For the past decade or so, we have seen Elon Musk’s future of transportation clearly articulated — as most visionary proposals are — through a series of Twitter replies. Autonomous electric vehicles (the ones he makes, of course) will run very quickly through tunnels (the ones he makes, of course), navigating beneath all the other cars to get people to their destinations fast. Well, what if I told you that Musk’s future of transportation is not ten or 20 or 50 years away but already here! Right at this very moment, anyone can see how well it works, and all you have to do is get to Las Vegas, home of the annual techstravaganza that is the Consumer Electronics Show.12
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Remember that in this particular transportation system of the future, Musk was contractually obligated to deliver a specific daily ridership to the convention center: 4,000 people per hour for 13 hours per day during major trade shows. (The contract also has penalties for failure to meet these numbers: $300,000 per trade show for a maximum of $4.5 million.) Part of this math was calculated when the system was to use autonomous 12-passenger vans, which have never materialized, and then by having four passengers in each autonomous SUV, with one person sitting in the non-driving driver’s seat.
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- 1. In 2019, the Las Vegas Convention Center became the first paying customer of Musk’s tunnel-digging operation, the Boring Company. The city’s tourism agency paid him $50 million to build a pair of one-mile tunnels beneath the recently expanded convention halls, promising to turn a 20-minute walk into a one-minute ride.
- 2. Right next to the tunnel, part of the convention center’s parking lot has been blocked off for an autonomous-vehicle demonstration to show how well various automakers’ pedestrian-detection systems work. A small figure meant to represent a child crossing the street is placed in front of the vehicles, which navigate toward the figure, detect something in the road using their onboard LIDAR systems, and stop.
