For All of Elon Musk’s Brilliance, He Can’t Grasp This Fundamental Concept – thebolditalic

Still courtesy of Tesla/Vimeo

Elon Musk has been lauded as one of the most visionary minds in Silicon Valley. He champions electric cars, renewable energy and the colonization of Mars (dont get me started on that), and has been positioned as the modern Steve Jobs. Robert Downey Jr.s depiction of Iron Man is loosely based on Musks billionaire genius playboy archetype.

Yet for all his brilliance, he seems to have a very hard time accepting the physical limitations of geometry, and for that his employees have suffered.

Recent photos of the parking lot of the Tesla facility in Fremont, California, provide a concrete example of the result of this mindset. You may have seen these images when they went viral recently: workers vehicles crammed into the too-small factory parking lot, and cars ignoring the painted lines and filling the roads around the facility. One wonders if Musk reimburses his employees for how his failed parking lot is damaging their cars.

This isnt the first piece of evidence that Musk is geometrically challenged. Last year, Jarrett Walker critiqued his plan to move everyone out of public transit and into driverless cars as a disaster that would be fine for low-density outer suburbia and rural areas but that would not work in cities.

Why? Because space is severely limited in cities, and taking everyone out of public transit and putting them in individual self-driving pods would require vastly more space to transport the same number of people. Beyond inefficient, Musks vision would put more cars on the road and create a lot of pissed-off drivers who have to wait in traffic. The issues in the Tesla parking lot would be transplanted into major cities.

Walker blames Musks ignorance of geometry on the mindset that dominates the tech industryits marketing departments in particular, which cater to the whims of the elite. But society can never be sustainable if everyone lives like those at the top, and its pretty clear that elite lifestyles are core to the visions of Musks companies.

Teslas first car was the Roadster, an expensive sports car that sold the idea that an electric vehicle could be cool and powerful but that, at $109,000, was available to a wealthy few. Now Musk is taking electric cars to the masses (at least the upper-middle-class ones) with the $35,000 Model 3. Still, merely switching everyone from gas to electric cars would not be a sustainable solution; healthy cities require fewer cars overall, as anyone who has tried to drive in car-choked San Francisco can attest. For cities to remain good places to live, citizens need to be able to move around them efficiently, which means fewer cars and more public transit, cycling and walking.

There are similar problems with Musks other company, solar-system installer SolarCity. Its technology works great for large single-family homes in suburban and rural areas, but its pretty tough for city dwellers to affix solar panels to the balconies of their high-rise condos and apartments. With Tesla and SolarCity, Musk is pushing for a version of a green future that works only for rich people like him or in areas that arent densely populated. Its not a lifestyle that can be adopted by the masses.

And you could even say the same thing about SpaceX, Musks rocket company, which, according to him, will one day lead the way in colonizing Mars. Yet his vision of how the colonization of Mars could happen is predicated entirely upon the ability of rich tourists to pay their way there. Similarly, it is more of a vision of Elysium than Athens.

Essentially, as the world undergoes a rapid urbanization, Musk is pitching solutions that work only for a small (and shrinking) percentage of the population. Yet he seems either oblivious or indifferent to this fact. On the basis of his statements, it seems more like hes indifferent. Why? Tunnels.

Because Musk doesnt like sitting in traffic himself, he announced that he plans to simply bore a series of tunnelsup to 40 levels of them in some areasthat would magically fix the traffic problem. This could be seen as mere ignorance, since it has been proven time and time again that building more roads makes traffic worse, but it seems quite clear that he was mainly looking out for himself. If he ever does start boring tunnels commerciallyand I dont think he ever willyou can be absolutely certain they wont be open for everyone like public roads and highways are. And just think about the engineering that would be involved. Are we really going to build 40 levels of tunnels below our cities just so we can all drive (or be driven in) individual vehicles, or will we finally eject cars from our cities and embrace means of transit that are not only more efficient but also healthier for us? It seems like an easy decision.

Theres no denying that Musk has executed some brilliant ideas, even if hes tried to downplay how reliant his companies are on government subsidies, but his elite vision of a future based on a nostalgic revival of cookie-cutter postwar suburbs with a sustainable twist simply does not fit the trend toward dense mega-cities where personal vehicles are a wasteful luxury. Instead, solutions must be focused on improving quality of life for as many people as possible while using the smallest amount of space.

Musks evacuated-tunnel rapid-transit-system concept, Hyperloop, may be the most promising of his ideas in such a future, yet its also been criticized as a pie-in-the-sky idea that serves only to distract from the more achievable high-speed rail. Musk also hasnt even shown much personal interest in pursuing the project. Not flashy enough, or not enough subsidies? We may never know.

Original post:
For All of Elon Musk's Brilliance, He Can't Grasp This Fundamental Concept - thebolditalic