Elon musk's boring company One of the most successful moguls on the planet
is Elon Musk.
He is a visionary and a genius who is redefining technology and building a future
for everyone else.
At ten years old, Musk got his firstever computer–the Commodore Vic-20.
He fell in love with it, and since then, he was totally stuck
with the world of technology.
Since then, Elon has never looked back.
To say that Elon is a busy guy is an understatement.
He mages SpaceX, Tesla, NeuraLink and his other ventures at the same time.
In 2016, while he was stuck in another LA traffic jam, he got frustrated and tweeted
he was going to build a tunnel boring machine and just start
digging.
In case anyone thought he was kidding, he followed up with another tweet that said:
“I’m actually going to do it”.
It wasn’t a hastened decision; Musk had been thinking about it for a while.
We are all familiar with the should-destroying traffic
jams, and especially if you are in LA.
And Elon’s solution might end it for good.
After this he founded a company, The Boring company to achieve his
goals and end the problem of traffic.
Since then, Elon Musk’s Boring company is all over the news
as the next big smart city technology with a potential to
completely transform the face of urban transportation by, quite simply, placing it all underground.
SO just sit back and watch the video to know about The Boring company and its plans.
Musk has proposed a series of overlapping tunnel networks, which will transport people
across cities, countries and continent on “skate”
platforms or through its new electric transport system
‘Hyperloop’.
This may seem like sci-fi, but it’s happening.
The boring company is already in agreements with cities.
The first Loop will be built in Las Vegas for the massive convention centre
which hosts the Consumer Electronics show every January.
A typical walk time between the new Exhibit hall to the existing Central hall
can take up to 15 minutes, but with the boring company
tunnel it only takes 1 minute.
They visitors will be packed into a model X or Model 3 car.
The vehicles will zip through the tunnels at up to 155
Mph, initially with a driver and eventually autonomously.
The Las Vegas convention centre loop LVCC could be the beginning of a bigger Vegas network,
potentially one day connecting to Los Angeles.
In LA, there’s a proposal to take fans to and from
Dodger Stadium, so instead of sitting in traffic for an hour, the Dugout Loop as it’s called
would only be a four-minute ride and cost a dollar each
way.
But expanding to expanding major cities will only
be possible if we bring down costs.
Elon musk’s SpaceX did the work of cutting down cost very
efficiently.
Earlier, space shuttle launches used to be really expensive, costing unto 400 million
dollars per mission, then SpaceX came along and cut down the cost to 62 million dollars
for a Falcon 9 flight without affecting the performance.
In the very same way, building tunnels can be very
expensive.
In order to make a tunnel network workable, tunnelling costs must be reduced by a
factor of over 10.
Los Angeles’ purple line subway extension has a price tag of more than a billion
dollars a mile, yet the one-mile demo tunnel only costs $10 million because The Boring
Company applied the principle of reusability responsible
for SpaceX’s success.
Typically, the excavated dirt is thrown away and the process of taking it off-site
is very costly.
Instead, the dirt will be used to help build the tunnel’s reinforcing segments
on-site and any leftovers will be turned into bricks to be sold,
paying for the dirt removal itself or given away for free for affordable housing projects.
Another way the company is cutting costs is by decreasing
the tunnel diameter, cutting the cost by 4 times.
The standard size for a single lane is 28 feet
in diameter.
Boring’s will only be 12 feet, which doesn’t leave a lot of room.
If the tunnels are small, building them is easy and fast.
Tunnelling today is slower than a snail.
For this they are aiming to create a faster system for digging tunnels with the fastest
boring machines.
This is our goal: we must be faster than a snail.
For this they even have a company mascot called Garry the snail to keep them
on track with faster and a cheaper system.
That seems easy, right?
It surely isn’t!!
A simple standard Tunnel Boring machine can dig one mile in about 8 to
12 weeks, but the boring company has plans to dig more than a mile in a single week.
And if that happens subways will soon be history.
A train would have to stop at every station, whereas the Loop
Passengers could travel directly to their destination, skipping all the other stops.
Not only it will save time by avoiding stops but also because of
its speed which will be 10 times the speed of a train
today.
The loop is a stepping stone towards the Hyperloop.
This is the exciting prospect of this project that it might be able to seamlessly
integrate with the hyperloop, which is another transport
system that Musk is planning to build and which could travel at speeds of unto several
hundred miles per hour.
This means that this could provide a high-speed network that could both work for
inner city travel and for travelling at larger distances.
The loop will be for inner city travel whereas hyperloop is meant for city-to-city transport
at speeds more than 600 miles an hour.
The passengers and cargo will be in a pressurised pod.
It could either connect to the loop or fit within the loop
tunnels.
