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Elon Musk wants to whisk your car around L.A. traffic in an underground tunnel system

Michael Juliano
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Michael Juliano
Editor, Los Angeles & Western USA
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Elon Musk, the closest person to a real-life Tony Stark, casually tweeted last December that he was so sick of L.A. traffic that he would build a tunnel to bypass it all.

By January, the Tesla and SpaceX founder claimed digging would commence near the SpaceX headquarters in Hawthorne within a month or so.

Today, in a syndicated TED talk, Musk unveiled a concept video of what an entire network of these tunnels could look like, and the vision—if executed in a way that at all resembles this rendering—is astounding.

 

The video commences with a Tesla—of course—driving onto a platform on the side of the road and being lowered into a subterranean tunnel. From there, the driving duties are taken out of your hands as a large "skate" streaks down a magnetic track at 124mph. Back at street level, another skate loads up not with a car, but rather a glass tank full of bicycles and pedestrians. The virtual camera then pulls back to reveal that there's an entire system of these tubes laid underneath the familiar Los Angeles skyline.

There's so much to be dazzled by in the video—but so few actual details. How extensive would the network be? How much would it cost? How would these street-level platforms be negotiated onto city streets? How would they be secured? Who would be able to use them? Wouldn't cars just queue up for these lifts, creating another kind of traffic? How would the tunnels hold up in seismically unsafe Southern California? And, quite frankly, is any of this even possible?

Recode was able to jot down a partial transcript of Musk's conversation, and it seems like he's not overly concerned with those details quite yet; his time spent at the Boring Company, as he's artfully titled his tunnel digging company, only accounts for two or three percent of his time.

“There’s no real limit to how many levels of tunnels you can have,” says Musk. “The deepest mines are much deeper than the tallest buildings are tall.”

And there's no real limit to just how badly we want to see this built. In the meantime, if this boring machine is any indication, it might actually be a reality one day.

The companies cool stuff I see outside the office. Can't wait to see some tunnels! #theboringcompany #workperks

A post shared by Ryan Schroeder (@schrodude) on

 

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