Boring Company To Build Tesla Tunnels Under Nashville (techcrunch.com) 96
Elon Musk's Boring Company plans to build a 10-mile underground transportation loop in Nashville connecting the airport to downtown, with private funding and a projected launch as early as fall 2026. "If that happens, Nashville would become the second city where The Boring Company has opened such a system, with the first being Las Vegas," notes TechCrunch. "The company has spent the last few years in Sin City digging and opening tunnels around the Las Vegas Convention Center, and claims to have given 3 million rides in Teslas to date." From the report: The project will be privately funded by The Boring Company "and its private partners," according to the Governor's press release, though those partners are not named. The Boring Company and local officials will now begin a "public process to evaluate potential routes, engage community stakeholders, and finalize plans for the project's initial 10-mile phase." Construction won't begin until the project clears the approvals process. But the governor's office said the first segment of the loop could be operational as "early as fall of 2026."
Most cities really need this (Score:2)
Having a wimpy direct path that just goes from Airport - Downtown - Convention center is perfect for a huge number of cities.
So many places it can be really rough to get from the airport to the downtown area any time around rush hour (which in a lot of cities is around a 3-4 hour window).
Some places with rail kind of have this - like the train that goes from Midway into Chicago. But even THAT has a lot of stops and is not great for travelers, even if it's nice for residents.
I also have to say that a system
Re:Most cities really need this (Score:5, Insightful)
Yes it’s called a subway and they move more people at greater speeds.
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Yes it’s called a subway
Yeah, but are they electric? Wait, never mind.
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Many, many, many places don't have a subway.
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Even more places don't have an imaginary tunnel dug by a ketamine junkie. Like, all places that exist.
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Competing to be World's biggest Douche Bag is hard, very stressful.
Shit I can hardly handle one baby-mama, lost count of how many that dude has.
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Well, as I understand it, Musk likes a challenge.
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And Musk is trying to address that issue. I don't see what the problem is.
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But his solution isn't involving any public money. If he wants to piss away this own money and the money of his investors, why should we care?
Re:Most cities really need this (Score:5, Informative)
But his solution isn't involving any public money.
The whole musk business empire is built on public money. Without public money musk would have been long forgotten.
Re: Most cities really need this (Score:1, Insightful)
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Yes it’s called a subway and they move more people at greater speeds.
Most cities do not have passenger rail to their airports.
Even those that do often require time-consuming transfers.
The NYC subway has an average speed of 28 kph. That isn't faster than a Tesla.
Most importantly, the Boring Company's raison d'etre is that it builds tunnels at far lower cost than conventional methods.
What if there isn't enough passengers? (Score:4, Insightful)
I think that what might be missed here is that one has to ask whether or not there'd be enough passenger traffic to justify 200 passengers per car @4-5 cars, IE ~1000 people. Just like how we don't need 4 lane highways everywhere, most are actually 2 lane, but some are 6-8 lane. That said, I think that the people capacity would be lower because subways typically don't assume luggage. While airlines charging for luggage has dropped the amount people carry substantially, many still bring at least one bag to check. So maybe not 200 passengers, but closer to 100-150?
If you don't need to dig the enormous tunnel to enable either ICE engines or a large subway car, it reduces costs by a lot.
While I am substantially disappointed in Tesla NOT fully automating their tunnel vehicles, the fact remains that the Boring Company/Tesla Motors have an understanding and a path forward for increasing capacity if called for. The current systems work well enough for the current demand, after all.
Shortening following distance, increasing speed, increasing passengers per car by eliminating the driver, upgrading to a custom van or bus on top of a Tesla sled chassis. Etc...
And yes, a ring road and maybe a few closed "expressways"
Re:What if there isn't enough passengers? (Score:4, Insightful)
Shortening following distance, increasing speed, increasing passengers per car by eliminating the driver, upgrading to a custom van or bus on top of a Tesla sled chassis. Etc...
And yes, a ring road and maybe a few closed "expressways"
Tesla doesn't build buses so that is not an option because this Tesla/Boring company 'transport loop' system is a giant Tesla publicity stunt funded by the tax paying citizens of Nashville so obviously there have to be Teslas in the tunnels. If, however, you decided that the tunnel should to be able to accommodate buses which would certainly be able to shift worthwhile numbers of passengers then that would quite make a bit more sense. However the tunnels would then have to be (A) quite a lot bigger than the one in Las Vegas, which (B) increases costs even if (C) you'd still probably save a whole lot of money and increase throughput quite dramatically by buying decently sized off the shelf electric buses from China instead of anything Tesla can lash together (because the world's largest electric bus manufacturers are BYD and Yutong who enjoy considerably economies of scale in that market). Sadly that's not an option because, remember, there have to be Teslas in the tunnels and because: "Orange man says Chiiiiina bad".
