When Elon Musk tweeted his frustration at the traffic jam in Los Angeles and said that the best way to circumvent the traffic grind was to build a tunnel boring machine and drive under the city the internet had a hearty chuckle. What we forgot in that moment is that Elon Musk is more or less our real-life version of Tony Stark, minus the Iron Man suit. However, in a TED talk in Vancouver yesterday, he unearthed more details about his new project, The Boring Company.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=u5V_VzRrSBI
According to Musk, The Boring Company will likely have to create a 3D network of tunnels. However, the exact timeframe of building a network of tunnels as extensive as the one Musk envisions is unknown. The entrepreneur already spends most of his time managing his other companies, Tesla, SpaceX, Neuralink, etc. As a result, he stated that The Boring Company takes up two to three percent of his current schedule. Furthermore, The Boring Company is mostly composed of interns and part-timers. That said, it hasn’t stopped him from purchasing second-hand tunnelling machinery to test out his plans.
The next step Elon Musk and The Boring Company want to take is building their own boring machine, one that can simultaneously bore the tunnel and reinforce it; the current machine divides its time between the two tasks.
“There’s no real limit to how many levels of tunnels you can have. The deepest mines are much deeper than the tallest buildings are tall.”
– Elon Musk.
With the TED talk came the launch of the company’s website, www.boringcompany.com, but it’s currently void of much details though future updates will most likely be posted there.
