The underground tunnel projects of Elon Musk's Boring Company have been making headlines since its proposition in 2016. But up until now, the focus was on public transport. Recently, the Boring Company has been pitching a wider tunnel system to potential clients that could be used for freight transport, according to Bloomberg reports.
Since its conception, Musk's tunnelling startup focused on transporting passengers in an effort to solve the soul-destroying traffic situation in cities. However, pitches to Bloomberg show that wider tunnels could expand the Boring Company's potential business.
The Boring Company Freight Tunnels
The Boring Company's new pitch includes 21-feet tunnels almost twice the size of the originally proposed 12-foot tunnels that the company has also built too far, which would be able to accommodate two shipping containers per side.
Most recently, Musk's company has completed 1.7 miles of the tunnel underneath the city of Las Vegas as a part of the city-wide tunnel system from the Las Vegas Strip to McCarran International Airport. The company claims that the tunneling system could shuttle more than 50,000 passengers per hour. On the other hand, the current tunnel in Las Vegas is supposed to transport roughly 4,000 people per hour in the coming months, reports the Verge.
But according to TechCrunch reports based on the company's previous documents, the underground tunneling system in Las Vegas would only be able to ferry 1,200 people at a time. Musk has yet to provide comments on the matter.
Musk's Tunnel Vision
Like many of Musk's ventures, The Boring Co's tunneling system drew eagerness and skepticism alike.
In December of 2016, Musk tweeted that traffic was a nightmare and that he would build a company and 'just start digging.' Within 6 months, Musk began the Boring Company and began digging within the parking lot of SpaceX in Hawthorne, California.
Almost two years later, a tunnel over a mile long was completed — the company's first tunnel that was completed at a cost, according to the Boring Company, just under $10 million. According to the Boring Company's website, as of today, tunnels are expensive to dig, costing at a range of $100 million to $1 billion per mile. Stating that the only way to make vast tunnel networks plausible is, the tunneling costs must be reduced to roughly $10 million per mile.
As it stands, Musk's Las Vegas Convention Center Loop has a pair of one-way tunnels connecting passengers to three stations built roughly 40 feet beneath ground level. The end-to-end 1.7 mile tunnel can be completed in roughly less than 2 minutes with passengers hopping on and off electric Teslas that are steered through narrow tubes by human drivers at top speeds of 40 mph, according to New Atlas.
However, the recently completed Las Vegas tunnel was far from Elon Musk's earlier visions roughly 5 years ago. Musk envisioned elevators lowering cars from street level on skates down to the tunnel before deploying them onto underground trucks in the tunnel network at traveling autonomously at max speeds.
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