Tesla CEO talks about his newest venture, which will bore tunnels around L.A. to avoid traffic.
The Boring Co. (best name ever) would would build a network of tunnels under Los Angeles so cars could sidestep the city’s legendary traffic jams. Musk showed a brief video about the venture at his TED talk Friday. This might be our clearest picture yet – a video shown during Musk’s TEDTalk from Friday morning, which includes a rendering of a future underground transit network where cars travel on crisscrossing layers of tunnels that include sleds shuttling vehicles around on rails at around 130 mph.
Musk first floated the idea in December of 2016, tweeting that he wanted to build a tunnel boring (as in digging) machine so he could start digging tunnels.
He followed that tweet up with a second saying, “I am actually going to do this.”
For now, The Boring Company is nowhere near SpaceX or Tesla levels of engagement for Musk, who said he only spends about 2% or 3% of his time on the venture.
Why are you boring? “We’re trying to dig a hole under LA, and this is to create the beginning of what will be a 3D network of tunnels to alleviate congestion,” Musk says, describing the work of his new project, The Boring Company. Musk shows a video of what this system could look like, with an electric car-skate attached to an elevator from street level that brings your car vertically underground into a tunnel. There’s no speed limit in the tunnel — and the car-skates are being designed to achieve speeds of 200 km/h, or about 130 mph. “You should be able to get from Westwood to LAX in 5-6 minutes,” Musk says.
But it’s more than just a vision. Progress is already being made on the boring machines.
Meanwhile, Tesla TSLA, +1.76% the only publicly traded company that Musk leads, is a couple of months away from its target for making the first Model 3 sedans, the $35,000 car that Tesla hopes to sell to the masses by the end of the year.
Musk’s career as a serial entrepreneur started in earnest as co-founder of Zip2 in the 1990s (some would say it goes back farther than that, to when Musk sold the videogame “Blastar” as a 12-year-old).
He went on to cofound PayPal Inc. and to invest in Tesla, among other ventures, and later on became the CEO of Tesla and the CEO of privately held rocket company Space X.
Last month, he confirmed plans for Neuralink Corp., a neuroscience startup that he would lead. Neuralink would initially focus on brain conditions but aims to help people’s brains keep up with computers.