brought by community groups opposed to that project.
But Musk’s company said it was moving ahead with a proposed tunnel across town to connect Dodger Stadium, home of the city’s Major League Baseball team, to an existing subway line.
In June, Boring was selected by Chicago to build a 17-mile underground transit system linking that city’s downtown to its main airport. The company also has proposed an East Coast Loop that would run from Washington, D.C., to the Maryland suburbs.
Reporting by Steve Gorman, Editing by Bill Tarrant and Rosalba O"Brien
TORONTO (Reuters) - Facebook Inc plans to open an artificial-intelligence laboratory in Montreal, which will be run by prominent AI researcher Joelle Pineau, two people familiar with the plan said on Friday. Tech
(Reuters) - U.S. chipmaker Micron Technology Inc (MU.O) gave on Tuesday quarterly sales and profit forecasts well below Wall Street estimates, citing a market glut of memory chips as consumer and business demand for phones and computers is weakening.
Memory chip parts of U.S. memory chip maker MicronTechnology are pictured at their fair booth at an industrial fair in Frankfurt, Germany, July 14, 2015. REUTERS/Kai Pfaffenbach/File Photo
Micron said it expected industry output, including from South Korean rivals Samsung Electronics Co Ltd (005930.KS) and SK Hynix (000660.KS), to outstrip demand from the makers of phones, PCs and servers, pushing down Micron chip prices.
Samsung had already warned of a slowdown in demand and drop in chip prices, flagging an end to a two-year boom in memory chips as global demand for mobile and other electronics devices wanes and fresh supplies from Hynix and Toshiba Corp (6502.T) hit the market. Hynix has also offered a downbeat outlook.
Micron Chief Executive Sanjay Mehrotra told investors on a conference call on Tuesday that the company was taking “decisive actions in terms of reducing our production output” to hold the line on prices.
“We are always reviewing how to best align our output with market demand to focus on delivering healthy profitability,” Mehrotra said in an interview.
But the glut will hammer Micron in the short term, with the company estimating revenue of $5.7 billion to $6.3 billion for its fiscal second quarter and gross margins of 50 to 53 percent, compared to analysts’ estimates of $7.3 billion and 55 percent, according to I/B/E/S data from Refinitiv.
Shares of the Boise, Idaho-based company fell as much as 8.5 percent in extended trading after the forecast, before paring losses to 2.8 percent.
Asked about Micron’s comments, Hynix told Reuters that in the short term, the memory chip sector would struggle through a period of relatively low growth due to weak demand in the smartphone and PC markets, but the outlook would brighten in the long term.
Hynix shares were down 1.6 percent in late morning trading in South Korea. Samsung shares were up slightly.
“The worse may not be over yet if the end-market demand weakens further,” said analyst Kinngai Chan of Summit Insights Group.
Micron is responding to the oversupply of DRAM and NAND memory chips by investing more in its next generation of chips. Major suppliers to smartphone makers such as Apple Inc (AAPL.O) have lowered their sales forecasts, citing weak demand from device makers.
Data centers, which have been a boon for Micron as cloud computing providers like Amazon.com’s (AMZN.O) Amazon Web Services have become massive businesses, were a weak spot in Micron’s earnings. On the post-earnings call, Mehrotra cited “inventory adjustments” at data centers for the pressure on revenue.
Several chipmakers have cited strong demand in the months before U.S. tariffs were imposed on some Chinese goods, leaving analysts wondering if data center owners had tried to get in orders ahead of the levies.
“We expect this headwind will persist for a couple of quarters. We are seeing some cloud customers go through a digestion period following very strong growth over the last two years,” Mehrotra said.
Stifel analyst Kevin Cassidy said Micron was making the right move by slashing output instead of cutting prices to gain market share as it had in the past.
“We see today’s announcements as prioritizing profitability over market share gains,” he said.
Micron’s gross margin was 59 percent for the fiscal first quarter, and executives said U.S. tariffs on Chinese goods cut its gross margins by about half a percentage point, at the lower end of the negative impact it told investors in September.
Micron is ahead of schedule in addressing the expected impact of U.S. tariffs on its products, Manish Bhatia, Micron’s executive vice president of global operations, said in an interview.
“We made very good progress across multiple sites in our (factory) network taking the products that were being made in China and destined for the United States and quickly transferring them to other sites outside of China,” he said.
Net sales rose 16 percent to $7.91 billion, short of analysts’ expectations of $8.02 billion.
