Elon Musk has officially unveiled The Boring Company’s first underground transportation tunnel, and invited guests to take some of the first rides ever on the tech entrepreneur’s solution to “soul-destroying traffic.” They boarded Musk’s Tesla Model S and were driven on Los Angeles-area surface streets about a mile away to what’s known as O’Leary Station, which sits smack dab in the middle of a residential neighborhood. The tunnel system consists of a wall-less elevator that lowers the car down a wide shaft, roughly 30 feet below the surface. Read more for the full drive through video and additional information.
Reporters who were lucky enough to go for a ride described the tunnel as bumpy but impressive, and at least one experienced motion sickness while another yelled, “Woo!” This first tunnel is meant to be a “proof of concept” and runs just over a mile under Musk’s SpaceX headquarters in Hawthorne.
“According to Musk his contraption is capable of safe travel at over 150 MPH that makes it feel like ‘teleporting’ within the city. It also can carry more than just Teslas, of course, and Musk said it applies to any ‘autonomous, electric car’ that you might have. While that description only really fits Tesla vehicles at this point, the idea is apparently that electric vehicles will drive themselves along the track at high speeds right along with cars ‘dedicated to pedestrians and cyclists,'” reports Engadget.
