Musk's Secret Plan to Curb City Traffic With Self-Driving ‘Bus’
Musk's Secret Plan to Curb City Traffic With Self-Driving
‘Bus’
By Marie Mawad Marie_a_Paris
April 21, 2016 — 7:39 AM PDT
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.”
Musk in the past has mentioned building car tunnels as a
fix for traffic congestion. “Gridlock is just a soul-destroying thing,” he said
in May last year in an interview with Bloomberg Television. His response last
August to a question about car-sharing prompted speculation about Tesla
starting its own such service with electric vehicles.
Musk is not the only billionaire investing in the future
of public transport: Warren Buffett has backed initiatives to roll-out
all-electric buses to cities including Seattle.
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