  Motor-driven intracellular transport of organelles, vesicles, and other
molecular cargo is a highly collective process. An individual cargo is often
pulled by a team of transport motors, with numbers ranging from only a few to
several hundred. We explore the behavior of these systems using a stochastic
model for transport of molecular cargo by an arbitrary number N of motors
obeying linear Langevin dynamics, finding analytic solutions for the
N-dependence of the velocity, precision of forward progress, energy flows
between different system components, and efficiency. In two opposing regimes,
we show that these properties obey simple scaling laws with N. Finally, we
explore trade-offs between performance metrics as N is varied, providing
insight into how different numbers of motors might be well-matched to distinct
contexts where different performance metrics are prioritized.
