A descending platform for vehicles won't be the most difficult engineering problem that Elon Musk needs to solve with his tunneling venture The Boring Company. But progress is progress, and the multi-tasking CEO has shown off his latest step forward with a video of the company's car elevator in action.
Among the many challenges facing The Boring Company are its stated objectives of making tunneling a whole lot more efficient than it is today. It aims to do this by cutting the cost by a factor of more than 10, and speeding things up to a point where the company's tunnel boring machine can beat a snail in a race (the snail currently moves 14 times faster).
The end game is to have tunnel networks sprawl beneath cities where cars are shuttled along on electric sleds at up to 200 km/h (124 mph), bypassing all that traffic on street level. Musk imagines that cars will enter by pulling up to specially designed platforms, just like they would a parking spot, which then lowers them down to the tubes below.
And today we've learned that The Boring Company is already working on these car elevators, and has a functional version of it on hand at its headquarters in LA. The SpaceX CEO shared a video of it in action on Instagram, showing a shiny new Tesla rolling onto the platform and disappearing rather quickly into the shaft below.
Compared to images of rocket landings and falcon-winged Teslas, it's not the most riveting thing the one-man hype machine has shared on social media. But it is cool to see his latest future-oriented project moving along all the same. Check it out at Elon Musk's Instagram.