Excluding items, Micron earned $2.97 per share, narrowly beating the analyst average estimate of $2.96, according to I/B/E/S data from Refinitiv.
Reporting by Sonam Rai in Bengaluru and Stephen Nellis in San Francisco; additional reporting by Heekyong Yang in SEOUL; Editing by Richard Chang and Muralikumar Anantharaman
LOS ANGELES (Reuters) - Billionaire entrepreneur Elon Musk made a brief public appearance late on Tuesday to unveil the first tunnel completed by the underground transit venture he launched two years ago as an ambitious remedy to Los Angeles’ infamously heavy traffic.
Tesla Inc. founder Elon Musk speaks at the unveiling event by "The Boring Company" for the test tunnel of a proposed underground transportation network across Los Angeles County, in Hawthorne, California, U.S. December 18, 2018. Robyn Beck/Pool via REUTERS
But contrary to some of his own hype from several months ago, free rides were not part of the grand opening.
In a 30-minute presentation carried by live webcast, Musk touted the newly finished 1.14-mile (1.83 km) tunnel segment as a breakthrough in low-cost, fast-digging technology being pioneered by his nascent tunneling firm, the Boring Company.
Musk has advertised the proof-of-concept tunnel as a first step toward developing a high-speed subterranean network capable of whisking vehicles and pedestrians below the “soul-destroying” street traffic of America’s second-largest city at up to 150 miles per hour. But such a system has a long way to go.
The new tunnel was excavated along a path that runs not through Los Angeles but beneath the tiny adjacent municipality of Hawthorne, where Musk’s Boring Company and his SpaceX rocket firm are both headquartered.
Musk, best known as head of the Tesla Inc electric car manufacturer and energy company, launched his foray into public transit after complaining on Twitter in December 2016 that L.A.’s traffic was “driving me nuts,” promising then to “build a boring machine and just start digging.”
In May, the company gave the world a preview of the Hawthorne tunnel, posting a fast-forward video of its interior shot by a camera traveling the length of the cylindrical passageway, which measures about 12 feet (3.7 m) in diameter.
On Tuesday, Musk put the total price tag for the finished segment at about $10 million, including the cost of excavation, internal infrastructure, lighting, ventilation, safety systems, communications and a track.
By comparison, he said, digging a mile of tunnel by “traditional” engineering methods costs up to $1 billion and takes three to six months to complete.
FASTER THAN A SNAIL?
Musk boasted of several cost-cutting innovations, including higher-power boring machines, digging narrower tunnels, speeding up dirt removal, and simultaneous excavation and reinforcement.
He also invoked his favorite comparison with a snail, a creature he said moves 14 times faster than the speed of a typical tunneling machine. “Aspirationally, we should be slightly faster than a snail,” he said.
Musk did not say how long it took to burrow his new tunnel, which ended up running short of the 2-mile easement his company originally requested for the project.
But he showed pre-recorded video footage of a newly built elevator station designed to carry passengers from street level to the tunnel’s subterranean entryway. The video featured a modified Tesla Model X luxury car on the elevator.
When fully operational, the “loop” system as Musk envisions it will consist of passenger- and automobile-carrying platforms called “skates” that can zip through the tunnels by way of electric power once they descend into the underground network.
Alternately, he said, passenger cars could be outfitted with retractable side wheels allowing them to travel through the loop autonomously.
Musk arrived at Tuesday night’s event in a Tesla vehicle so equipped, emerging from the car at one end of the tunnel - bathed in green and blue interior lights - as he was cheered by a small, enthusiastic crowd gathered for the presentation.
Musk created a stir earlier this year by promising free trips through the tunnel once it opened. However, no such rides were in the offing on Tuesday night. A company message posted online beforehand said tunnel tours “are by invitation only,” citing “unbelievably high demand.”
If successful, the Hawthorne tunnel is envisioned as eventually connecting to a network of other tunnels, yet to be built.
Slideshow (19 Images)
Last month, the Boring Company scrapped plans for a 2.7-mile segment under a West Los Angeles neighborhood, settling litigation brought by community groups opposed to that project.
But Musk’s company said it was moving ahead with a proposed tunnel across town to connect Dodger Stadium, home of the city’s Major League Baseball team, to an existing subway line.
In June, Boring was selected by Chicago to build a 17-mile underground transit system linking that city’s downtown to its main airport. The company also has proposed an East Coast Loop that would run from Washington, D.C., to the Maryland suburbs.
