We know that The Boring Company is into tunneling. Indeed, that might well be an understatement. The company wants to create a network of tunnel under urban areas that will make travel that much faster. And as far as Elon Musk’s confidence into the premise of his scheme is concerned, he believes that it will outstrip flying cars.
At a recent Ted talk, we got our first in-depth look at exactly how Elon Musk plans the future of travel to be. The Tesla/SpaceX CEO showed off a video in which we get a glimpse of his highly ambitious scheme to revolutionize travel. And it is quite different from what most of us were imagining it to be.
Take a look:
So the idea here is not to create tunnels that would be mirror images of our roads. No. Instead, the surface roads will contain elevator shafts that will actually be a sort of sled that will enable cars to be transmitted from one elevator shaft to the other, all the while being underground.
Even while underground, it won’t be the car that is traveling. Instead, the sled, which we assume to be electric, will be doing the traveling on rails. Everything will be controlled by computers and cars will hurtle along at speeds in excess of 200 Kmph.
And in case you are wondering about where exactly the underground part comes in, well, it comes in because basing everything below the surface of the earth will allow the creation of layers upon layers of these tunnels. So you could have thousands upon thousands of cars traveling inside a tunnel (and those above and below it) at once.
Well, like most of Musk’s other schemes, this is very appealing as well. And Elon Musk has a thing for putting the impossible before you and making you think that it is possible. Reusable rockets? Electric cars that would have people clamoring to buy them? The plan is ambitious, but it sure isn’t as ambitious as a civilization on Mars. Indeed, it starts looking downright achievable. However, it might yet be a few years before we start burrowing underground to travel faster.
