Elon Musk to Unveil Further Plans for L.A. Tunnel Project
Never have so many waited so breathlessly to get an update on a hole in the ground.
But this isn't just a hole in the ground. It's Elon Musk's hole in the ground.
Musk is going to make an announcement of some kind Thursday evening about The Boring Company, the firm he launched in 2016 to develop an underground transportation system, and what it will do next in Los Angeles.
What the company has done so far is burrow a 2-mile-long tunnel (see the Instagram video above) under the L.A. suburb of Hawthorne. The bore, which took about 15 months to dig, is a proof of concept for a tunnel network to facilitate ultra-high-speed travel and bypass the metropolis's infamously congested freeways.
Exactly what that transportation system would look like? That's anyone's guess, at this point. Musk has talked about some version of his Hyperloop system -- well, not a system yet, because no one's developed more than a test version yet -- that envisions moving people and goods at near supersonic speeds through a network of sealed, near-vacuum tubes.
A scaled-down and lower-speed version of the system might involve sleds that could carry Musk-built Teslas (and perhaps other makes) through the Musk-bored tunnels at speeds of more than 150 mph.
The tunnels could also carry high-speed transit pods like the ones The Boring Company depicts in a video that looks like an ultrasterilized version of "Blade Runner" L.A. (Musk isn't a fan of the current, nonsterilized version of public transit.)
As is often the case with Musk's entrepreneurial visions, however, the tunnels could lend themselves to something much grander -- a blindingly fast Hyerloop trip from L.A.'s Skid Row, say, to an offshore spaceport. (What would be flying from the spaceport? Musk-designed and -manufactured SpaceX rockets.)
In addition to the Los Angeles project, Musk and his boring concern have proposed longer-distance tunnels in Chicago and in the Baltimore-Washington area.
The Musk announcement will be at 7 p.m. Thursday evening. Musk has tweeted it will be streamed live somewhere -- The Boring Company site, perhaps. We'll update if we see the details before he goes live.