Elon Musk’s Solution To Traffic: Underground Highways

Musk plans to design an underground network of tunnels, and elevator shafts that lower cars into these highways.

Tesla Motors CEO Elon Musk. (Photo Courtesy: AP)

Elon Musk’s latest venture took shape on a Saturday morning in December last year. His tweet, while being stuck in LA’s gridlock traffic, was a sign of what was to come.

Moments later, he announced on Twitter, "I’m really doing this," and called his new venture ‘The Boring Company.’ It was anything but.

After a month, SpaceX employees were greeted with a giant pit in their office parking lot. The founder of their company had conveniently chosen this site to bypass city permits and build a high-speed network of tunnels to save millions from "soul-crushing traffic".

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How Would It Work?

Musk’s vision of a less congested city begins with a car stopping at a designated parking spot that doubles as an elevator shaft. The elevator lowers the vehicle into an underground network of tunnels.

Once underground, the vehicle travels at speeds of 200 km/h, perched safely atop an autonomous electrically-powered sled. The use of an autonomous sled not only eliminates the possibility of accidents but also helps achieve the goal of zero emissions.

Images of a concept vehicle that could ferry multiple passengers along tunnels. (Photo Courtesy: The Boring Company)

And it’s not just cars that could skate along these underground highways. The company recently revealed images of a concept vehicle that could ferry multiple passengers and goods along these tunnels.

What About Building Flying Cars?

The process of building tunnels is slow, and inefficient, and in some cases the costs run as high as a billion dollars per mile. Musk’s Silicon Valley peers like Google’s Larry Page have taken to the aerial route, funding aircraft startups like Zee Aero and Kitty Hawk.

The SpaceX founder believes that flying cars are best left to the reveries of Hollywood. In the real world, weather and noise would prevent the flying car fantasy from ever taking off. The looming threat of an in-air accident wouldn’t bode well for pedestrians either.

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Musk’s project rests on making tunnelling cheaper, faster and more viable. He aims to bring costs down by investing in making boring machines more powerful, efficient and getting rid of human operators altogether. The electric sled would also reduce the overall diameter of these tunnels, bringing down costs.

Musk realises this is no easy undertaking, but insists his company will be able to bring about the necessary improvements needed in tunneling technology. In an interview with Bloomberg Businessweek he said:

To make it a little better should be easy, to make it five times better is not crazy hard. To make it 10 times better is hard, but nobody will need to win a Nobel Prize. We don’t have to change the standard model of physics.

(This story was originally published on BloombergQuint)