Elon's forays into "public transportation" will suffer from the same problem that plagues so many imagined projects in the US: people who would never ride a bus imagine the kind of transportation that they either might take themselves, or that they think is cool like that monorail ride they took as a child.
So a "bus that looks like the future as imagined in the 1980s, but which is more like a taxi, somehow" is the kind of thing we get.
There probably is some future for driverless buses, but they will not be buses that are more like taxis. They will be buses that are more like trains, running on fixed routes. A "flexible bus" - that is, one that makes diversions based on demand, can't provide service on a reliable schedule, which about 15 different tech startups learned back in the last decade when they were all trying to invent buses.
I'm giving him more credit than he deserves, of course. This is likely totally fake.
