Musk tunnel debut hits a few bumps

Underground system for self-driving cars

LOS ANGELES •Elonmusk unveiled his underground transportation tunnel on Tuesday, allowing reporters and invited guests to take some of the first rides in the revolutionary albeit bumpy subterranean tube — the tech entrepreneur’s answer to what he calls “soul-destroying traffic.”

Guests boarded Musk’s Tesla Model S and rode along Los Angeles-area surface streets about a mile away to what’s known as O’leary Station. The station, smack dab in the middle of a residential neighbourhood — “basically in someone’s backyard,” Musk says — consists of a wall-less elevator that slowly took the car down a wide shaft, roughly nine metres below the surface.

The sky slowly fell away and the surprisingly narrow tunnel emerged.

“We’re clear,” said the driver, who sped up and zipped into the tunnel when a red track light turned green, making the tube look like something from space or a dance club.

The car jostled significantly during the ride, which was bumpy enough to give one reporter motion sickness while another yelled, “Woo!”

Musk described his first ride as “epic.”

“For me it was a eureka moment,” he told a room full of reporters. “I was like, ‘This thing is going to damn well work.”’

He said the rides are bumpy now because “we kind of ran out of time” and there were some problems with the speed of his paving machine.

“It’ll be smooth as glass,” he said. “This is just a prototype.”

Later in the day, Musk emerged from the tunnel himself inside one of his cars. “Traffic is soul-destroying. It’s like acid on the soul,” he said to guests.

He explained for the first time in detail how the system, which he simply calls “loop,” could work on a larger scale beneath cities across the globe. Autonomous, electric vehicles could be lowered into the system on wall-less elevators, which could be placed almost anywhere cars can go. The cars would have to be fitted with specially designed side wheels that pop out perpendicular to the car’s regular tires and run along the tunnel’s track. The cost for such wheels would be about $200 or $300 a car, Musk said.

A number of autonomous cars would remain inside the tunnel system just for pedestrians and cyclists. Once on the main arteries of the system, every car could run at top speed except when entering and exiting.

“It’s much more like an underground highway than it is a subway,” Musk said.

The cars would have to be autonomous but not Teslas specifically, and they would have to be electric because of the fumes from gas, Musk said. The demo rides were considerably slower — 64 km/h — than what Musk says the future system will run at (241 km/h).

Musk said it took about $10 million to build the test tunnel, a far cry from the $1 billion per mile his company says most tunnels take to build.