Elon Musk, a tech mogul and ambitious engineer has been constantly tweeting on X and other social media platforms about how much he despises traffic. In December of 2016, Musk tweeted, “The traffic is driving me crazy. I’m going to build a tunnel boring machine and start digging.”
He wasn’t kidding.
Under the city of Las Vegas, Nevada, a pair of twin tunnels approximately 1.7 miles long are being used to transport passengers via Tesla cars. These passages are known as the Las Vegas Convention Center Loop (LVCC Loop) and they carry employees and attendees of the actual convention center just above them. Built by Musk and his tunnel construction company, The Boring Company, its completion cost about $47 million.
However, this wasn’t Musk’s original aim. The goal from the beginning was to create a pod tunnel that could travel between cities like Los Angeles, Vegas, and even Chicago using vacuum technology. The problem was that the tunnels, having been built underground, would need to sustain incredible amounts of pressure, especially during earthquakes. This would lead to massive maintenance costs. And on top of that, The Boring Company was having problems getting their pods to work in the tunnels. After over a decade of constant failures and more money just getting poured into the project, the company decided to pivot and change their objective.
Thus, the LVCC Loop was born. Instead of pods, manned Teslas have been driving about the tunnels since they opened on June 1st, 2021. It’s not what Musk had envisioned, but it is operational and useful.
Although, this isn’t the end of his ambitious tunneling plans. Musk may be on his way to creating a transatlantic railway passage that spans from New York to London worth $20 trillion. Perhaps the craziest part, it will get you from one end to the other…in just 54 minutes.
Musk’s goal is to make a vacuum chamber. A vacuum is formed when the air molecules in a container are sucked out, leaving a low pressure area. When there is low air pressure, air molecules want to rush back in to fill the empty vacuum. By using a pressurized vehicle in a low pressure tunnel, a train can travel up to 3,000 miles per hour, or that is at least what Musk intends.
Many physics and geography experts have their doubts about this project, especially after Musk failed to make a tunnel between cities. An anonymous engineer explained to unilad.com, “This is an active volcanic zone that is pushing apart the continental plates that separate the Americas from Europe and Africa. This ridge is visible above the water on Iceland.”
In addition to the skeptics, The Boring Company didn’t formally announce any official plans for this project. All evidence of these efforts comes from the company and Musk’s posts on X and other social media. As of now, we have yet to see any traction on Musk’s plans.
