Elon Musk’s Boring Company Completes First Mile-Long Vegas Tunnel

• Elon Musk’s first public tunnel is complete, in Las Vegas.

• The starter tube goes about a mile under the Convention Center.

• Plans exist to expand it, and to build something similar in Miami.

The first finished section of Elon Musk’s much-touted Boring Company project under Las Vegas was shown to the local press last week. It goes, not from LA to Vegas, not from Primm to Vegas, not even from one end of Vegas to the other. It goes from one end of the Las Vegas Convention Center to the other, a distance of 4,475 feet.

Before we start whining about the size of the project, remember that it’s just the beginning of what could be a much larger system of subterranean car tubes that could whisk Tesla Model 3s and Model Xs silently beneath the streets of Vegas and other cities. Some day.

We were not invited and indeed, haven’t heard an official word from any Musk company representatives since the Tesla press office was disbanded in October of last year. However, those invited to a demo included Las Vegas media and various city officials, as well as representatives of other cities. The mayor of Miami, Francis Suarez, was there and hopes to have a Boring Company tunnel under his city someday, too, for instance.

Reports from those who were invited described demo runs of 35 mph along the parallel tunnels, one tunnel going one way, the other accommodating Teslas going the other way. The rides started above ground at the Diamond Lot parking area outside the brand-new West Hall, stopped at the underground station in front of the Central Hall, and ended up way across the LVCC property at the east end of the massive South Hall above ground. Reports said each ride took two minutes.

The Teslas were all driven by Boring Company employees, showing that the autonomous conductivity hoped for at some future date is not here, not yet, anyway. The L.A. press was invited to a similar underground demo ride at The Boring Company’s 1.2-mile Hawthorne trial tunnel back in 2018. I gotta tell you, that was the scariest ride of my life. Those Model Xs were fitted with spring-loaded side wheels that bounced off curbing in the tunnel, increasing their side-to-side spring loading exponentially with each whang of a curb until the engineer in the driver’s seat had to grab the wheel to save us all from subterranean oblivion. It didn’t look like the Las Vegas tunnels had curbs nor like the Teslas driving through them had the spring-loaded side-wheels. Instead, the Vegas mole cars appeared to follow bright white stripes on either side of the paved flat black asphalt on the bottom of the tunnel. It’s conceivable that this system might work better than the curb-bouncers.

Digging began on the first Vegas tunnel in November 2019 using a tunneling machine of The Boring Company’s design called Godot. That machine has since been replaced by a new one called Prufrock, which can “porpoise” under dirt—you just aim it down, it tunnels away and pops up wherever you told it to stop.

The first tunnel was completed in February 2020. The second tunnel was finished in May of 2020 and since then crews have been lining the tunnels and stringing electricity through them. The plan is to have the so-called LVCC Loop available to the public in June, according to press reports. That would be just in time for the “World of Concrete” convention June 8-10, or the International Esthetics Cosmetics & Spa Conference (IECSC) International Beauty Show Las Vegas June 20-22. Or maybe even the International Pizza Expo June 22-24.

The question, of course: Instead of putting Teslas down there, why not just put in a subway? Since there are two tunnels each operating in opposite directions, you could cram almost as many trains down there as would fit, and get a lot more people on them, surely? The demo day in Vegas had only 11 vehicles that sat five each, seven if you get the right Model X. A big convention like CES or SEMA has over 150,000 attendees, there’s no way you could get any significant number of them into Tesla EVs in the LVCC Loop. Plans were supposedly set forth for 35 vehicles operating and then at some future date 60. Expansion of the whole system is also said to be underway, with one growth spurt boring from the Diamond Lot to a new development on the far side of The Strip called Resort World, and the other expansion going from the South Hall to the big Encore hotels and casino.

This reality is a far cry from that set forth at The Boring Company press launch in 2018. Back then we were led to believe that you could dig an infinite number of tunnels under an infinite number of cities, eliminating surface congestion with happy commuters driving their Teslas through the earth at 150 mph, unhindered by surface crowding. That reality is still far off and maybe far out.

The Boring Company has, in fact, made tunneling more efficient so far and the question arises, why not try and eliminate traffic? So let’s cut Musk and The Boring Company some slack, for now anyway, while we wait a little longer to see how all this pans out. You couldn’t very well stand at Kitty Hawk and yell at the Wright Brothers because you wanted to fly to LA that night on the redeye. Maybe it’ll take technology a while longer to tunnel under enough cities to make traffic stop sucking.

Share your thoughts on whether you think this is an efficient way of tackling urban congestion in the comments below.