- The next story I have for you is
an interesting one because it's not
something that I ever really expected to be talking about.
(chuckles) And so let me switch over to it now.
So this story is about The Boring Company,
and they recently won a bid in Chicago
to build a multi-billion dollar, high-speed express train
from downtown to Chicago's O'Hare International Airport,
which I believe is the busiest in the United States.
That is crazy to me because this is a company that,
they haven't even actually got a pod.
We haven't seen a pod running.
So many of the components here are still to be built.
So it's kind of crazy.
Now, currently, this ride, when the train does exist,
takes you about 40 minutes,
and the new one will go
in about 12 minutes is what they say.
It's an 18-mile journey.
So that's pretty awesome.
That'll save you a ton of time,
and that it will travel with speeds
up to 150 miles per hour.
Now there were some other big, notable companies
that were bidding on this.
They lost out, and I think it's largely due to cost,
so we'll talk about that here in a second.
Now, there were some other videos that came out though,
notably this one from The Boring Company,
which shows a Tesla inside of the track.
And so you can see here,
this is inside of The Boring Company,
and it's on the kind of electric skate,
just heading down this tunnel.
I'll put a link to this in the description
so you guys can check it out.
But yeah, that was a surprise,
and it led this next bit of news related to this,
is that Tesla is actually going to be building these pods,
and that they're reportedly based
on the Model X platform.
So if you forget, they're gonna carry I think
between 8 and 16 passengers per pod,
and they'll be entirely autonomous.
You'll hop in, it'll go down, and it'll head off,
so pretty amazing stuff.
And the fact that Tesla's gonna be involved also means
that this could be a huge boon for them
in terms of profitability and a new revenue stream,
because if they're actually able to pull this off,
this company could be worth a ton of money.
So we'll talk about that as well in just one second here.
So, these guys here over
at CityLab talk about this stuff a lot,
and I thought it was really interesting,
this recent article they had calling it The Express Loop,
the craziest thing about it being the price.
So it got me looking at the other options out there,
and I found this New York Times article
which talked about the most expensive
mile of subway track on earth.
Now you can imagine, New York is probably
a difficult place to build these things.
Now, this article has to do with a mile of track,
or I think a couple miles of track,
that in the budget they had 200 more people
than anyone there knew what they were doing,
and so it has ballooned.
This is the East Side Access,
a Long Island Railroad project.
It has ballooned to $12 billion,
which comes out to about 3.5 billion for each mile of track.
So it's not a super long track, but after an audit,
they found some insane stuff going down with this.
So here is a typical tunneling-type project,
that cities are used to.
Now there's another one they talked
about in this article saying
that it's called the Second Avenue Subway
in Manhattan's Upper East Side,
and the 2015 extension of the No. 7 line
to Hudson Lines also cost far above the average
at 2.5 billion and 1.5 billion per mile respectively.
So you've got 3.5, 2.5, 1.5 per mile, billion,
and if you compare that to what they're trying to do here,
it's pretty amazing the contrast.
Let's take a look at it.
So, the boring project overall cost
for an 18-mile journey,
is that right, 18 miles?
Yeah, 18-mile journey is 1 billion.
So if you break that down per mile,
you're looking at a pretty insane amount here.
So there's that East Side Access project,
the Second Avenue Subway,
and the 2015 extension of the No. 7 line
from the New York Times article that we just mentioned.
And then you have a Tesla Chicago O'Hare route
at the cost per mile of $.1 billion.
Now, if you look at that from a cost-saving standpoint,
the Tesla project here is saving almost 98%
over that East Side Access project.
Now granted, that's the most expensive one,
there were all these issues,
but seeing the other projects here,
it's not uncommon.
It's not crazy to imagine that.
So if they can do this, if they can pull this off,
I think it's gonna be a huge boon
for not only The Boring Company,
but Tesla as well.
I think it's gonna play to both of their strengths,
and in their favor,
and so I was blown away the more I dug into this.
When I first heard it, I was like yeah, cool, whatever.
But then I heard all these other little pieces connecting,
and that's when I wanted to dig into the data.
Now, today, there was an article in Teslarati,
because there was an analyst firm, Berenberg analyst,
that was saying that The Boring Company
could be worth as much as 16 billion
if it completes this ambitious project.
Now, the analyst stated that his $16 billion estimate
for The Boring Company's potential
is provided that it succeeds in the Chicago transfer line.
It was taken from figures of the Channel Tunnel Project,
which connects England and France.
And here's a quote from the analyst.
On conservative assumptions and taking
into account similar businesses like Getlink,
formerly Eurotunnel, we estimate the potential
enterprise value could be as high as 16 billion.
With Tesla set to become a key supplier
to The Boring Company,
it will likely mean an early opportunity
to take a stake in the business,
potentially without cash consideration.
So, big, big stuff, and I'm really...
I mean it's just great.
It's great that not only are we at a place
where these things are actually happening.
We're talking they won the contract,
now they have the green light to go.
All the future outlooks, if they can pull this off,
show also a tremendous opportunity to really,
not just make these companies great,
which is fine, but to help us switch over
to more sustainable forms of transportation,
and then eventually energy.
So I'm curious what you guys think about those.
Leave me a comment down below
if you're interested in this stuff at all.
I hope to get a ride on The Boring Driving,
The Boring Tunneling Machine.
It was part of the referral program.
I haven't heard anything about it yet.
I know that they're gonna be doing public access rides
up in L.A. sometime soon,
so I hope to attend one of those.
So let me know what you guys think about that,
and what you wanna see when I get to go do that.