The Boring Company (confusingly abbreviated to TBC) CEO and general tech and energy entrepreneur Elon Musk has released the first video footage of TBC’s nearly completed tunnel under Los Angeles.
In the video, which he uploaded to Instagram, Musk claims that TBC will begin offering free rides to the public in just a few months time.
“First Boring Company tunnel under LA almost done!”, he writes on the post. “Pending final regulatory approvals, we will be offering free rides to the public in a few months.
“Super huge thanks to everyone that helped with this project. Strong support from public, elected officials & regulators is critical to success.”
The footage, aside from a couple of scenes of a team working on the tunnel, is really just a big loop of a camera plunging into a tunnel and then back out again. It’s also clear that, while the tunnel is nearly done, it’s still not quite yet finished.
However, the level of progress Musk’s TBC has made since it broke ground on the LA tunnel project in February 2017 is certainly impressive. While it’s relatively simple to build a tunnel under a city that doesn’t have many other tunnels or underground networks in the way, it’ll be interesting to see how Musk’s tunnelling techniques carry over to more crowded cities and suburban areas.
On Twitter, Musk said that The Boring Company had also started on its Washington DC to New York City route, with plans of an LA to San Francisco network to begin in 2019.
It’s not currently clear what sort of network will run though these tunnels just yet. It’s likely they’ll be standard passenger trains, but Musk believes that the 2019 LA-SF route will be a “true hyperloop with pressurised pods in near-vacuum tunnels, and faster than a jetliner.”
Not sure who calls jet planes jetliners anymore, but at least Musk’s underground alternative will be speedier.
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