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Going last-mile is actually a bad thing in some ways ... cities should be built to subtly nudge people to walk and interact in public (both are healthy). A society where people go from indoors to car to indoors won't be a healthy or happy one. Perpetuating loneliness.
Also, 4-5 cars is short for a NYC subway train - try 8-9 cars as normal. I think only some short shuttle lines and the G train run 4-car trains.
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It doesn't really make sense to compare the cost of boring a tunnel to the type of rolling stock.
Even with a cheaper tunnel you could put trains inside it rather than cars. The current system has two tunnels and can move 4,400 people per hour, assuming you fill up each car. A subway can move 40,000 people per hour per tunnel.
Running the numbers, the Tesla tunnel has about the same capacity as a road.
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Yep. And I’m 100% sure that the costs of the Tesla tunnel are a lot more than 10% of the costs of a subway, so the cost per passenger per hour is going to be higher, not lower. (Obvs the full costs needs to account for electricity, rolling stock capex and opex, etc, but the basics are crystal clear).
Also the OP is being trite, comparing the speed of a dedicated airport-link tunnel with the NYC subway. The former is designed as a shuttle service, so obviously can optimise for speed, and there’s l
That's capacity, but what about demand? (Score:1)
However, what if you don't need to move 40k people/hour? What if the figure is closer to 2k?
In which case, even if the subway is "only" 5 times the cost, it would still end up substantially more expensive per passenger than the Tesla tunnel.
Still, there's quite a few ways to increase capacity of the tunnels after the fact. Switch to fully automated cars will allow 1 more passenger per car, increasing capacity. Using automation to shorten the following distance and increasing speed.
Right now, using more
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if the capacity requirements drop down to 2k an hour, a tunnel is going to be less cost effective than better surface public transport. Buses will be a lot cheaper than some sort of special “bus type vehicle” plus a tunnel etc.
Re:Most cities really need this (Score:4, Informative)
Yep. I think there's some confusion and/or wishful thinking going on.
Rail infra is expensive. Trains are expensive, signalling is expensive. It's also much much higher capacity so you need much larger and so more expensive stations. The kind of escalators that can deal with over 40,000 pph are vastly more expensive than the kind that can deal with 4000, and of course for heavier more critical infrastructure you need some sort of redundancy (so expense). But you get much much higher capacity, lower running costs, better accessibility, comfort and safety and much greater reliability.
An 800 car per hour tunnel needs as much infrastructure as a road so fitting out the tunnel is much much cheaper.
If you look at the total cost, then Tesla tunnel looks a lot cheaper because it doesn't do as much. I doubt that it's the actual digging of the tunnel that is much cheaper.
Also the OP is being trite, comparing the speed of a dedicated airport-link tunnel with the NYC subway. The former is designed as a shuttle service, so obviously can optimise for speed, and thereâ(TM)s lots of train-based shuttles that do exactly the same. Heathrow Express, for example, takes 15 mins and runs at 110mph. Oslo has Flytoget which takes 19 mins and runs at 130mph. Each carries hundreds of passengers per train.
We also have the Piccadilly line which is a subway and takes about 3 or 4 days to get to central London (I've caught it a lot since it used to pass very close to where I worked, so it was worth the lack of hassle and changes to just hop on and chill out) and the Elizabeth Line which is a heavy rail subway sitting somewhere between the two, which I usually use now because it's very good.
Also, at capacity, the Tesla tunnel system would take over half an hour to deal with the passengers from just one A380, whereas that wouldn't even fill a single train.
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But one could go down one step and use a tram-like service, in that case, if there's an human driver, the signalling is going to be the same used for cars. If you go with automatic self driving systems the signalling is going to be more complex, but not much more than an elevator, and having some door on station to prevent peop
Re:Most cities really need this (Score:5, Informative)
Plus Tesla never got its self driving cars to work reliably, even in the highly controlled environment of a purpose built tunnel, so they need a lot of drivers to move 4k people an hour.
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And presumably an army of people to recharge the army of cars at some point, and so on.
I do think their approach to FSD is flawed. Human eyes are astonishingly good compared to cameras (annoyingly so as a computer vision person), but cars can easily have super human senses, such as LiDAR and RADAR. Playing to the strengths of a FSD system would seem like the best bet.
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Indeed, the advantage of LIDAR and RADAR are that you get hard data for things like obstacles. Okay it needs some processing to filter noise and the like, but if you look at a lot of Tesla accidents they happen because the vision system didn't notice the huge solid object it was about to crash into until it was milliseconds from impact. Presumably the "can't see the road, apply brakes" logic kicks in at that point, and FSD disengages in an attempt to transfer legal liability to the human driver.
