While we snooze, Musk’s Boring Company hits another dimension
Over the past week I’ve been treading a very familiar path, looking at whether South Africans are investing in Elon Musk’s company Tesla. It’s been a fun exercise. Musk fascinates me, as he does so many people. I know that although he was born in SA he has more or less disowned the country. But I still think he serves as a kind of symbol because I have a suspicion South Africans tend to have a bit of an inferiority complex about where they fit into the world. It’s a terrible generalisation, but my guess is that to the extent that it’s possible to empirically validate, it’s probably true.
Perhaps it’s SA’s history and seemingly never-ending problems and failures that engenders a “chip on the shoulder” sense of the world. Anyway, Musk is the counter proposition. If someone who is locally born goes on to achieve real greatness, then while he might have disowned us we can at least draw some sustenance from not disowning him.
Unfortunately, it turns out that SA’s investors haven’t taken Tesla to heart; local investment in the company is really minuscule. There are lots of reasons for that, obviously: the company is horrendously overvalued on a technical basis and it has a weak balance sheet and severe production problems.
The latest incarnation of Tesla’s main product, the Model 3, is being produced at a rate of 2,500 a week, roughly half of what Musk suggested the company would be producing at this stage. By comparison, the VW plant in Uitenhage produces just over 2,000 cars a week.
Musk has recently become testy with investors, a sure sign that the problems run deep, and more so with journalists, a sure sign that these deep problems are likely to be enduring. Long experience has taught me that people who attack the press are very often trying to find a way to present themselves as victims in case things go pearshaped, in which case they have someone else to blame.
But I still think Musk is a fabulous phenomenon. If you have the time, it’s worth watching his detailed presentation on YouTube about one of his side interests, the Boring Company, which digs holes in the ground. I was only vaguely aware of the company but the conception is so much more than digging holes. The idea is really to revolutionise intracity travel.
And, conceptually, it’s just so smart. He starts off saying that after living in Los Angeles for almost 20 years the huge city’s traffic problems just never seem to get better, no matter how many more roads the city lays down. Why? It has to do with dimensionality. Roads are essentially a twodimensional concept, tied to the surface of the planet. The result is that even if you build more roads you can only ever shift the needle very slightly, almost by definition.
The option is to go threedimensional, so vehicles or commuters can travel above or below each other, essentially on a vertical plane, as well as travelling on a horizontal plane from one place to another. Now the possibilities open up. So what about flying cars, you may ask. Turns out it’s just not realistic at this stage because of the physics of the energy required to lift people off the ground, and the problems with weather and accidents, never mind the noise.
THE PLAN IS TO BUILD HUNDREDS OF TUNNELS FOR DISCRETE, 12-PERSON BUSES THAT MOVE SEAMLESSLY AROUND THE CITY
That leaves underground. But to achieve that we have to have better diggers. Underground hole diggers are actually quite rare and they cut into rock extremely slowly. So Musk set his engineers the challenge of making a digger that travels almost as fast as a snail, which would be more than 50 times faster than the current diggers. They actually have a company snail as a pet.
The project is under way, and the company is building new diggers that use the batteries used in Tesla cars. The plan is to build hundreds of tunnels for discrete, 12person buses that move seamlessly around the city.
It’s just gobsmacking. It reminds me how little South Africans obsess about innovation and how many problems could be solved with creative thinking. While we argue endlessly over the minimum wage and state capture, the world is moving on, concentrating not only on how to slice the pie but how to make it bigger and better.
And it’s being led by someone born in Pretoria. Think about that for a moment.