Thursday, April 21, 2016

"Musk's Secret Plan to Curb City Traffic With Self-Driving ‘Bus’"

There is some humor in the timing of this story, see after the jump.

From Bloomberg, April 21:
  • Tesla founder says he's exploring futuristic public transport
  • Vehicle would replace buses in cities, complement Hyperloop
Tesla’s Chief Executive Officer Elon Musk is working on a self-driving vehicle he says could replace buses and other public transport in order to reduce traffic in cities. But he’s keeping the development a secret. 
“We have an idea for something which is not exactly a bus but would solve the density problem for inner city situations,” Musk said Thursday at a transport conference in Norway. “Autonomous vehicles are key,” he said of the project, declining to disclose more. “I don’t want to talk too much about it. I have to be careful what I say.” 
Musk’s Tesla Motors Inc. has disrupted the transport industry with smarter software-packed electric cars and this month received 400,000 pre-orders for its latest product, a less costly model dubbed Model 3 aimed at the mass market. Meanwhile the billionaire is exploring Hyperloop to transport people between cities via pods enclosed inside of tubes, and his aerospace company Space Exploration Technologies Corp. is working on one day sending humans to Mars. 
“I very much agree with solving the high-density urban transport problem,” Musk said. “There’s a new type of car or vehicle that would be great for that and that’ll actually take people to their final destination and not just the bus stop.”...MORE
Izabella Kaminska has been arguing the financial-inefficiency-of-individual-vehicles-à-la-Uber point for at least a year culminating in today's tweets:



...MORE
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