Two years ago, the relentless Los Angeles traffic frustrated Elon Musk so much he tweeted that he was going to build a tunneling machine to take transport subterranean, helping drivers beat the crazy backups altogether.
The Tesla and SpaceX CEO is known for making outlandish Twitter statements, but this time he wasn’t joking. He was set on building a tunnel.
And lo, what seemed like a joke turned into a reality: In December 2016, The Boring Company was born.
On Tuesday, Musk officially opened the highly anticipated first Boring Company test tunnel under SpaceX headquarters in the Southern California city of Hawthorne, where The Boring Company is also located. Musk has slowly drip-fed information on the underground effort to the public on social media, but Tuesday marked a turning point as Boring’s underground vision officially surfaced with not so much a party as a PowerPoint presentation.
Measuring 1.4 miles (2.3 kilometers) long and 14 feet (4.3 meters) wide, the test tunnel winds its way underneath Hawthorne and is estimated to have cost $10 million. This, Boring notes, is a fraction of the cost of traditional tunneling. It exists as a research and development tunnel for Boring’s aspirations of improving tunneling capabilities and creating new modes of public transport.
