Innovation of the week

Elon Musk’s Boring Company opened its first underground “Loop,” said Claire Reilly in CNET.com. The 1.7-mile conduit beneath downtown Las Vegas consists of three passenger stations “connected by stretches of 12-foot-wide tunnels, all lit with color-changing LED lights.” Inside, a fleet of 62 Teslas pick up and drop off passengers, “turning a 25-minute walk across a mammoth convention center into a two-minute ride.” It doesn’t exactly look like the “giddy vision of the future” Musk once promised, which involved “cars descending on elevator platforms” before “zooming along tracks inside a massive network of subterranean tunnels.” But the Boring Company “has plans to extend the Loop from downtown Las Vegas to the city’s stadium and airport,” where riders might eventually hail a driverless car via an app.