Reporting by Steve Gorman, Editing by Bill Tarrant and Rosalba O"Brien
LOS ANGELES (Reuters) - Billionaire entrepreneur Elon Musk made a brief public appearance late on Tuesday to unveil the first tunnel completed by the underground transit venture he launched two years ago as an ambitious remedy to Los Angeles’ infamously heavy traffic.
Tesla Inc. founder Elon Musk speaks at the unveiling event by "The Boring Company" for the test tunnel of a proposed underground transportation network across Los Angeles County, in Hawthorne, California, U.S. December 18, 2018. Robyn Beck/Pool via REUTERS
But contrary to some of his own hype from several months ago, free rides were not part of the grand opening.
In a 30-minute presentation carried by live webcast, Musk touted the newly finished 1.14-mile (1.83 km) tunnel segment as a breakthrough in low-cost, fast-digging technology being pioneered by his nascent tunneling firm, the Boring Company.
Musk has advertised the proof-of-concept tunnel as a first step toward developing a high-speed subterranean network capable of whisking vehicles and pedestrians below the “soul-destroying” street traffic of America’s second-largest city at up to 150 miles per hour. But such a system has a long way to go.
The new tunnel was excavated along a path that runs not through Los Angeles but beneath the tiny adjacent municipality of Hawthorne, where Musk’s Boring Company and his SpaceX rocket firm are both headquartered.
Musk, best known as head of the Tesla Inc electric car manufacturer and energy company, launched his foray into public transit after complaining on Twitter in December 2016 that L.A.’s traffic was “driving me nuts,” promising then to “build a boring machine and just start digging.”
In May, the company gave the world a preview of the Hawthorne tunnel, posting a fast-forward video of its interior shot by a camera traveling the length of the cylindrical passageway, which measures about 12 feet (3.7 m) in diameter.
On Tuesday, Musk put the total price tag for the finished segment at about $10 million, including the cost of excavation, internal infrastructure, lighting, ventilation, safety systems, communications and a track.
By comparison, he said, digging a mile of tunnel by “traditional” engineering methods costs up to $1 billion and takes three to six months to complete.
FASTER THAN A SNAIL?
Musk boasted of several cost-cutting innovations, including higher-power boring machines, digging narrower tunnels, speeding up dirt removal, and simultaneous excavation and reinforcement.
He also invoked his favorite comparison with a snail, a creature he said moves 14 times faster than the speed of a typical tunneling machine. “Aspirationally, we should be slightly faster than a snail,” he said.
Musk did not say how long it took to burrow his new tunnel, which ended up running short of the 2-mile easement his company originally requested for the project.
But he showed pre-recorded video footage of a newly built elevator station designed to carry passengers from street level to the tunnel’s subterranean entryway. The video featured a modified Tesla Model X luxury car on the elevator.
When fully operational, the “loop” system as Musk envisions it will consist of passenger- and automobile-carrying platforms called “skates” that can zip through the tunnels by way of electric power once they descend into the underground network.
Alternately, he said, passenger cars could be outfitted with retractable side wheels allowing them to travel through the loop autonomously.
Musk arrived at Tuesday night’s event in a Tesla vehicle so equipped, emerging from the car at one end of the tunnel - bathed in green and blue interior lights - as he was cheered by a small, enthusiastic crowd gathered for the presentation.
Musk created a stir earlier this year by promising free trips through the tunnel once it opened. However, no such rides were in the offing on Tuesday night. A company message posted online beforehand said tunnel tours “are by invitation only,” citing “unbelievably high demand.”
If successful, the Hawthorne tunnel is envisioned as eventually connecting to a network of other tunnels, yet to be built.
Slideshow (19 Images)
Last month, the Boring Company scrapped plans for a 2.7-mile segment under a West Los Angeles neighborhood, settling litigation brought by community groups opposed to that project.
But Musk’s company said it was moving ahead with a proposed tunnel across town to connect Dodger Stadium, home of the city’s Major League Baseball team, to an existing subway line.
In June, Boring was selected by Chicago to build a 17-mile underground transit system linking that city’s downtown to its main airport. The company also has proposed an East Coast Loop that would run from Washington, D.C., to the Maryland suburbs.
Reporting by Steve Gorman, Editing by Bill Tarrant and Rosalba O"Brien
From a parking lot in a quiet, manufacturing-dominated suburb of Los Angeles, Elon Musk and his Boring Company tonight unveiled what he believes is the future of “mass transit” and the best way to eliminate the scourge of traffic: electric, autonomous vehicles carrying an extra set of wheels, shooting through layers of thin tunnels at speeds up to 150 mph.