It simply do
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The fact that they don't use it even in the tunnels suggests that it has some major problems detecting pedestrians too.
I think that's one of the most damning things. There should essentially be none of the problems you refer to in the tunnels, and they could even have (say) one in 10 cars with a person in just to check. But they can't.
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You could even abandon the batteries and just run directly off that saving cost and complexity. The next stage, since it's a restricted environment is to use special wheels that don't wear as fast. And possibly a guideway so the driver can't make mistakes. Also, to save costs, you could add a tow hitch and one car could pull several at once saving on driver costs too.
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Re:Most cities really need this (Score:5, Interesting)
Most importantly, the Boring Company's raison d'etre is that it builds tunnels at far lower cost than conventional methods.
So, how many tunnels and of what length has The Boring Company produced since it was incorporated?
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Yes it’s called a subway and they move more people at greater speeds.
Most cities do not have passenger rail to their airports.
Even those that do often require time-consuming transfers.
The NYC subway has an average speed of 28 kph. That isn't faster than a Tesla.
Most importantly, the Boring Company's raison d'etre is that it builds tunnels at far lower cost than conventional methods.
Sure, but the criticism isn't that this tunnel boring system is more expensive, it's the inefficiency of then putting a bunch Tesla passenger cars into the tunnel. A subway from the central station to the airport with only a few two or three minute stops can travel at least as fast and it can transport one heck of a lot more people per trip. Even making the tunnels a bit bigger and using electric buses would be more efficient than 70 Tesla model Ys. If these tunnels with Tesla passenger cars in them were so
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Most cities do not have passenger rail to their airports.
Yeah, like ... New York ...
Kind of. Getting on the train from LGA requires a 15 minute trip on an overcrowded bus to a transfer station in a questionable neighborhood loaded with panhandlers and reeking of piss, even more than the subway does. And getting on the train from JFK requires paying 3x what you pay for the subway to ride the "airtrain" to the subway. And FSM help you if you decide you want to take the train from one airport to the other (there's a bus for that. Kind of.)
Given NYC's history of big brash public engineeri
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Faster than conventional methods? Nothing the Boring Company is doing is different from everyone else. I'm not sure why Musk thought he could buy a tunneling machine and somehow run it faster than everyone else. And they can't do it any cheaper either.
Maybe some day that rock vaporizer drill technology we read about a few weeks ago could be scaled up to burn out large tunnels. But u
it’s called a subway (Score:2)
I think that word has been Trademarked by the fast-food sandwich company
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In big cities, it gets really complicated. Houston, for example, has not just one downtown, but at last five major business districts with clusters of high-rise buildings. Connecting all of these centers is difficult, even for the Boring Company.
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“Even”
It’s *especially* difficult for the Boring Company, because it’s a private organisation “run” by a ket-addled pillock
Re: Most cities really need this (Score:2)
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And yet, Houston is planning to reroute I-45 around downtown in a massive underground tunnel.
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Typical asozial techy ... I like being around other people. I like random conversations with strangers. That's part of the FUN of riding public transit.
Also, there are other ways of solving homelessness, like creating a society with lower levels of inequality and a functional mental health system. But, you know, Dumbericant austerity.
Just like crypto (Score:2, Offtopic)
This is a "solution" looking for a problem. What a stupid, wasteful, destructive mess.
https://humantransit.org/2025/... [humantransit.org]
Uh, OK. (Score:2)
And they've made more profit by selling "flamethrowers."
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That's a pretty pathetic number. To put it in comparison it's less than the daily subway ridership in NYC
Has Boring Co really done anything? (Score:2)
Their goal was to be a price disruptor on cost-per-mile underground tunneling but to me landing and reusing a spacecraft was an obvious way to disrupt the launch industry and at least to me with regards to tunneling there was no at least obvious disruptor tech or method or they'd discover some glaring inefficiency the rest of the industry was missing but considering the challenges in tunneling are many and unavoidable.
Maybe it's been skunkworks and we'll see it now? I'm ready to be wrong on this.
It shut down high speed rail (Score:4, Informative)
So now your options are to drive across country or to take a plane. And if you're just going City to City you could have had high speed rail which would have been substantially cheaper and faster than both.
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Go take your pills; high speed rail killed high speed rail. The Boring company had absolutely no part in that.
The California track was always a federal money suck that never had a chance in hell. None of the money that has gone into it was spent on putting actual track down so every town that wanted to be connected to it had to pay 10's of millions for that privilege while all of the actual money disappeared into the California cesspool. Of course all the of the towns said "fuck that"; end of story.
