Despite the name, The Boring Company is far from “boring.” To save us from “traffic hell“, Tesla CEO Elon Musk founded a company to solve the problem by rerouting traffic into strategically designed tunnels which would transport the cars at speeds of up to 125 miles per hour with no traffic. With its boring robot, Godot, already beginning to dig tunnels, engineers have begun designing and testing another key component—the elevator.
We’ve all dealt with the stress of traffic, some more than others. The greater Los Angeles takes the cake when it comes to some of the worst traffic congestion in the entire world, so what a better place to look into resolving a problem that has had little relief after billions in dollars of governmental spending? Elon Musk decided to do something about this problem by planning to dig a series of tunnels over a 40-mile stretch of Los Angeles which cars would be able to complete a trip from Westwood to LAX in five minutes—a huge improvement for something that would take much, much longer in traffic.
The conceptual idea is that these tunnels wouldn’t be bi-directional or even something that you can drive into on your own. Rather, cars would drive onto an electric sled found on the side of the road that would lower itself into the ground. Once in the tunnel, it traverses the underground highway on the sled at 125 MPH until it reached its destination.
Musk took to Instagram Wednesday morning to show off a video of a Tesla Model S being lowered into the ground using a Boring Company car elevator. As the car lowers into the ground, it gives a sense of anxiety because of just how close the tight space the Model S fits between the walls of the elevator—likely not something for the closet claustrophobic in anybody. You can check out the video of the lift in action below:
With more moving parts being shown to the public, it really seems that The Boring Company is onto something. The company has already received verbal approval for an actual underground tunnel spanning from New York City to Washington D.C., indicating that the U.S. government also sees potential in a new form of mass transit, according to Musk. With manufacturers ramping up their EV production in light of increased sales, long-range transit that relies on infrastructure rather than exerting the car’s own power may become very in-demand.