Musk offers deep fast tunnels to beat city jams
Elon Musk unveiled his underground transportation tunnel on Wednesday, 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 ‘‘souldestroying traffic.’’
Guests boarded Musk’s Tesla Model X and rode along Los Angeles-area surface streets 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 9m 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 of future systems. ‘‘This is just a prototype. That’s why it’s a little rough around the edges.’’
The demo rides were considerably slower – 464kmh – than what Musk says the future system will run at: 241kmh. Still, it took only three minutes to go just over a mile from the beginning to the end of the tunnel, the same amount of time it took to accomplish a right-hand turn out of the parking lot and onto a surface street even before the height of Los Angeles’ notorious rushhour traffic.
The tunnel is just a test to prove the technology works and could one day cure traffic. –AP