If that sounds a little fantastical—well, duh. Musk’s presentation, punctuated by a glitzy entrance aboard a TeslaModel X that traveled through the company"s accent-lit, 1.4-mile test tunnel, filled in a few details about his ambitious plans to destroy LA congestion with new and improved tunnel boring processes. But the test tunnel still seems to be a test tunnel, and the Boring Company in a deeply experimental phase. A bevy of questions remain.
"I think this is, like, really a panacea," Musk said standing in front of the tunnel, which extends from a SpaceX parking lot into the city of Hawthorne. A panacea for a terrible ill. Traffic, he said, “is like acid on the soul.”
A few big elements of the Boring Company’s “mass transit” concept, which it’s calling “the Loop”, have changed since Musk last presented it in May. Gone are the “electric skates”, the platforms that were to ferry vehicles throughout an extensive tunnel network whose tendrils BoCo would like to one day spread throughout the LA metro area / the world. Instead, users will now have to mount specialized wheels on their own electric, autonomous vehicles, which will guide the vehicles along the tracks in the tunnels. These look a bit like bicycle training wheels, but sit parallel to the ground:
Gone, too, is the Boring Company’s 16-passenger pod concept, the centerpiece of what Musk once said was a system that would put pedestrians and cyclists first. This is a system meant to carry people’s cars—as long as they are fully electric and capable of driving themselves. For those without such vehicles, Musk said, cars would continually circulate the Loop system to pick up and drop off anyone who wants a ride. Press materials provided by the Boring Company say each tunnel should one day be able to support 4,000 cars per hour—about 16,000 passengers, provided each car is nearly full. That’s the capacity of about 11.5 full (but not packed) New York City subway trains.
Boring
“We are no way saying there shouldn’t be other means of public transport,” Musk said during the Tuesday night event. “Let us do everything we can along every direction to alleviate traffic.”
The technology is also far from finished. The car that traveled through the test tunnel, which the company used to give demo rides to fans and journalists, only hit speeds of around 50 mph, not 150 mph. (Musk said it was capable of traveling 110 mph.) And Musk admitted to The LA Times that the ride was bumpy, and that the Boring Company “kind of ran out of time.”
“The bumpiness will not be there down the road,” he told the Times. “It will be as smooth as glass. This is just a prototype. That’s why it"s just a little rough around the edges.”
Hawthorne’s city council allowed the company"s project to fast track through the environmental review process because it"s a demonstration, not a functional form of mass transit, and because the city concluded its construction wouldn’t disturb neighbors. Musk says the company digs so deeply beneath the earth that its tunneling isn’t perceptible from above and rightly notes tunnels are safe in earthquake-prone spots like LA. BoCo spent just under two years and $10 million building this test tunnel.
Musk tweeted the Boring Company into existence in December 2016, when he cracked a joke about being so frustrated by LA traffic that he would buy a tunnel boring machine and “just start digging”. By early 2017, there was an honest-to-God hole in the SpaceX parking lot, the beginnings of the test track that the company unveiled today. Musk has argued that cities like LA can only quash traffic by going “3D down or 3D up”, and that flying cars (that would be up) are too dangerous.
Thus, his vision: layers of underground road carrying hundreds of thousands of vehicles traveling at high speeds, transported into the netherworld by thousands of elevators woven throughout the sprawling city. (Musk likened system to "wormholes".) Boring has said it will charge riders $1 each, will finance this vision itself, and won’t accept government funds.
Transportation engineers and urban planners have criticized the plan, which they argue does not address the underlying causes of traffic, like bottlenecks at highway on- and off-ramps (or the elevator entrances and exits where cars will enter the system) and urban sprawl. The plan faces another foe: the public environmental review process, which can sometimes take over a decade for an infrastructure project of this ambition.
To pull this off, Musk has acknowledged that he will have to bring down the cost of digging tunnels and speed up the process—dramatically. Eventually, Musk has said, he would like his modified boring machine to beat his pet snail, Gary, in a race, increasing the standard boring pace by a factor of 14. (Professional tunnel engineers have publicly cast doubt on whether Musk’s innovations are possible. Also, the original Gary is long dead. BoCo now cares after Gary VI.) He has also said his tunnels’ reduced width—about 12 feet at their widest—will also bring down costs.
