Skip to main content
  1. Home
  2. Emerging Tech
  3. Cars
  4. News

Elon Musk shows off Boring Company’s ‘disturbingly long’ tunnel beneath LA

By
Add as a preferred source on Google
The Boring Company

Billionaire entrepreneur and Twitter enthusiast Elon Musk took to the microblogging site on Sunday to show off the interior of a “disturbingly long” tunnel.

Recommended Videos

This, of course, is no ordinary tunnel, as it’s been built by Musk’s Boring Company, the outfit that’s aiming to create a new high-speed transit system beneath the streets of Los Angeles, and other cities if the scheme proves viable. (Meanwhile, Musk’s other company is taking a disturbingly long trip into outer space, as SpaceX’s Starman just passed Mars…)

The two-mile-long test tunnel in southwest Los Angeles is gearing up for a grand opening on December 10, with members of the public to be offered free rides along its track the following day.

“Walked full length of Boring Co tunnel under LA tonight,” Musk said in his tweet, describing it, rather curiously, as “disturbingly long,” a description that leaves us wondering how he might describe Line 3 of China’s Guangzhou Metro, which, at 37.5 miles (60.4 km), is currently the longest transit tunnel in the world.

Accompanying the tweet is a trance-inducing video (below) that takes you on a ride of the full length of the tunnel ahead of its official opening in December.

The tunnel travels a short distance north from below the headquarters of SpaceX — another of Musk’s ventures — before turning and traveling west for several miles.

The route that the tunnel takes is probably the least important part of its design. For Musk and his Boring Company team, it’s the first real chance to showcase a functioning system as he seeks to convince city planners of its potential to transform transit in cities facing such challenges — which means pretty much all of them.

So how would Musk’s high-speed, subterranean transit system work?

After building the tunnel with a digging machine that’s essentially the best video game ever, the idea is to use electric-powered sleds to move vehicles, as well as foot passengers and cyclists, to multiple destinations across a city at speeds of up to 150 mph.

As demonstrated in the video at the top of the page, vehicles and passenger pods would be lowered from street level onto the sleds via an elevator system, with recent reports suggesting the elevators could also connect to office buildings and private residences.

At the start of a journey, the sled transfers from a side tunnel onto the main track, so all of the passengers are constantly on the move. “This is a big difference compared to subways that stop at every stop, whether you’re getting off or not,” Musk said.

Another important part of the project is to revolutionize the tunneling industry with faster, more efficient boring machines.

In a positive sign for the Boring Company, it’s already been chosen to enter into talks for the design of a high-speed, 18-mile tunnel link between downtown Chicago and O’Hare International Airport, and the company’s idea for a fast transit tunnel between Dodger Stadium and a transit hub in Los Angeles has also been welcomed by the authorities.

Trevor Mogg
Trevor Mogg
Contributing Editor
Not so many moons ago, Trevor moved from one tea-loving island nation that drives on the left (Britain) to another (Japan)…
Topics
The Apple Car may be dead, but it became the foundation of Apple Intelligence
A decade of work on a canceled car project reportedly laid the groundwork for Apple Intelligence.
Apple Intelligence in Apple Car

The Apple Car may have never left the garage, but it apparently gave birth to Apple's AI ambitions. According to Bloomberg's Mark Gurman, Apple's canceled autonomous vehicle project, one that consumed more than a decade of work and over $10 billion before being scrapped in 2024, ended up laying the technological foundation for Apple Intelligence. In a rather ironic twist, one of Apple's most expensive failures may also become one of its most important long-term investments.

The Apple Car forced Apple to think like an AI company

Read more
Researchers hid a prompt injection inside a PNG, and AI fell for it
Hacker

AI coding assistants like Claude are becoming every developer's favorite coworker. They can review code, explain confusing functions, and even write entire features with a single prompt. But new research suggests that this growing trust could also become their biggest weakness.

A team of security researchers (professor Sudipta Chattopadhyay and researcher Murali Ediga) has demonstrated an unusual attack that doesn't target the AI model directly. Instead, it targets what the AI doesn't pay enough attention to during code reviews. Rather than hiding malicious instructions in lines of code, the researchers tucked them inside an image file. Since many AI review tools treat images as decorative assets rather than as something worth inspecting, the pull request can appear perfectly harmless and sail through the review.

Read more
AI has already fallen into the wrong hands and they’re using it to make bombs
Logo, Text

Artificial intelligence has quickly become the go-to tool for everything from writing emails and summarizing meetings to helping students study or developers debug code. But the same technology that saves people time can also be misused, and a new report suggests that terrorist organizations are finding ways to do exactly that.

According to a research paper shared with The New York Times ahead of its publication, researchers found evidence that members of Boko Haram have been using popular AI chatbots to support both day-to-day activities and combat-related tasks. Interviews with 27 former members conducted in Nigeria over the past two years suggest that tools such as ChatGPT, Gemini, Claude, Grok, Meta AI, and DeepSeek were used to gather technical information, troubleshoot weapons, and even assist with planning attacks.

Read more