The Hole Story: What I Found Inside Elon Musk's First Boring Company Tunnel
I’m at the Boring Company’s unveiling of their prototype tunnel in Hawthorne, California, waiting to take a ride on Elon Musk’s moon-shot solution to the scourge of traffic congestion…and I’m preoccupied. There are placards with the press tent’s Wi-Fi password placed everywhere, but I didn’t need it to log on. My phone just automatically joined the network. And in the moment, I kinda want this to mean something.
I want it to mean something the way Elon Musk means something to the guy who tried to sneak into the press tent earlier. He and his mother are huge fans of Elon, he said. Huge fans of the future, he said. I want to be a fan of the future. The future's been a tough bet lately.
And this whole Boring Company tunnel thing-it’s not turning my crank yet. No, I’m thinking maybe this Wi-Fi thing is the thing. I mean, I’ve never been to the Boring Company or SpaceX across the street. Never been on this network. A mystery, that. My imagination hyperloops right into sci-fi territory-and pretty soon the only explanation is that the Boring Company is a front for a time-travel operation, and I’ve been sent back to this moment, and whoever wiped my mind forgot to erase the press network from my phone.
Yeah, Musk is working on a transportation system all right: one that sends you back in time.
But then I realize I’d logged in with my Mac a few minutes earlier, the cloud synched the passwords on my devices blah blah blah. Sigh. Reality is boring. The present is boring. Literally.
Turns out, the ride in Musk’s new tunnel is actually pretty damn cool. A group of us climb into a Tesla X, buckle up, and our driver rolls us into the surprisingly narrow tunnel. We won’t go more than 40 MPH, but as the overhead line of lights changes from red to green, and we pick up speed…it becomes obvious that going 150 MPH will be, um, awesome. Even at this clip, even with the bumps, the tight tunnel is mesmerizing, almost calming. It feels natural to be zipping in this discrete pod.
In a few minutes, we're at our destination, and pull onto an elevator. We rise some fifty feet toward the California sky, a Boring Company employee watching us come up like a scuba instructor. There’s a palm tree. A private plane cuts through the sky. We are back on the surface where the Earth is disgorging Teslas.
Musk tells us later that it all came him to him fuming in L.A. traffic. Truth. You can feel yourself dying in L.A. traffic. My tactic is to stay home, stay in my ‘hood. I got my coffee places, my Trader Joe’s. I will not do Los Angeles things simply because of what havoc traffic does to my mood. I feel Musk’s pain.
The problem isn’t just the traffic, but how we’ve conceived it. We live in three dimensions, but we travel in two. It’s stupid. And our flying-car fetish has been a bogus panacea all along-every crash would be an air disaster. The mythic draw of flight was maybe too dazzling for us to appreciate another direction: underground. Well, until now.
Here’s the thing about Musk: The flamethrowers, tweets, the suggestions that our reality might be a simulation-they all garner a ton of attention. But if you want to learn anything from the guy, learn to appreciate his eye for the absurd. Current tunneling technology runs about $2 billion a mile and even at such cost, you can expect to dig that measly mile in a year. The state of this art is horrendous.
So the Boring Company is doing the opposite of rocket science. Digging faster. Digging cheaper. Their newest modified machines tackle the costs of digging with almost ridiculously simple solutions. The engineers buffed the drill. The dirt the machines remove makes the concrete tunnel segments. And by boring and reinforcing the tunnel simultaneously, Musk thinks their custom machine can work fifteen times faster than existing boring machines. And do it much cheaper-the 1.14 mile Hawthorne test tunnel cost $10 million.
I have my skepticisms. A subterranean high-speed superhighway is basically a killer app for selling electric cars. And I’m not sold on the idea that the steady eruption of cars from every urban nook wouldn’t make a fresh hell of American cities. And even if the multi-layered, infinitely expandable transportation array Musk envisions is as sound as he believes, I have profound doubts we won’t find a way to legislate a perfect disaster of the idea.
But all that said, the Boring Company might be the most vital of Musk’s projects precisely because their innovations do not speak to our imagination-they speak to our frustration. Cities are clots of stymied humans, vast swathes of wasted time. Traffic is just a salient example of our shoddy situation. Health care, education, our very electoral machinery…nearly every component of our civic infrastructure is in dire need of updating. That’s what’s so invigorating about the Boring Company. They’re making a time machine after all, dragging us a little closer to the future in which we’re supposed to be living now.
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