Elon Musk has shown the concept of underground transport tunnels
Elon Musk, founder of SpaceX, Tesla and The Boring Company, in a speech at the TED conference told the details about his plans for the drilling of tunnels under the ground.
Also Boring Company has published a video that illustrates a possible scheme of the transport system.
For the first time about the appearance of The Boring Company became known in December 2016, when Elon Musk announced the company’s emergence in his Twitter: “Traffic drives me crazy, going to build the tunnel boring machine and start digging…” In February, 2017 Musk began to dig a test pit with a width of 15 meters in the Parking lot of the headquarters of SpaceX, and told some details about the project.
In particular, when it became known that the concept involves the construction of up to 30 levels of the tunnels, which will move cars and high-speed trains, including Hyperloop
For testing The Boring Company acquired the tunnel boring machine and yesterday a number of publications reported that the complex is delivered to the SpaceX Parking lot.
As previously reported, Elon Musk, his plans include testing and further improvement of technique. The main limiting factor in modern construction of tunnels is the rate of penetration, so Musk hopes to study principles acquired machines and to increase the rate of penetration up to 10 times.
Now Elon Musk for the first time demonstrated how it can be used the system of tunnels for transporting vehicles. It is assumed that in road tunnels machine be moved by special trucks that also will act as an Elevator for communication tunnels with the surface. The tunnels will not speed limits, so the trolley car can accelerate up to 200 kilometers per hour.
The founder of the Boring Company also noted that at the moment he attaches to this project only two to three percent of the time. Apparently, Musk presented the concept today is far from completion — even if an order of magnitude faster tunnel boring machines for the construction of even a relatively small network of underground tunnels can take decades.
Nikolai Vorontsov