Elon Musk’s The Boring Company is expanding its subterranean network of tunnels to create an underground transit system in Las Vegas.
Unlike London’s underground system, there will be no trains in these tunnels – but electric cars from Musk-owned Tesla. The Tesla tunnels were first demonstrated earlier this year, with an initial loop unveiled in a ‘loop’ under the Las Vegas Convention Centre.
Tesla’s request to expand the loop to a larger system of 29 miles of road with 51 stations was approved by a Las Vegas local authority this week.
The network of tunnels will supposedly whisk passengers from the famous Las Vegas strip to locations like NFL stadiums and university campuses.
Named the ‘Vegas Loop’, the planning approval estimated that the system could support as many as 57,000 people per hour.
The current route, which has only three stops and covers almost 2 miles, has been in operation since the middle of the year.
While the ultimate vision for the Vegas Loop is to take passengers to and fro from the airport in fully driverless cars, the current loop uses drivers (who have to follow a pre-approved list of Tesla talking points) and only covers the convention centre.
Tesla predicts the five-mile trip from the airport to cost around $10 and take five minutes.
Musk’s Boring Company, which is less well known than his Tesla and SpaceX ventures, was first unveiled in 2016. Musk built a 1.14-mile tunnel segment in Hawthorne in California to demonstrate the technology, next to Musk’s rocket company SpaceX.
The Californian segment was created as a proof of concept to show how cars might be transported underground so as to free up traffic on the surface.
Musk had previously called Los Angeles traffic, in 2014, ‘soul destroying’ and promised to ‘build a boring machine and just start digging.’
The cost of the Californian tunnel was reportedly around $10 million, including the cost of excavation, internal infrastructure, lighting, ventilation, safety systems, communications and a track.
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