Don't trust 'narcissistic, self-interested' billionaires like Elon Musk to improve transport, author says

• Society can't trust Elon Musk or Silicon Valley to improve transport, said author Paris Marx.

• Musk is styled as future-maker in a way that benefits him but not society, he told Insider.

• Marx wrote 'Road to Nowhere: What Silicon Valley Gets Wrong About The Future of Transportation'.

Governments and the public should not trust Silicon Valley billionaires like Elon Musk when they promise to solve climate change and to improve transport systems, according to author and transport researcher Paris Marx.

Musk is "a really narcissistic self-interested billionaire who is trying to push a particularly naive idea of what the future should look like onto the public," Marx told Insider in an interview following the publication last month of his book "Road to Nowhere: What Silicon Valley Gets Wrong About The Future of Transportation".

It explains how automakers and Silicon Valley disruptors continue to promote technology as the sole solution for inner-city traffic and climate change, in a way that does little to help society, Marx believes.

He argues that switching to an electric Tesla Model 3 might be far cleaner than driving a petrol car, but its batteries have their own environmental impact and do not solve the problem of traffic or road deaths — a topic far less talked about.

Flying taxis may sound cool, and help people move around more efficiently than helicopters, but will create noise pollution and need a complex remodeling of infrastructure to make them work.

Marx highlights that neither example is anywhere near being feasible as a mass market solution, yet companies continue to promote them as such for their own benefit, while governments continue to believe them.

This is where Musk in particular has been "really pernicious" in Marx's opinion. Through Tesla, Musk pushes the idea that electric cars are the solution to transport emissions, and that computers should drive cars instead of humans, he said.

"If we're thinking about what a sustainable transportation system looks like, it's about getting people out of cars all together," he said.