For the past few years SpaceX even has held competition for students and non-students
to build sub-scale prototypes.
So, if you have any good ideas or visions definitely try it out.
Recently Boring company got a verbal government approval for an underground NY-Phil-Balt-DC
Hyperloop, as said by Elon Musk.
But we know that when it comes to large sale projects, verbal
approvals and government approvals are two very different things.
The company is working through the real boring part- the long and intensive
paperwork process.
They recently published a sprawling, 505-page draft environmental assessment.
The report lays out Musk’s plans with accurate details.
If this project is completed, the loop would
carry passengers between Baltimore and Washington through twin 35-mile tunnels.
Autonomous driving vehicles would shoot passengers at speed unto
150 mph, completing the entire trip in mere 15 minutes.
The company further noted that at some point the Baltimore-Washington segment could
link to a hyper-loop carrying passengers to New York
at speed unto 600 mph.
Though the current potential use of hyper-loop is unknown, but it will soon
be a reality.
For its effort in building the LAS Vegas convention loop, Boring company got its first
pay-out of, a 44-Million-dollar contract.
Las Vegas is hedging its bet on the boring company by
withholding more than two-thirds of the payment until the construction is complete.
It’s a technology gamble, but they are ready to gamble
on Elon’s ideas and visions.
The Boring company says that loop is needed because the wider DC region is terribly plagued
by traffic.
The loop will save a lot of time for the people.
But the company will face challenges from other transportation options, like, the highways,
subways, intercity buses and trains.
But if built in the way as the company promises, and it satisfy
if people with their safety, the loops will probably
have an edge over these other transportation options.
The Boring company promises a speedy construction process for the loops.
The draft report says that about 10 to 15 boring tunnels can get
the whole thing done in about 15 to 24 months, depending upon the company’s ability to
improve its boring tunnel technology.
But as said earlier, getting government’s verbal approval isn’t enough.
Before it can stick its tunnel-boring machine in the ground, and start digging, the project
will need approvals from government from departments
like Maryland Department of Transportation, the city
of Baltimore, federal department of transportation and many others.
It will have to rally up with regional water authorities and environmental
authorities.
It might need a set of purpose-built regulations for its new technology.
And at last, it will face criticism for some people, especially its
competitors, but the boring company has proved all of them wrong until now.
Boring company’s other ventures have been mired in bureaucracy
and in politics.
The company had to abandon a loop project in West Los Angeles after a legal
challenge from a local neighbourhood association.
The Chicago high speed airport connector, once
promoted by former Chicago Mayor Rahm Emanuel, faced uncertainty in its future after the
city elected its new mayor, who has not been shy to openly
talk about her opposition to this project.
Two other projects—a proposed Loop to Dodger Stadium,
and another in Las Vegas small system inside the LA Convention Center are also struggling
for approval from the locals and government.
So, it looks like that the boring company still has a lot of
ground to cover and appease many people.
They cannot use the technology unless people are sure
that it will elevate their life.
Although this technology may captivate minds, there are questions
about how safe a loop or hyper-loop would be.
The DC to Baltimore loop has been criticized for not
having emergency exits.
The plan is to construct up to 70 ventilation shafts serving as exists that
would be spaced as far as two miles apart.
Though the company has stated that the loop is designed
to be the fastest and safest system ever and says that it will comply with safety and fire
protection standards.
Still, some engineers are skeptical that this will succeed on a large scale.
But the same was said for SpaceX when it began.
But SpaceX changed the future of space exploration.
In the same way, many people thought that Tesla would
never learn the art of mass production.
If Musk is known for anything, it’s beating the odds
with engineering feats.
Musk and the company seem to be a powerful institution in itself.
On Wednesday, the federal Department of Transportation praised the release
of the draft environmental assessment in a press
conference.
And it timed the release with the rollout of another pet project, its new “NonTraditional
and Emerging Transportation Technology Council,” which DOT describes as a
“deliberative body tasked by the Secretary to identify jurisdictional gaps arising from
DOT’s review of new transportation technologies.”
A completed DC to Baltimore Loop still has a long way to its
approval, but at least Washington has one agency that has showed no sign of disagreement.
Clearly, this is an extremely ambitious project creating a whole new type of transportation
and infrastructure.
Musk is publicly asking questions if this is possible or what more improvements they
can make.
Why hasn’t it been done yet?
Projects like the boring company and the loop are daring
people to think bigger about progressing into the future.
But the boring company would finally give us freedom from the traffic that drives everyone
crazy.
The future should be anything but boring.
Thank you everyone for watching, we really appreciate that.
So, what do you think about the boring company’s plans?
Will we be able to use them in the coming future?
Let us know your thoughts and ideas in the comment section below.
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