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Go take your pills; high speed rail killed high speed rail. The Boring company had absolutely no part in that.
. What about all those other countries with high speed rail? Leon wasn't involved with them and they run just fine.
connected to it had to pay 10's of millions for that privileges
Source. I haven't heard about any free Saudi jets running around Cali.
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1.) Strawman much? I was talking about the debacle called the California High Speed Rail Project not a well run system in another country.
2.) Try google I'm not paid to do your thinking for you. It was well covered by the AP News and Reuters.
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But the point is there’s nothing inherent in HSR that means it *had* to fail in California (or the UK). It is about the structural and governance barriers that exist in both countries, which are wildly different from other countries.
This article captures some of the issues in the UK, much of which applies to the US too:
https://www.britainremade.co.u... [britainremade.co.uk]
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there’s nothing inherent in HSR that means it *had* to fail in California
Of course there is: an entire political party that relies on the perception of California being a failure.
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Ha. Well, yes, but I still stand by my original statement as the GOP is committed to making *everything* fail, not just HSR
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Correct, their ideology requires the government to not work even if they have to use the government to make things not work on purpose.
Government barriers aren't a problem (Score:2)
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It's well documented by reliable journalists (Score:2)
Why is Elon musk's dick in your mouth more important than reality? That's a question only you can answer for yourself.
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You should be thankful you even have sidewalks. Where I live currently, sidewalks barely exist. It is literally impossible to walk from one end of the city to the other using sidewalks. If you are walking, you frequently need to walk on the same paths that the cars use. It is not just my city as my city is better than the average in the region regarding sidewalks.
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There are some possible disruptive technologies in tunneling. Microwave drilling looks like it might actually work and be a lot cheaper than conventional methods. That might be adaptable to tunneling. The Boring Company has built their own machines and does seem to be refining tunnel boring, although they're not doing anything super unconventional.
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I overall agree with you - price disruption in tunneling would have so many benefits.
But at this point, I'm thinking Elon's businesses such as SpaceX is a mix of two factors: Elon not being full crazy yet, and other people successfully managing Elon's excesses.
Also, overall, techbros are like moths to the flame when it comes to reinventing mass transit poorly.
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I’m old enough to remember when Segways were going to disrupt everything. Micromobility is now expanding rapidly, but none of that is Segways.
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Their goal was to be a price disruptor on cost-per-mile underground tunneling but to me landing and reusing a spacecraft was an obvious way to disrupt the launch industry and at least to me with regards to tunneling there was no at least obvious disruptor tech or method or they'd discover some glaring inefficiency the rest of the industry was missing but considering the challenges in tunneling are many and unavoidable.
Maybe it's been skunkworks and we'll see it now? I'm ready to be wrong on this.
It's one of Musk's "necessary to the plan" spin-offs. Back when he had some in the world he had a plan other than just self-enrichment, that plan involved a human settlement on Mars. The boring company was part of that, as the equipment could be used to create, if not outright living spaces, at least travelable passages between living spaces and other areas of any given human settlement. At least, that was the spin that was originally put on it back when he was popular among the space-enthusiast crowd.
Now t
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Yeah at this point I feel like it was something he is trying to make happen through sheer force of will and really it came about as he was completely high off disrupting launch services and EV's so "I can disrupt any industry!"
Why so secretive? (Score:5, Interesting)
Representative Justin Jones, the state representative whose district includes Nashville and where this "loop" will be located, was denied entry because he wasn't on "the list" [wkrn.com].
Makes one wonder how much more socialist payments Musk will take the taxpayers for.
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Can't have those types getting too uppity, after all. If you let them into public events, next thing you know they'll want to eat in the same restaurants as us or even ride in the front of the bus!
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Monorail! (Score:2)
Yes, a monorail!
Did somebody say high speed rail? (Score:1)
With crypto I bet you could easily give millions of dollars to a politician with it being basically untraceable. Yeah I know Bitcoin and all that is traceable but it's not hard to use any one of the many tumblers out there.
There's a reason why cryptocurrency is so popular with money launderers. It beats th
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Why Nashville? (Score:2)
Seems like an odd choice.
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Center of the U.S?? By what measure?
Certainly not geographically. Not even close.
Financially? No
Culturally? No
Population wise? I dunno, maybe. I'd have to look that one up.
I don't see how Nashville is the center of anything, other than country music and, maybe, kinda sorta, Tennessee.
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Man can dream, right?
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This. Nashvillian here: Easy access to politicians stupid / greedy enough to give this a green light. To an inordinate degree, Tennessee ends up being at the center of "stupid tech policy" news on a national level.
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Red states are easier to grift.
If only other things could run in tunnels (Score:2)
No Tunnel is Worth Nazis (Score:1)