Elon Musk Releases First Photo Of Underground LA Tunnel
LOS ANGELES (CBSLA) – Tesla founder Elon Musk shared a new Instagram photo Sunday of the underground tunnel he hopes will help solve Los Angeles' traffic problems.
The tunnel, which extends from Musk's Hawthorne-based SpaceX headquarters, is currently about 500 feet long. However, Musk has an ambitious timeline. He wrote on Instagram that he expects it to be two miles long in the next four months. He said he hopes to have it stretch along the Interstate 405 corridor to Los Angeles International Airport and the 101 Freeway within a year.
It is being burrowed with a tunnel-digging machine that Musk unveiled earlier this year.
In August, the Hawthorne City Council approved the tunnel construction. Under Musk's plan, platforms would carry cars down to an underground series of passages. The platforms would act as electric sleds, transporting cars across the city at speeds of more than 120 miles an hour.
Musk launched The Boring Company last December to focus on the tunnel project. The company built a shaft and a 160-foot-long tunnel entrance in the former SpaceX parking lot, across the street from its 1 Rocket Road headquarters.
In January, SpaceX held a Hyperloop Pod competition in which university teams from across the world tested out pods on a track that simulated how pods would possibly shoot through a vacuum-like underground tunnel, known as a Hyperloop, at about 70 miles per hour.
In July, Musk received permission from officials to begin to work on a Hyperloop that would transport people from New York City to Washington, D.C., in about 30 minutes.