← BackDecember 18, 2018Boring Company Tunnel Opening0:00 / 0:00CC1×YouTubeBoring Company Tunnel OpeningDecember 18, 2018Highlights of the Boring Company's Hawthorne test-tunnel unveiling and the first public Loop demonstration rides.Highlights of the Boring Company's Hawthorne test-tunnel unveiling and the first public Loop demonstration rides.TranscriptElon MuskI've lived in LA for 16 years and traffic has gone from like, just like seventh level of hell to like the eighth level of hell. And, you know, it's terrible. Finally, finally, finally there's something, something that I think could solve the problem. Goddamn traffic problem.The thing is, like, why tunnels? You know, sometimes people say, what about, like, flying cars and all these other things? I want to be clear. We're not opposed to mass transit. We think mass transit is fine. Like, let's try every solution possible. But the thing about tunnels is that you can go 3D underground. The inherent problem with the way cities are constructed is that you've got all these tall buildings that are in 3D and then a road network in 2D necessarily.This will result in traffic. There's no way around it. You have to make transport 3D. You could go with a flying car. But there are some drawbacks to flying cars. Essentially, it's a helicopter with wheels, and they make a lot of noise. There's a lot of wind force. And the probability of something falling on your head if there are a bunch of flying cars around is much higher than if there are not. The great thing about tunnels is that there's no limit to how deep you can go.They're weatherproof. That's the other thing about flying cars. If there's like snow or rain or hurricane or something, suddenly you can't go anywhere. But tunnels are immune to weather. It does not matter if there's a tornado. It doesn't matter if there's an ice storm. Doesn't matter what's going on above ground. If you're in a tunnel, you're safe and secure, so you will not hear, see, or feel the tunnels being created.You can weave the boring system tunnel network into the fabric of a city without changing the character of the city.You'll have this revolutionary transport system and your city will still feel like your city. So what's the problem with tunnels? They usually take a very long time to build and they're very expensive. Can cost up to a billion dollars per mile. In fact, the LA subway extension that just got completed cost $2 billion for two and a half miles. So clearly something needs to be done to revolutionize tunneling technology.We need to be able to build tunnels way faster and for a hell of a lot less money. This is us Nail. This is Gary Vi.It turns out snails don't live that long. So this is Gary the sixth. What are we doing to increase the speed of tunneling? In a given hour of tunneling, only about 10 minutes of the hour is spent actually digging. Then the other 50 minutes are spent erecting the tunnel reinforcements, laying down tracks, doing logistics and a bunch of other stuff. So just automating the segment placement and solving the logistics issues will actually give you about a five fold increase in tunneling speed.With our design, we've also tripled the power of the drill that results in a theoretical net speed increase of about 15 compared to the next best tunneling machine. So, and hopefully we'll beat our snail. So aspirationally we should be slightly faster than a snail after doing those things. And we have three tunnel products.One is the loop. That is for transportation pods. And you guys will try it out later today. And that's transport tunnel. We're also seeing a lot of interest in just utility tunnels, where a municipality can get a big tunnel and then put water mains and electricity lines inside the tunnel and then they can actually service. Like if they had a water main break, instead of it flooding the main street in the city, they can actually go into the boring company tunnel and fix the water main.But this fundamentally is what we're trying to solve. We've all been there many, many times. We must solve the soul destroying traffic situation. So the loop that we're talking about consists of autonomous electric vehicles. The combination of autonomous electric vehicles with deployable guide wheels so that it braces itself against the side of the tunnel so that it's safe even if the car loses power or even if somebody goes crazy or there's like a mechanical failure.Those guide wheels keep the car centered in the tunnel and ensure that you can go through the tunnel very fast and still be safe. But the thing about going 3D is that you could have like three. You could have, you could have 16 tunnels going in the same direction. So you can have as many tunnels as you want. And I'm pretty sure everyone in the United States is not going to move to la, but you could literally build enough tunnels to transport everyone in the United States.In la, there is no limit. The way the loop would work is that you'd have main arteries that are traveling at 150 miles an hour. And only when you want to go to an exit would you have an off ramp. It's like a 3D highway system underground, basically.Sam.And for the elevators, the way we're doing the elevators is we construct them off site. So the elevators are prefabricated, self contained steel structures. And so in order to insert the elevator, all you do is dig a hole in the ground. Real fast. Then bring the prefabricated elevator in sections, drop it down, connect the sections and you're done. There's not like some extended construction project. I think that's also important.So you don't have these like construction projects that disrupt the city all over the place. And this, I should say also we will have continuously operating cars in the loop for those that do not have a car. So this will be. We'll actually give priority to pedestrians and cyclists with cars that are continuously circulating in the loop. So even if you don't have a car, you can still use the system. I really want to emphasize that a small but very important element is having retractable wheels that when you're driving down the road, normally they retract and go under the car, you don't even see them.But when you get into the tunnel, they deploy and allow you to go through a narrow tunnel very quickly and effectively, like a little train. So this, even though it's like a small thing, it's a small but very important element of the technology. This is not intended to be some sort of walled garden or just for Teslas or something like that. Any autonomous EV can be outfitted with these guide wheels. Yeah, and why autonomous will?It means you can go very, very fast and brake very quickly. Like we expect that you can probably do one vehicle per second through the tunnel. Typically on a freeway you can do without autonomous vehicles. You can do a car every two seconds, but with autonomy, we think you can do a car at least every second. I mean, you can think of these like they're sort of like wormholes. Just like you drop down the worm like you're driving around.I need to get to the other side of the LA or New York or whatever, drop down the wormhole, pop out the other side, and then you can just drive. Normally the elevator itself only takes as much as two parking spaces on the street. So if you can just have a station in exchange for two parking spaces, and that's what I mean, that's basically the size of a station. So you can interleave these stations throughout cities, wherever there's, you know, a couple parking spaces or a little patch of road, pretty much anywhere you can actually even have them come up in underground garages.And then one day it will connect to the hyperloop, but that's for another time.And what I think this really amounts to is an actual solution to the soul crushing burden of traffic. This is something that I think will actually work. It's scalable and we have a demonstration tunnel here. And we expect to expand this over time to many cities all around the world and give people more time for their friends and family.That concludes our presentation. Thank you.