Elon Musk wants to connect your garage to an underground mass-transit network
THE enigmatic entrepreneur has an out-there plan - and this time, he wants to change your daily ommute forever.
IF there is one word you can’t use to describe Tesla founder Elon Musk, it’s boring.
Yet that’s the very word behind his latest out-there concept for cutting traffic congestion.
His tunnelling enterprise, the Boring Company, is developing an underground commuter tunnel for automated vehicles and has won approval to test a concept that delivers your car straight from the garage to this subterranean freeway.
A sketch depicts a garage connected to the tunnel via an elevator and a short spur.
The Boring Company has already built a one-mile test section of its underground hyperloop. The test section is located in Hawthorne a suburb in the south west of Los Angeles that is also home to another Musk venture, SpaceX.
The private garage access point concept will work with a car entering the tunnel from an existing access point at the SpaceX campus and then moving to the house and back again along the one mile test track.
The concept envisions cars riding on the same electric ‘skate’ as the driverless pods the hyperloop is designed for.
According to The Mercury News, the company wants to show that it can use an elevator and short tunnel spur for developing as high speed transportation network.
“It’s an important part of the longer-term vision the company is trying to build,” company representative Jane Labanowski told the newspaper.
Earlier this year the Boring Company suggested it could build a hyperloop that would link Dodger Stadium — which holds baseballs games and concerts — to several LA neighbourhoods.
The loop would take only four minutes — a massive reduction in time compared to LA traffic — and would only cost about one dollar. However, the loop can only carry 1400 people for each event, which is 1.5 per cent of the stadium’s capacity.
The autonomous pods would carry 8-16 passengers and can travel up to 240km/h. The pods ride on electric skates — similar to recent hoverboards — which are powered by multiple electric motors.