At a TED talk this morning, Silicon Valley serial entrepreneur Elon Musk unveiled the first concept video for the Boring Company, which wants help you never get stuck in traffic again by boring huge tunnels underground. In it, cars hop on and off platforms that lower from street level to a network of tracks, whizzing along beneath the surface of the city at 130 mph. In theory, people would arrive smoothly and maybe a little disoriented at their destinations without ever having to sit in traffic.
Musk has been talking about the Boring Company, his new project with the dad joke name, since December 2016. But he hasn’t given the public a good look at it until now. It’s a project he said he only spends “about two to three percent of his time” working on.
Videos by VICE
In March, Musk tweeted that digging would begin, uh, this month. Something as complex as changing the infrastructure of the entire subterranean space of a major metropolitan city like Los Angeles takes time, but okay, dude. If Musk can make reusable rockets launch into space and land safely on a little platform floating in the ocean I guess this doesn’t seem like that big of a challenge. And hey, even if it never breaks ground, at least it’s pretty to look at.