The first tunnel of the drilling company that is being excavated under Los Angeles is almost complete, Elon Musk said in a tweet on Thursday. And while waiting for regulatory approval, Grimes' boyfriend plans to offer free underground tours to the public in a few months. Musk's ad was accompanied by a time-lapse video on Instagram that shows a round trip through the tunnel.
The two-mile test tunnel beneath the SpaceX headquarters in Hawthrone, California, is a proof of concept for an underground public transportation system that aims to transport passengers and vehicles under congested roads on autonomous electric skids . The skids theoretically will transport between 8 and 16 passengers, or a passenger vehicle, along magnetic rails at speeds up to 124 mph (200 km / h).
In August, Musk shared a photo of a Tesla Model S in the same Hawthorne tunnel. (Questions were recently raised about whether the second tunnel proposed by Musk would be large enough to accommodate the all-electric vehicle.) The Boring Company has four underground transportation projects underway, including the Hawthorne test tunnel, Los Angeles, Washington, DC, and Chicago.
Musk previously tweeted about his frustration with traffic congestion in Los Angeles, commenting in December 2016 that "the traffic is driving me crazy, I'm going to build a tunnel boring machine and start digging " Musk ha also expressed his hopes to build a hyperloop between Los Angeles and San Francisco next year, which he said would present pressurized pods in almost empty tunnels that travel faster than a plane.
In December, the Musk company received a $ 266,000 sales tax exclusion from the state of California to build a new fully automated concrete ring manufacturing facility. Once in operation, the Boring company says the $ 3 million facility will produce concrete for its tunnels four times faster than existing processes and with 20% less energy and air pollutants.
The company also recently announced plans to sell "interlocking" bricks "made from the rock that its tunnel-making machines dig out of the ground." In other words, Lego thinks, Musk says except giant, heavy and made of earth.