Elon Musk unveils Boring Company’s long-ballyhooed tunnel aimed at easing ‘soul-crushing traffic’
With fanfare rivaling a movie premiere, Elon Musk unveiled for the first time publicly the one-mile tunnel beneath a Hawthorne city street that he says will be the start of a transportation revolution.
But, admittedly, there is still much work to be done.
“It’s not like we have all the answers and this is some panacea and the problem is solved,” Musk told reporters on Tuesday, Dec. 18. “We’re obviously at the early stages and figuring things out, but finally there is a path to alleviating traffic congestion in cities.”
When it’s completed, which Musk estimates could be within the next 10 years, the billionaire entrepreneur envisions a system of tunnels beneath Los Angeles where individual cars and people movers can enter and exit through elevators and ramps that lead to street level. An elevator, Musk said, could take up as little as two parking spaces.
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Serious questions still remain, however, about just how practical such a system would be given the predictable back-up at the various tunnel entrances, to which Musk said they would simply build more entrances.
The first place likely to make Musk’s vision a reality will not be in Los Angeles, but in Chicago. That’s where the company is working on finalizing a deal for an 18-mile loop from downtown Chicago to O’Hare International Airport.
“We believe we have a real solution to traffic that plagues every city on Earth,” Musk said.
On Tuesday, representatives for The Boring Company, which Musk created in 2016 to fight what he called “soul-crushing traffic,” led reporters for the first time through the 1.14 mile tunnel that runs 40 feet beneath 120th Avenue between Crenshaw Boulevard and Prairie Avenue in Hawthorne.
The tunnel cost an estimated $10 million, roughly a quarter of Musk’s total investment in The Boring Company, which is funded nearly entirely by Musk personally. Asked whether Tuesday’s event was an effort to drum up investment in the private company, Musk said there is no shortage of those wishing to invest.
“We have people hounding us to invest non-stop,” Musk said.
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The tour on Tuesday open to reporters and later private guests during a launch party was led on board a Tesla Model X equipped with stabilizing wheels that guided the car along a concrete track similar to the way an automobile travels through a car wash. Musk said fashioning a car with a set of tracking wheels attached to the front tires would cost $200 to $300.
Tesla in @boringcompany tunnel with retractable wheel gear that turns a car into a rail-guided train & back again pic.twitter.com/3a6i0NoSmi
— Elon Musk (@elonmusk) December 19, 2018
Designed to reach speeds of 150 miles per hour, the cars that carried passengers on Tuesday only reached about 40 mph, in part because the ride was just too bumpy.
“Basically we ran out of time,” said Musk who promised when it’s finalized that a ride in the tunnel would be as smooth as glass. “We had some issues with the paving machine.”
Musk on Tuesday threw out the idea of using a “skate,” a concept previously floated as a way to transport individual automobiles.
Instead, he said the tunnel would be accessed strictly by electric vehicles capable of driving in autonomous mode. This was a necessary stipulation he said to reduce air emissions and ensure safety.
The ultimate goal of The Boring Company is to reduce the cost of tunneling, something that has previously held back the proliferation of subways and other underground transportation options.
Rather than costing roughly $1 billion per mile at a rate of three to six months per mile — the current estimate of most urban tunnel boring — a tunnel burrowed by The Boring Company would be accomplished 15 times faster at a fraction of the cost, Musk said.
In order to create tunnels faster and cheaper, The Boring Company plans to create a brand new boring device. It’s currently working on the second generation cutter with plans for a third that will reach its goal.
A key element of the design includes utilizing the dirt pulled out of the tunnel to make cement used to construct six interlocking panels that make up the tunnel structure, as the boring cutter continues working. The dirt will also be used to make bricks, something the company demonstrated by constructing a 50-foot tall medieval guard tower.
Guests on Tuesday who entered the event space next to the tunnel’s main entrance on Crenshaw Boulevard across from SpaceX were greeted by a scene that looked like a Hollywood red-carpet event.
Along with displays of the current boring devices and information about the company’s latest progress, guests could peruse a row of former tweets by the CEO that had been blown up and mounted.
The first Tweet that started The Boring Company came in December 2016.
“Traffic is driving me nuts,” Musk wrote. “Am going to build a tunnel boring machine and just start digging…”
Traffic is driving me nuts. Am going to build a tunnel boring machine and just start digging…
— Elon Musk (@elonmusk) December 17, 2016