Here’s Your First Look at Elon Musk’s Tunnel Dreams
It involves car “skates” and a massive tunnel system beneath a big city.
Tesla CEO and founder of The Boring Company, Elon Musk, unveiled new details of his plan to develop a massive series of tunnels beneath cities at a TED Talk Friday, while also showing off a video on the tunnels that he hopes will help cars bypass the extreme traffic situations found in Los Angeles.
The video, uploaded to The Boring Company's YouTube page on Friday, shows a rendering of a Tesla Model S being driven onto a "skate," as the platforms used to transport vehicles about in the tunnels are called. That skate is then lowered into the ground and maneuvered onto some sort of track; once on the track, the sled is apparently able to travel at speeds up to 124 miles per hour, according to the video.
It's not just for Teslas, though. Toward the end of the video, a vehicle that appears to be some sort of autonomous-looking people-mover is loaded onto a sled and lowered into the realm of tunnels.
This potentially game-changing network of tunnels isn't exactly Musk's top priority, though. According to Wall Street Journal reporter Rolfe Winkler, Musk said The Boring Company takes up just 2-3 percent of his time and that the company is currently just "puttering along" with the help of some "interns."