Elon Musk’s plan to dig tunnels under cities for cars to circumvent traffic is coming to fruition — starting in the SpaceX parking lot in Los Angeles.
Elon Musk’s car tunnel gets an elevator next week
He started digging in the SpaceX parking lot.
Twitter via Elon Musk
The serial entrepreneur is breaking ground with his new startup The Boring Company, which Musk says should have its first car elevator operating next week.
The idea with the Boring Company — which Musk first introduced in a series of tweets last December while lamenting about how much he hated sitting in traffic — is to lower cars underground with an elevator. The cars will then travel on a platform, like a skate, to zip through a tunnel at speeds up to 130 miles per hour.
Musk shared on Twitter a short video of the car elevator being built that goes underground Friday; he says it should be operational next week:
The Boring Company has now completed the first segment of a tunnel in Los Angeles, Musk said on Twitter. He started digging in the parking lot of SpaceX, his other company that builds and launches rockets for interplanetary travel.
The tunnel digging machine is named Godot, inspired by Samuel Beckett’s famous 1953 play about procrastination, “Waiting for Godot.”
It’s not clear whether the Boring Company has been successful in getting permission from the city of LA, but Musk says he has had talks with the mayor, pointing out that it will be harder to get regulatory approval for his tunnels than figure out the technology.
At the TED Conference in April, the Tesla CEO showed an animation illustrating how the tunnel system would work.
“There’s no real limit to how many levels of tunnels you can have,” Musk explained. “The deepest mines are much deeper than the tallest buildings are tall.”
Here’s a video of a test run of the electric platform system that would skate cars underground at super-fast speeds. Musk estimates it could take a car from the Westwood area of Los Angeles to the Los Angeles International Airport, LAX, in five minutes. The 405 would take roughly 40 minutes.
This article originally appeared on Recode.net.
