Elon Musk’s snail is 14 times faster than his boring machines

Elon Musk wants to build a tunnel through Los Angeles that would shoot people around the city at over a hundred miles per hour, all for the paltry cost of a single dollar.

Wealthy Californians are really into the idea. On Thursday night, Musk held a press conference at Leo Baeck Temple, which was packed with affluent residents of Los Angeles’ Bel Air neighborhood and Musk superfans, many of whom showed up wearing SpaceX hats and Tesla hoodies, according to Wired. Musk, for his part, showed up 30 minutes late, blaming traffic on the 405, and sat next his company’s mascot, a snail.

The implication was that if the Loop were already built — the ambitious project he’s pursuing through his newest venture, the Boring Company — he would’ve been on time. As for the snail: He hopes that it’ll race his new design for a hole boring machine to build the project. Right now, Gary the Snail moves 14 times faster than Musk’s machine.

“So we do want to be faster than a snail, which is way harder than it sounds,” Musk said.

The space and technology scion wants to build a relatively small-scale version of the Loop, a two-mile tunnel, near LA’s Sepulveda Pass. If it works, it would ferry people back and forth in ten minutes. And, eventually, Musk wants to outfit the entire city with a vast network of tunnels that transport people throughout Los Angeles at a scale similar to a full-fledged subway system, which Los Angeles doesn’t have.

The drills may be slow, but the city’s approval process has moved fast. The Los Angeles city government and Musk’s credulous rich supporters are so excited about the project the LA City Council’s Public Works committee has voted to bypass an environmental review of the project.

Community groups, however, aren’t as excited. Two of them, the Brentwood Residents Coalition and the Sunset Coalition, are suing over the move to waive the lengthy, but thorough, environmental review process.

But Musk insisted on Thursday that community concern is misplaced. “You won’t even know we exist,” Musk said. “If we can’t do a two-mile tunnel without disturbing people, how can we do hundreds of miles?”

The hundreds of miles he’s referring to, of course, is the Hyperloop, his grand plan to for inter-city travel with similar underground tubes, which would pump humans back and forth at near supersonic speeds. Musk has apparently been in talks with the White House about building a Hyperloop project on the East Coast, between New York and D.C. — it would take just 30 to get between the cities in Musk’s tubular system, which now takes about five hours in a car.

Besides environmental concerns, community members say they don’t have information on how the city will ensure that Musk would keep prices low for access to the Loop.

"It’s a tunnel for the rich and dirt bricks for the poor,” Wendy-Sue Rosen, president of Brentwood Residents Coalition told VICE News, referring to Musk’s plan to make bricks out of the dirt he excavates from the tunnels. Rosen said she wasn’t invited to Thursday’s meeting, and had to push the organizers to let her into the meeting at all.

“It's an equity issue,” Rosen added. “Who is really going to be allowed to use this tunnel? Who is this tunnel being built for?”

The city, however, appears fully ready to hop on the Loop. Last month, Los Angeles' transit authority tweeted out a statement, saying that they were “partners” with Musk’s company, and were working to ensure that the Loop doesn’t interfere with its own plans to build new rail lines.

This whole venture has been funded with characteristic Musk pizazz. The CEO, who recently launched his own car into space, has sold flamethrowers to fund the Boring Company.

Announcing on Thursday that he’d soon be offering private test-rides on the Loop as soon as it’s functioning, he said: “It’ll be like a weird little Disney ride in the middle of LA. Bring your flamethrower.”