Musk’s company has created a tunnel, at top, more than a mile long beneath the street across from SpaceX headquarters in California using a huge boring machine, below.
Everyone talks about the weather, but no one does anything about it. Same with traffic. Except Elon Musk — who calls it "soul-destroying traffic" and decided to do something about it.
As with many things, Musk sees it in mathematical terms. He sees people going from three-dimensional homes, to two-dimensional roads, to three-dimensional offices and back. The solution, he says, is geometry.
No, not rockets — the sky is already too crowded. Musk is going to use tunnels. Specifically, Musk's The Boring Co. is planning to bore tunnels under the world's cities with giant, hyperefficient mole machines, spiraling through earth and rock until there is a network of underground roads that would rival a professional-grade ant farm. Then autonomous electric cars will whisk commuters through those tunnels at speeds up to 155 mph.
That's the plan, anyway. There are a few things that still need to be sorted out. Tunnel-boring, for instance, has historically been extremely slow and expensive. Current technology requires $1 billion to $2 billion and three to six months per mile of tunnel.
"You'll run out of money and take a zillion years," Musk said.
So Musk is going to make it all faster and cheaper.
Simple, no?
The project is still in its infancy, but The Boring Co. has managed to bore through 1.14 miles of dirt underneath the street across from SpaceX headquarters in Southern California. What's it like to go through that tunnel? They gave some of us press schmoes a ride to find out.
They herded us past stacks of concrete tunnel wall sections, past the old boring machine, past the new boring machine and then around a corner and there it was: the tunnel. First of all, a caveat: The tunnel is not finished. It appeared to be a sort of demo tunnel. It is clearly in its crude, proof-of-concept state.
A Tesla Model X was parked on what looked like an open elevator platform over the drop 40 feet down to the open tunnel orifice. The Tesla Model X had little wheels on the front corners that looked like wheeled horizontal bumpers. The bumpers seemed to be able to keep the autonomous electric cars in between the concrete curbs the same way those bumpers on the Autopia cars at Disneyland steer their cars — kind of.
We climbed down some narrow concrete stairs to the level of the tunnel itself. There were some more Model Xs parked down there. (Being clever, I figured our group was going to be getting into the frontmost X, so I started working my way over to the right-front passenger seat. I was there pushing the weird Tesla door handle by the time one of the local news reporters yelled a futile "Shotgun!" Ha ha. Suckers!)
img04We had a driver with whom we were expressly forbidden to speak and who was expressly forbidden to speak to us. We spoke to him anyway. He just smiled. He did manage to say, "Buckle up," which we all did.
The tunnel is 12 feet in diameter inside, we were told, and 14 feet outside. A cross section of the bottom has concrete ledges that run the full 6,000 feet. The wheels of our Model X rode on those ledges. The concrete curbing lines the edge of those ledges for the bumper wheels to bounce off of. There are no train rails or anything like that, and our Model X wasn't on a "skate" as had been considered for tunnel transport earlier. In the current version, riders will ride in their electric cars while autonomy drives them.
When we were all buckled in, the Model X began to drive itself up a short ramp and into the tunnel, but our driver kept both hands near the wheel. Then it launched. And I mean, launched. It rocketed off the concrete and down the tunnel toward the first bend. I thought: "Hey, this Boring Co. might be the real deal."
Then it hit the brakes, slowed way down and the big redundant front-wheel curb feelers started banging off the curbs. The concrete ledges we rode on were wavy, not flat, and I began to think the Model X was very nearly going to bounce off them, while at the same time banging off the curbing. It was more terrifying than it was revealing.
So there we were, bouncing and banging toward the underground future of transportation, our driver regularly grabbing the wheel to keep the whole contraption from coming apart in spectacular fashion. I imagined the headline: "Five die in tunnel disaster — Musk blames 'idiot press' for crash." Our driver had to keep grabbing the wheel as the bouncing and banging got increasingly more violent. I estimated we were going 45 mph, maybe. Did other transportation pioneers get scared like this, or were they braver, did they have moxie, did the first steam-driven automobile have terrified reporters on it screaming like teenage girls? Perhaps not.
Then the light at the end of the tunnel appeared. We'd made it. Whew!
Again, this is a crude prototype. Production tunnels, those the public will ride in, will be "perfect," Musk promises. So no bouncing or banging. Really.
At the end of the track is another elevator platform staffed by young mining engineer types. I could look up through the big windshield and see their bearded mugs peering down at us. Someone hit a button and the platform rose. We came out into the most nondescript suburban/industrial alley you've ever seen and then drove on surface streets back to where we started. We went past the Hyperloop, Elon's other great transportation idea, and past SpaceX, which so far may be the only one of these crazy ideas to turn a profit.
Will it all work? Will we all be whisked about in musktunnels at hyperspeed to whichever destination we desire? Who knows? Musk knows. And he is saying "Yes."
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