BORING COMPANY'S FIRST PHOTO IN THE UNDERGROUND OF LOS ANGELES
Elon Musk just revealed his first photo of the tunnel in Los Angeles.
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He shared on Saturday the very first image of the Boring Company’s underground Los Angeles tunnel that is actively under construction. We’ve known for months now that Musk’s cleverly named tunnel-digging venture has been testing equipment and technology beneath SpaceX’s Hawthorne, California headquarters and elsewhere in the LA suburb, after the city granted the company a test permit back in August. But this is the first image Musk has shared of what looks like a fully built out underground system similar to what the entrepreneur first unveiled earlier this year in a concept video.
The Boring Company was founded as an experimental effort in alternative urban transportation, with Musk envisioning a series of underground roadways that ferry vehicles to and from destinations using electric tracks. It’s effectively a high-speed subway exclusively for cars. Musk has picked LA as the testing ground both because he works in nearby Hawthorne and because the city’s notorious traffic jams gives the Boring Company a clear-sighted target.
The goal is to reduce congestion and speed up travel times, similar in concept and execution to Musk’s supersonic hyperloop concept. Except while the hyperloop remains only an idea of Musk’s that other third-party companies are trying to bring to life, Musk himself has built out the Boring Company from the get go to really test the viability of the idea and lay the initial groundwork for an underground LA system.
In a post to his personal Instagram containing the same photo, Musk describes this section of the LA tunnel as running parallel to Interstate 405 all the way to Interstate 101, with exit ramps “every mile or so.” Musk writes that “it will work like a fast freeway, where electric skates carrying vehicles and people pods on the main artery travel up to 150 mph, and the skates switch to side tunnels to exit and enter.”
