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Old Posted Aug 23, 2018, 7:32 PM
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Hatman Hatman is offline
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They're currently building 6,200 Model 3's per week according to Bloomberg's VIN tracker:
https://www.bloomberg.com/graphics/2018-tesla-tracker/
Add in 1,000 S and X vehicles per week each, and we get about 8,000 new Teslas built per week.

This thread has become a sadly amusing read in recent weeks. The thing about Elon Musk is that he is an engineer first, not a promoter or a businessman. When he comes up with something he thinks will be helpful, he tweets it out to the world and sees what sticks. Some examples of things that he hasn't followed up on include battery swapping stations for Teslas, man-rating the Falcon Heavy rocket for space tourism, building a larger version of the hyperloop big enough to fit a person vehicle into, etc.
These are not failures. These are the first iterations of ideas he thought he could develop further if they generated a good enough response. He does this a lot, and it is fun to see how his ideas change over time through many iterations.
Take his tunnels idea. First it was for cars, then it was going to be its own separate mass-transit system, and now he's working on building "loops" as additions to mass transit lines - and I doubt the changes will end there.
If you want to make sense of him, you just need to know his end goals:

Tunnels: transportation needs to become three-dimensional in order to avoid total gridlock. This is obvious, as every crowded area already does this in the forms of subways and other car tunnels. Whatever breakthroughs he is able to make in the form of building cheaper and faster tunnels will be a very welcome development, IMO.

Tesla: Transportation will eventually become entirely battery-electric anyway since fossil fuels are non-renewable and will run out. The idea that a battery is as polluting as a gas car has been disproved many times. Comparing all the materials required to produce batteries vs all the materials required to produce a gasoline engine and its exhaust systems already proves this before even considering all the fuel resources that need to be mined to keep the gas engine running. Furthermore, we gain nothing by delaying the conversion from gas to batteries - we are only killing ourselves by procrastinating the inevitable.

SpaceX: Other companies like ULA and Sierra Nevada exist, but none have yet been successful at being private, profitable companies. ULA in particular lacks any ambition beyond getting government contracts, and their consumption of all available money without producing any price-lowering innovations has been a huge roadblock to the US space and launch industry. SpaceX has finally broken that log jam, and they did it by pushing technology farther than anyone has before - even NASA. Even if it isn't SpaceX who is finally able to establish a permanent human presence in space, we will have SpaceX to thank for pioneering the techniques needed to do so.

So while we may have suggestions and feedback to give on Elon's transportation visions, let's do so constructively. He's on the right track, and he's shown in many examples that he absolutely can deliver proposals that most people originally considered to be ridiculous.
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