Elon Musk Invites Us To Take A Magic Tunnel Ride On December 11

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While the world around him may be spinning with fear and fulminations from the SEC, the mainstream media, and a vast short seller conspiracy cabal, Elon Musk just keeps plowing ahead in his seven-league boots doing what he does best — disrupting everything in the transportation sector and then some.

This week, he tweeted an invitation to anyone in the Los Angeles area to come on down to the first Boring Company station in Hawthorne, California, southeast of LA, for a free ride in his new tunnel. The official opening is scheduled for December 10, with free rides available to the public on December 11.

boring company

The tunnel may look something like this:

Or not.

It’s often hard to tell when Musk is joking and when he’s dead serious.

Later on Twitter, Musk clarified that the “first tunnel” is the one that begins in the SpaceX parking lot. According to the SpaceX website, it “leaves SpaceX property (parking lot east of Crenshaw Boulevard and south of 120th Street), turns west under 120th Street, and remains under 120th Street for up to 2-miles.”

Musk says the first tunnel is a 6000 foot long “proof of concept” demonstration tunnel. The first commercial tunnel is expected to be a high speed link between downtown Chicago and O’Hare airport. The Boring Company says there will be electric pods inside the tunnels capable of transporting a single vehicle or a group of people. What exactly people will find inside the Hawthorne tunnel remains to be seen. In another tweet, Elon told his followers whatever it is that is inside the Hawthorne tunnel will have a top speed of 155 mph. When operational, he claims the cost of a trip will be less than that for a ride on a traditional public transit bus.

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According to ArsTechnica, the Hawthorne city council approved a request by The Boring Company last month to build an entrance to the tunnel from the garage of a residential building nearby. It also approved digging a short addition to the existing tunnel to allow The Boring Company to get its boring machine out of the ground. It’s not uncommon for other boring companies to just leave their machinery buried in the ground after a job is completed because extracting it can cost more than it’s worth. That’s not how Tesla rolls.

Everything having to do with the The Boring Company (and hyperloops, for that matter) has involved a high degree of speculation up until now. After December 10, we should have a clearer idea whether yet another Musk venture has legs or is just a Jules Verne–like pipe dream. Of course, the things Verne thought of — outlandishly weird in his own time — had a way of becoming reality after the world caught up with his prescient notions.


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Steve Hanley

Steve writes about the interface between technology and sustainability from his home in Florida or anywhere else The Force may lead him. He is proud to be "woke" and doesn't really give a damn why the glass broke. He believes passionately in what Socrates said 3000 years ago: "The secret to change is to focus all of your energy not on fighting the old but on building the new."

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