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Elon Musk unveils prototype high-speed LA transport tunnel
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Entrepreneur Elon Musk has unveiled a prototype underground tunnel in Los Angeles which is designed to transport cars at high speed around the city.
Fed up with Southern California vehicle snarls, Elon Musk set out to solve the persistent urban irritant: the traffic. But rather than build atop the highway system, where his Tesla cars travel, or in the sky, home to his SpaceX rockets, he sought an answer under his feet: tunnels.
“I said, ‘What if we go down instead of up?’” Mr. Musk told Mayor Eric Garcetti of Los Angeles during a recent public discussion. “I’ve lived in L.A. now since 2002. Traffic has gone from bad to horrific back to bad.”
Mr. Musk unveiled the first mile-long stretch of his underground vision of a transit system in this suburb of 90,000 people about 15 miles southwest of Los Angeles. It is the home of both SpaceX and his tunneling enterprise, called the Boring Company.
But the promotional event, which attracted hundreds of people who lined up to see the tunnel, fell short of earlier promises of a system that could transport up to 16 people at a time in electric-powered pods. Mr. Musk said he had abandoned that concept in favor of a system using more conventional passenger vehicles.
“So what we believe we have here is a real solution to the traffic problem we have on earth,” Mr. Musk told reporters. “It’s much more like an underground highway.”
Tunnel boring equipment on display at the Boring Company event in Hawthorne, Calif., on Tuesday. “So what we believe we have here is a real solution to the traffic problem we have on earth,” said Elon Musk, who controls the company.
The entrance to the tunnel sits across the street from the SpaceX headquarters and the Hawthorne Municipal Airport, next to a single-family residence and behind some storefront-style buildings.
Test rides on Tuesday featured Tesla Model X cars that were lowered on a circular panel to a lighted pathway several stories underground that is wide enough for a single vehicle. The concrete walls are painted white, with a single fluorescent bar on the ceiling that lights up blue or green throughout the tunnel’s length.
A pair of clamps attached to the Tesla’s front wheels keeps the car on the track as the vehicle moves under its own power. The company says speeds of 150 miles per hour will be possible, though the test run was far slower.
Until now, the company has used standard equipment, but it expects to roll out newly engineered tunneling technology as its efforts continue. Mr. Musk said about $10 million was spent on the first mile of the system, which took about a year to complete, largely because of hurdles with permits and licenses.
New York Times