There are people who have a knack to find problems in everything. And then there are people who see problems only to find their solutions. Elon Musk undoubtedly belongs to the latter. From self-driving cars to Man’s Mars Mission, Musk always dreams big and likes to tread the path less taken.
When Musk tweeted about traffic driving him nuts, and his plans to dig tunnels to fix it; it wasn’t a mere rant, he really meant his words.
Traffic is driving me nuts. Am going to build a tunnel boring machine and just start digging...
— Elon Musk (@elonmusk) December 17, 2016
It shall be called "The Boring Company"
— Elon Musk (@elonmusk) December 17, 2016
To solve the modern age transportation problem, Tesla and SpaceX CEO is actually digging tunnels, according to a recent Bloomberg report.
Musk hasn’t just revised his Twitter bio, which now reads, “Tesla, SpaceX, Tunnels (yes, tunnels) & OpenAI,” but has already dug a 15 feet deep and more than 50 feet wide pit at his SpaceX headquarters in Los Angeles to test his idea.
In his interview with Bloomberg Businessweek, Musk said that he is looking to develop a 3D transportation network that could have "as many as" 30 levels of tunnels for cars and public transit systems, such as the Hyperloop.
Interestingly Musk rubbishes off flying cars as a ‘dumb idea’ because firstly they are not scalable and require tremendous downward force to keep them in the air and secondly they will create noise and may shed dangerous debris for people down on earth.
Musk's goal for his company is to modernise the tunnelling industry. Musk believes the industry has stagnated and could benefit from the kind of disruption he brought to aerospace.
The Boring Company as Musk has named his project aims to build a machine that can dig ten times faster than the present ones for a fraction of the cost. Current machines can dig a few hundred feet per week, and Musk hopes to increase that number to a mile or more.
Besides a domain name, only other concrete detail that we have about the company is that it has one employee, Steve Davis, a SpaceX senior engineer. We’ll keep you posted with new details as Musk bores deeper!