Musk also announced last summer that the soil unearthed by his tunneling efforts would be repurposed into bricks, which will be sold through another Muskian spinoff, The Brick Store LLC. The bricks have already been used to build a Monty Python and The Holy Grail-type tower on the grounds of SpaceX’s headquarters. BoCo has also promised to release life-size LEGO sets.
The Boring Company has also popped up all over the country. There’s this test tunnel, in Hawthorne, and the company’s plan to build a small system running between one of three LA Metro subway stations to Dodger Stadium. (Musk told reporters Tuesday that he would like to build out the entire LA system by 2028, when the city will host the Olympics.)
One project that’s no longer on the Boring Company’s list: another test tunnel in West Los Angeles. BoCo pulled out of that project after settling a lawsuit with two local neighborhood groups, which argued the company was attempting to circumvent city rules by getting a metro-wide project appealed piecemeal.
So yes, it’s been a long and confusing road to this point. Musk has proposed a raft of ideas associated with his tunneling. Many have been questionable, but most have been exciting, if for nothing but their audacity. But maybe this meandering is the way to the future. It’s certainly the way of Musk, a man who’s never been much for the traditional, stodgy way of doing things, where you mull over a plan, announce it in a carefully worded press release, then spend the next few years executing it just like you said you would. Some CEOs wear suits and sit in the backs of limos. Others emerge from tunnels in rumpled flannel. You decide which group make better showmen—and which change how things really work.
LOS ANGELES (Reuters) - Billionaire entrepreneur Elon Musk made a brief public appearance late on Tuesday to unveil the first tunnel completed by the underground transit venture he launched two years ago as an ambitious remedy to Los Angeles’ infamously heavy traffic.
Tesla Inc. founder Elon Musk speaks at the unveiling event by "The Boring Company" for the test tunnel of a proposed underground transportation network across Los Angeles County, in Hawthorne, California, U.S. December 18, 2018. Robyn Beck/Pool via REUTERS
But contrary to some of his own hype from several months ago, free rides were not part of the grand opening.
In a 30-minute presentation carried by live webcast, Musk touted the newly finished 1.14-mile (1.83 km) tunnel segment as a breakthrough in low-cost, fast-digging technology being pioneered by his nascent tunneling firm, the Boring Company.
Musk has advertised the proof-of-concept tunnel as a first step toward developing a high-speed subterranean network capable of whisking vehicles and pedestrians below the “soul-destroying” street traffic of America’s second-largest city at up to 150 miles per hour. But such a system has a long way to go.
The new tunnel was excavated along a path that runs not through Los Angeles but beneath the tiny adjacent municipality of Hawthorne, where Musk’s Boring Company and his SpaceX rocket firm are both headquartered.
Musk, best known as head of the Tesla Inc electric car manufacturer and energy company, launched his foray into public transit after complaining on Twitter in December 2016 that L.A.’s traffic was “driving me nuts,” promising then to “build a boring machine and just start digging.”
In May, the company gave the world a preview of the Hawthorne tunnel, posting a fast-forward video of its interior shot by a camera traveling the length of the cylindrical passageway, which measures about 12 feet (3.7 m) in diameter.
On Tuesday, Musk put the total price tag for the finished segment at about $10 million, including the cost of excavation, internal infrastructure, lighting, ventilation, safety systems, communications and a track.
By comparison, he said, digging a mile of tunnel by “traditional” engineering methods costs up to $1 billion and takes three to six months to complete.
FASTER THAN A SNAIL?
Musk boasted of several cost-cutting innovations, including higher-power boring machines, digging narrower tunnels, speeding up dirt removal, and simultaneous excavation and reinforcement.
He also invoked his favorite comparison with a snail, a creature he said moves 14 times faster than the speed of a typical tunneling machine. “Aspirationally, we should be slightly faster than a snail,” he said.
Musk did not say how long it took to burrow his new tunnel, which ended up running short of the 2-mile easement his company originally requested for the project.
But he showed pre-recorded video footage of a newly built elevator station designed to carry passengers from street level to the tunnel’s subterranean entryway. The video featured a modified Tesla Model X luxury car on the elevator.
When fully operational, the “loop” system as Musk envisions it will consist of passenger- and automobile-carrying platforms called “skates” that can zip through the tunnels by way of electric power once they descend into the underground network.
Alternately, he said, passenger cars could be outfitted with retractable side wheels allowing them to travel through the loop autonomously.
Musk arrived at Tuesday night’s event in a Tesla vehicle so equipped, emerging from the car at one end of the tunnel - bathed in green and blue interior lights - as he was cheered by a small, enthusiastic crowd gathered for the presentation.
