Musk takes guests on bumpy ride
Elon Musk has unveiled his underground transportation tunnel, allowing invited guests to take some of the first rides ever on the tech entrepreneur’s solution to ‘‘soul-destroying traffic’’.
Guests boarded Musk’s Tesla Model S and were driven on Los Angeles-area surface streets about two kilometres away to what’s known as O’Leary Station yesterday.
The station sits in the middle of a residential neighbourhood. It consists of a wall-less elevator that slowly took the car down a wide shaft, roughly nine metres below the surface.
The tunnel, meant to be a ‘‘proof of concept,’’ runs just over a mile under Musk’s SpaceX headquarters in Hawthorne.
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.
Musk said the rides were bumpy now because ‘‘we kind of ran out of time’’ and there were some problems with the speed of his paving machine.
The demo rides were also considerably slower – 64kmh – 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. –