Elon Musk envisions tunnels deep in the ground to solve ‘soul-destroying traffic’ – but now he needs your help.
The billionaire is hosting a competition through The Boring Company that challenges the public to dig a 98-foot deep tunnel with a circular opening of 19.7 inches.
According to The Boring Company’s site, the main objective of the contest is to dig faster than a snail, which is 14 times faster than its own machine.
Three winners are set to be chosen in spring 2021 for fastest to complete the tunnel, along with one that has a driving surface that a Tesla remote controlled car can drive through.
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Elon Musk envisions tunnels deep in the ground to solve ‘soul-destroying traffic’ – but now he needs your help. The billionaire is hosting a competition through The Boring Company that challenges the public to dig a 98-foot deep tunnel with a circular opening of 19.7 inches
‘The Boring Company’s goal is to build the tunnel infrastructure necessary to enable fast, safe, and comfortable transportation, including Loop and Hyperloop,’ reads the firm’s website.
‘To feasibly build a large network of tunnels, one must first rapidly innovate to increase tunneling speed and reduce tunneling costs.’
‘This competition challenges teams to come up with tunneling solutions and answer the question, ‘Can you beat the snail?’
The Boring Company uses the Tunnel Boring Machine to dig the tunnels, but notes a snail ‘is effectively 14 times faster,’ which is why it wants a quicker solution.
According to The Boring Company’s site, the main objective of the contest is to dig faster than a snail, which is 14 times faster than its own machine (pictured)
The competition is open to everyone around the world, who have an opportunity to design, build, and race their own tunneling solution – but Musk does not give details what the three winners will receive.
Musk founded The Boring Company in 2016 due to his experience with the never-ending, bumper-to-bumper traffic in Los Angeles, California.
‘It’s a pain in the a**,’ Musk said regarding public transportation in a 2017 interview.
‘That’s why everyone doesn’t like it. And there’s like a bunch of random strangers, one of who might be a serial killer, OK, great. And so that’s why people like individualized transport, that goes where you want, when you want.’
On Twitter in 2019, Musk gave more details about his plans for future underground tunnels – for cars, saying: ‘These would be road tunnels for zero emissions vehicles only — no toxic fumes is the key.
‘Really, just an underground road, but limited to EVs (from all auto companies). This is not in place of other solutions, eg light rail, but supplemental to them.’
A year prior, The Boring Company showed reporters a new test tunnel in California, but Las Vegas is Boring’s first paying customer.
Three winners are set to be chosen in spring 2021 for fastest to complete the tunnel, along with one that has a driving surface that a Tesla remote controlled car can drive through.
Musk founded The Boring Company in 2016 due to his experience with the never-ending, bumper-to-bumper traffic in Los Angeles, California. Pictured are plans for a tunnel under Las Vegas, Nevada
The cost of the tunnel, originally estimated to be as low as $35 million, has since risen to $52.5 million, according to the Las Vegas Review-Journal.
Musk has also advocated for a futuristic underground tunnel system for trains, called the Hyperloop, which would allow passenger capsules on Tesla-built chassis to move through low-pressure tubes at high speeds.
He aspires eventually to build such a system linking Washington and New York along the busy US Northeast corridor; he has also proposed projects for Chicago and Los Angeles.
The billionaire hopes Boring’s people-moving technology will help revolutionize urban transit in an ever more crowded world.
He says the idea came to him as he sat in growing frustration in his car, stuck in a traffic jam between his pricey villa in Bel Air, California and the SpaceX offices in Hawthorne, south of Los Angeles.
Musk also envisions thousands of autonomous electric vehicles eventually moving millions of people underground at speeds up to 155 miles per hour -far higher than the moderate 35 mph speeds planned for the short Las Vegas link.
However, just as his vision for self-driving cars and colonies on Mars, the dream of underground roadway systems has also had its delays.
In October 2018, Boring said it planned to have the first commercial Hyperloop could be in operation as soon as 2019.
And a tunnel was set to be operational under Las Vegas this year.