Musk created a stir earlier this year by promising free trips through the tunnel once it opened. However, no such rides were in the offing on Tuesday night. A company message posted online beforehand said tunnel tours “are by invitation only,” citing “unbelievably high demand.”
If successful, the Hawthorne tunnel is envisioned as eventually connecting to a network of other tunnels, yet to be built.
Slideshow (19 Images)
Last month, the Boring Company scrapped plans for a 2.7-mile segment under a West Los Angeles neighborhood, settling litigation brought by community groups opposed to that project.
But Musk’s company said it was moving ahead with a proposed tunnel across town to connect Dodger Stadium, home of the city’s Major League Baseball team, to an existing subway line.
In June, Boring was selected by Chicago to build a 17-mile underground transit system linking that city’s downtown to its main airport. The company also has proposed an East Coast Loop that would run from Washington, D.C., to the Maryland suburbs.
Reporting by Steve Gorman, Editing by Bill Tarrant and Rosalba O"Brien
From a parking lot in a quiet, manufacturing-dominated suburb of Los Angeles, Elon Musk and his Boring Company tonight unveiled what he believes is the future of “mass transit” and the best way to eliminate the scourge of traffic: electric, autonomous vehicles carrying an extra set of wheels, shooting through layers of thin tunnels at speeds up to 150 mph.
If that sounds a little fantastical—well, duh. Musk’s presentation, punctuated by a glitzy entrance aboard a TeslaModel X that traveled through the company"s accent-lit, 1.4-mile test tunnel, filled in a few details about his ambitious plans to destroy LA congestion with new and improved tunnel boring processes. But the test tunnel still seems to be a test tunnel, and the Boring Company in a deeply experimental phase. A bevy of questions remain.
"I think this is, like, really a panacea," Musk said standing in front of the tunnel, which extends from a SpaceX parking lot into the city of Hawthorne. A panacea for a terrible ill. Traffic, he said, “is like acid on the soul.”
A few big elements of the Boring Company’s “mass transit” concept, which it’s calling “the Loop”, have changed since Musk last presented it in May. Gone are the “electric skates”, the platforms that were to ferry vehicles throughout an extensive tunnel network whose tendrils BoCo would like to one day spread throughout the LA metro area / the world. Instead, users will now have to mount specialized wheels on their own electric, autonomous vehicles, which will guide the vehicles along the tracks in the tunnels. These look a bit like bicycle training wheels, but sit parallel to the ground:
Gone, too, is the Boring Company’s 16-passenger pod concept, the centerpiece of what Musk once said was a system that would put pedestrians and cyclists first. This is a system meant to carry people’s cars—as long as they are fully electric and capable of driving themselves. For those without such vehicles, Musk said, cars would continually circulate the Loop system to pick up and drop off anyone who wants a ride. Press materials provided by the Boring Company say each tunnel should one day be able to support 4,000 cars per hour—about 16,000 passengers, provided each car is nearly full. That’s the capacity of about 11.5 full (but not packed) New York City subway trains.
Boring
“We are no way saying there shouldn’t be other means of public transport,” Musk said during the Tuesday night event. “Let us do everything we can along every direction to alleviate traffic.”
The technology is also far from finished. The car that traveled through the test tunnel, which the company used to give demo rides to fans and journalists, only hit speeds of around 50 mph, not 150 mph. (Musk said it was capable of traveling 110 mph.) And Musk admitted to The LA Times that the ride was bumpy, and that the Boring Company “kind of ran out of time.”
“The bumpiness will not be there down the road,” he told the Times. “It will be as smooth as glass. This is just a prototype. That’s why it"s just a little rough around the edges.”
Hawthorne’s city council allowed the company"s project to fast track through the environmental review process because it"s a demonstration, not a functional form of mass transit, and because the city concluded its construction wouldn’t disturb neighbors. Musk says the company digs so deeply beneath the earth that its tunneling isn’t perceptible from above and rightly notes tunnels are safe in earthquake-prone spots like LA. BoCo spent just under two years and $10 million building this test tunnel.
Musk tweeted the Boring Company into existence in December 2016, when he cracked a joke about being so frustrated by LA traffic that he would buy a tunnel boring machine and “just start digging”. By early 2017, there was an honest-to-God hole in the SpaceX parking lot, the beginnings of the test track that the company unveiled today. Musk has argued that cities like LA can only quash traffic by going “3D down or 3D up”, and that flying cars (that would be up) are too dangerous.
