How much time have you spent in traffic today? The average American spends 42
hours a year stuck in traffic. The Boring Company aims to solve this by building
an underground network of tunnels under major cities. This video is everything
you need to know about the Boring Company in four minutes.
The idea is a brainchild of Elon Musk who came up with a way was stuck in
traffic he realized in the same way that
buildings need to add extra levels create more space roadways need to have
more levels to remove congestion and with the high barriers to safe and
reliable flying cars
Elon chose to build tunnels. A network of tunnels offer some powerful benefits
firstly there's no practical limit to how many layers of tunnels you can have
which means regardless of how busy the city is, you can always fix a traffic
problem but add an extra layer of tunnels. The
tunnels are totally weatherproof and the vehicles can run on rails so in
a simple loop you can achieve speeds of 125 to 150 miles per hour. If you went a
step further and made them vacuum sealed chambers then you can have
vehicles or pods running at a 600 miles per hour a trip from LA to San Francisco
who just take 30 minutes and the process of building tunnels is unintrusive is
essentially silent and invisible to anybody on the surface. For a tunnel
network to become a reality they are too into urban problems that need to be
resolved - speed and cost. Tunnel boring machines are slow, incredibly slow they
only move about thirty-five feet per day about 10 meters or so and a tunnel
project may be one mile long cost up to a billion dollars.
Imagine a race between a snail and a tunnel boring machine over just 1/16 of
an inch. The snail would finish the race in six seconds with the tunnel boring
machine more than twice this at almost 14 seconds. Elon aims to resolve
these problems by increasing the power to the tunnel boring machines and
changing from diesel to electricity. He also wants to enable the tunnel boring
machines to build the supports as it digs the tunnel rather than have been
two separate processes. Thirdly by removing humans and having tunnel boring
machines that drive by themselves there'll be an increase in safety and
efficiency and also Elon is investing in research and development for tunnel
boring machines. The boring company is privately funded
however Elin has come up with creative ways of raising money for the
organization. In January 2018 he released 20,000 official the boring
company flamethrowers for $500 each. Actual real flamethrowers that shoot
flames that according to the ATF are legal because the flames don't go over
10 feet. The flame throwers have now sold out they generated 10 million dollars of
revenue for The Boring Company. Some agencies were threatening not to ship
anything called a flamethrower so Elon renamed it "Not a Flamethrower"
Really! There are currently 4 projects underway. On the East Coast The Boring
Company is working with States and the federal authorities to build a route
between DC and Baltimore that could be extended to New York
they've also responded to an opportunity to build a tunnel between Chicago's
O'Hare Airport and downtown. In LA an application has been submitted to build
a 6.5 mile-long proof of process tunnel and in Hawthorne a test tunnel is underway.
This has been Alex from lifelong learners if you enjoyed this content
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