Elon Musk envisions an underground network of tunnels beneath LA

Elon Musk revealed a video on Friday of his latest venture: a sprawling underground network of tunnels beneath the city of Los Angeles.

He created an infrastructure and tunneling firm called The Boring Company to oversee development of his ambitious project.

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The idea was first made public in December last year via a tweet in which Musk said he wanted to build a tunnel boring machine and begin digging tunnels.

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He then tweeted: “I am actually going to do this.”

“This is basically interns and people doing it part-time,” he said during the TEDTalk. “We bought some secondhand machinery. It’s kind of puttering along but making good progress.”

“We have a pet snail called Gary, and Gary is capable of moving 14 times faster than a tunnel boring machine – so the ambition is to beat Gary,” he said.

The goal of Boring Co. is to modernise the tunneling industry and develop a machine capable of digging ten times faster than current machines.

The Boring Company already has its first piece of physical hardware. An image of a tunnel digging machine with the Boring Co. logo was tweeted my Musk on Friday.

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In an interview with the BBC, Susan Beardslee, a senior analyst at ABI Research, said the project sounded like a “moonshot”.

“He has shown his ability to be a visionary, and I believe he can take tunnelling and apply the financial capital and technical expertise, but this is not a go-it-alone project.

“He is addressing the need to look at congestion – but it will have to be a public/private partnership,” she said.

“Musk is good at coming up with a very different way of looking at things, and this might work better somewhere where it can be purpose-built rather than retro-fitted.”