Thus, his vision: layers of underground road carrying hundreds of thousands of vehicles traveling at high speeds, transported into the netherworld by thousands of elevators woven throughout the sprawling city. (Musk likened system to "wormholes".) Boring has said it will charge riders $1 each, will finance this vision itself, and won’t accept government funds.
Transportation engineers and urban planners have criticized the plan, which they argue does not address the underlying causes of traffic, like bottlenecks at highway on- and off-ramps (or the elevator entrances and exits where cars will enter the system) and urban sprawl. The plan faces another foe: the public environmental review process, which can sometimes take over a decade for an infrastructure project of this ambition.
To pull this off, Musk has acknowledged that he will have to bring down the cost of digging tunnels and speed up the process—dramatically. Eventually, Musk has said, he would like his modified boring machine to beat his pet snail, Gary, in a race, increasing the standard boring pace by a factor of 14. (Professional tunnel engineers have publicly cast doubt on whether Musk’s innovations are possible. Also, the original Gary is long dead. BoCo now cares after Gary VI.) He has also said his tunnels’ reduced width—about 12 feet at their widest—will also bring down costs.
Musk also announced last summer that the soil unearthed by his tunneling efforts would be repurposed into bricks, which will be sold through another Muskian spinoff, The Brick Store LLC. The bricks have already been used to build a Monty Python and The Holy Grail-type tower on the grounds of SpaceX’s headquarters. BoCo has also promised to release life-size LEGO sets.
The Boring Company has also popped up all over the country. There’s this test tunnel, in Hawthorne, and the company’s plan to build a small system running between one of three LA Metro subway stations to Dodger Stadium. (Musk told reporters Tuesday that he would like to build out the entire LA system by 2028, when the city will host the Olympics.)
One project that’s no longer on the Boring Company’s list: another test tunnel in West Los Angeles. BoCo pulled out of that project after settling a lawsuit with two local neighborhood groups, which argued the company was attempting to circumvent city rules by getting a metro-wide project appealed piecemeal.
So yes, it’s been a long and confusing road to this point. Musk has proposed a raft of ideas associated with his tunneling. Many have been questionable, but most have been exciting, if for nothing but their audacity. But maybe this meandering is the way to the future. It’s certainly the way of Musk, a man who’s never been much for the traditional, stodgy way of doing things, where you mull over a plan, announce it in a carefully worded press release, then spend the next few years executing it just like you said you would. Some CEOs wear suits and sit in the backs of limos. Others emerge from tunnels in rumpled flannel. You decide which group make better showmen—and which change how things really work.
From a parking lot in a quiet, manufacturing-dominated suburb of Los Angeles, Elon Musk and his Boring Company tonight unveiled what he believes is the future of “mass transit” and the best way to eliminate the scourge of traffic: electric, autonomous vehicles carrying an extra set of wheels, shooting through layers of thin tunnels at speeds up to 150 mph.
If that sounds a little fantastical—well, duh. Musk’s presentation, punctuated by a glitzy entrance aboard a TeslaModel X that traveled through the company"s accent-lit, 1.4-mile test tunnel, filled in a few details about his ambitious plans to destroy LA congestion with new and improved tunnel boring processes. But the test tunnel still seems to be a test tunnel, and the Boring Company in a deeply experimental phase. A bevy of questions remain.
"I think this is, like, really a panacea," Musk said standing in front of the tunnel, which extends from a SpaceX parking lot into the city of Hawthorne. A panacea for a terrible ill. Traffic, he said, “is like acid on the soul.”
A few big elements of the Boring Company’s “mass transit” concept, which it’s calling “the Loop”, have changed since Musk last presented it in May. Gone are the “electric skates”, the platforms that were to ferry vehicles throughout an extensive tunnel network whose tendrils BoCo would like to one day spread throughout the LA metro area / the world. Instead, users will now have to mount specialized wheels on their own electric, autonomous vehicles, which will guide the vehicles along the tracks in the tunnels. These look a bit like bicycle training wheels, but sit parallel to the ground:
Gone, too, is the Boring Company’s 16-passenger pod concept, the centerpiece of what Musk once said was a system that would put pedestrians and cyclists first. This is a system meant to carry people’s cars—as long as they are fully electric and capable of driving themselves. For those without such vehicles, Musk said, cars would continually circulate the Loop system to pick up and drop off anyone who wants a ride. Press materials provided by the Boring Company say each tunnel should one day be able to support 4,000 cars per hour—about 16,000 passengers, provided each car is nearly full. That’s the capacity of about 11.5 full (but not packed) New York City subway trains.
