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Comment by shouldbworking | Hacker News Reader

Did anyone else notice that cars being lowered leaves a giant fucking hole in the middle of the street?!

This is a marketing fluff video untouched by engineers

I mean, you can easily cover up the hole with a sliding door pretty quickly after dropping, or, as someone else mentioned, raise fences during the process.

This is far from the hardest problem to solve in the video.

I'm just pointing out that the flaw is egregious. PR videos are supposed to give people a view of the future, suspend disbelief for a minute. This just looks like something slapped together by an intern told to "put some future cars in a tunnel"

A damn disappointment for something hyped a while back from Musk himself. He should learn from Hollywood, movie trailers are far more important than the movie itself when public interest is involved.

Except most people will probably not notice that.

This is obviously just a marketing video, but that isn't a very hard problem to solve. The bigger issue is building an enormous underground highway network under an existing city.

I was too busy noticing how there was no contention between the newly raised car leaving the platform and a new car driving into the platform, or the endless line of cars queueing to be raised or lowered, or the amount of time it would take for a car to make it in or out at rush hour, or brain sizzles

Do you really think that no one, not even Elon did notice? I would rather assume, that for this concept video they considered this detail as non-essential and the actual entry points would look quite differently (and safer) than displayed. They most certainly would be different to those "parking spots" shown in the video.

So you raise a fence around it (stored on the sides, underground of course), or slide a roof in (once again, stored below the surface) to prevent anyone from going in even if they wanted to. This doesn't sound like a biggie to me.

The ongoing maintenance of tens of thousands of sliding doors, elevators, and retracting fences sounds like a biggie to me.

Every subway contains a whole bunch of sliding doors that open and close every single stop.

Yes, and they frequently need repair and maintenance.

Now imagine having tens of thousands of subway cars instead of a couple hundred.

There are tens of thousands of teslas out there already with automatic doors.

And (most?) new minivans nowadays. And most cars have power windows as well. And most supermarkets have sliding doors as well. And probably most garages in the suburbs have automatic doors. This is actually run of the mill technology.

The easiest solution is to make it a covered "garage" with doors on both sides then the hole is always covered. But that doesn't look as good on a promotional video.

You didn't see the force field the appeared as the car lowered past the threshold?

uh duh??? Ever heard of a concept? How many concept cars actually get released as the "marketing fluff" that you see in auto shows?

Tesla releases every one they've shown. Or they will have, starting in July. (Though they'll soon have more to show.)

If this is ever built someone will absolutely ghost-ride the whip in the tunnel.

And die.

And lawsuits.

Someone needs to edit the video so you see a pedestrian falling down the shaft and breaking their neck

Might as well add Judge Judy and a scene in court when the lawsuit happens.

The amount would be way over Judge Judy's limit.

There's a sidewalk I walk down, it's quite narrow and runs along a shoulderless road with a steady stream of cars whizzing by at 50 miles an hour. I think to myself 'how much more or less dangerous is this than walking along the edge of the Grand Canyon? One misstep and I'm toast. One misstep from one of those cars and I'm toast.'

We have a hardwired respect for heights, but at no time in our evolutionary history did we ever have to deal with the kind of speed cars move at. So we look at a 10 foot deep unprotected hole in the ground and instantly think 'Hey, that's a hazard', but we don't give nearly enough consideration to speed, and as such 2 million people each year who are killed and injured in US motor vehicle accidents, and we just sort of shrug our shoulders.

Reminds me of this image: http://i.imgur.com/mE7uGoA.jpg

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