Boring
“We are no way saying there shouldn’t be other means of public transport,” Musk said during the Tuesday night event. “Let us do everything we can along every direction to alleviate traffic.”
The technology is also far from finished. The car that traveled through the test tunnel, which the company used to give demo rides to fans and journalists, only hit speeds of around 50 mph, not 150 mph. (Musk said it was capable of traveling 110 mph.) And Musk admitted to The LA Times that the ride was bumpy, and that the Boring Company “kind of ran out of time.”
“The bumpiness will not be there down the road,” he told the Times. “It will be as smooth as glass. This is just a prototype. That’s why it"s just a little rough around the edges.”
Hawthorne’s city council allowed the company"s project to fast track through the environmental review process because it"s a demonstration, not a functional form of mass transit, and because the city concluded its construction wouldn’t disturb neighbors. Musk says the company digs so deeply beneath the earth that its tunneling isn’t perceptible from above and rightly notes tunnels are safe in earthquake-prone spots like LA. BoCo spent just under two years and $10 million building this test tunnel.
Musk tweeted the Boring Company into existence in December 2016, when he cracked a joke about being so frustrated by LA traffic that he would buy a tunnel boring machine and “just start digging”. By early 2017, there was an honest-to-God hole in the SpaceX parking lot, the beginnings of the test track that the company unveiled today. Musk has argued that cities like LA can only quash traffic by going “3D down or 3D up”, and that flying cars (that would be up) are too dangerous.
Thus, his vision: layers of underground road carrying hundreds of thousands of vehicles traveling at high speeds, transported into the netherworld by thousands of elevators woven throughout the sprawling city. (Musk likened system to "wormholes".) Boring has said it will charge riders $1 each, will finance this vision itself, and won’t accept government funds.
Transportation engineers and urban planners have criticized the plan, which they argue does not address the underlying causes of traffic, like bottlenecks at highway on- and off-ramps (or the elevator entrances and exits where cars will enter the system) and urban sprawl. The plan faces another foe: the public environmental review process, which can sometimes take over a decade for an infrastructure project of this ambition.
To pull this off, Musk has acknowledged that he will have to bring down the cost of digging tunnels and speed up the process—dramatically. Eventually, Musk has said, he would like his modified boring machine to beat his pet snail, Gary, in a race, increasing the standard boring pace by a factor of 14. (Professional tunnel engineers have publicly cast doubt on whether Musk’s innovations are possible. Also, the original Gary is long dead. BoCo now cares after Gary VI.) He has also said his tunnels’ reduced width—about 12 feet at their widest—will also bring down costs.
Musk also announced last summer that the soil unearthed by his tunneling efforts would be repurposed into bricks, which will be sold through another Muskian spinoff, The Brick Store LLC. The bricks have already been used to build a Monty Python and The Holy Grail-type tower on the grounds of SpaceX’s headquarters. BoCo has also promised to release life-size LEGO sets.
The Boring Company has also popped up all over the country. There’s this test tunnel, in Hawthorne, and the company’s plan to build a small system running between one of three LA Metro subway stations to Dodger Stadium. (Musk told reporters Tuesday that he would like to build out the entire LA system by 2028, when the city will host the Olympics.)
One project that’s no longer on the Boring Company’s list: another test tunnel in West Los Angeles. BoCo pulled out of that project after settling a lawsuit with two local neighborhood groups, which argued the company was attempting to circumvent city rules by getting a metro-wide project appealed piecemeal.
So yes, it’s been a long and confusing road to this point. Musk has proposed a raft of ideas associated with his tunneling. Many have been questionable, but most have been exciting, if for nothing but their audacity. But maybe this meandering is the way to the future. It’s certainly the way of Musk, a man who’s never been much for the traditional, stodgy way of doing things, where you mull over a plan, announce it in a carefully worded press release, then spend the next few years executing it just like you said you would. Some CEOs wear suits and sit in the backs of limos. Others emerge from tunnels in rumpled flannel. You decide which group make better showmen—and which change how things really work.
one of the characters is talking about how he went financially bankrupt and one of the other characters says, "Tim, how did you go bankrupt?" He said, "Well, I went bankrupt the way that everyone does, very slowly and then all at once." I think that"s how marriages end. Very slowly and then all at once. There are lots of little things that happen and then the flood comes."
