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Elon Musk’s futuristic tunnel system looks both amazing and impossible

Elon Musk’s futuristic tunnel system looks both amazing and impossible

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What The Boring Company’s tunnels might look like

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Elon Musk wants to build intricate underground roadway systems beneath the country’s biggest and most sprawling urban centers. It may not be his most ambitious idea; let us not forget the plan to colonize Mars and turn humans into cyborgs. But The Boring Company, as the tunnel idea is called, is still pretty outrageous. For evidence, look no further than this brief concept video posted to YouTube today.

It shows a near-gridlocked, red Telsa-looking automobile weaving its way to the side of a busy street, only to wheel itself onto a futuristic metal platform that works like an elevator:

Down the car goes into what is presumably an underground Los Angeles — the Boring Company is currently working to solve that city’s infamous traffic epidemic:

There we see a network interweaving highways that move cars around on what look like magnetic rails, at speeds of up to 124 mph:

At the tail end of this conceptual demonstration, the video even hints at some public transport options, shaped like big glass rectangles, that could ferry numerous people, and even bicycles, through the underground tunnel network:

This whole concept is, of course, years away from reality. But Musk is indeed working on it. He even has his hands on a 400-foot-long, 1,200-ton boring machine nicknamed “Nannie,” and his recently formed tunneling unit is working on building a test track underneath the parking lot of SpaceX’s Hawthorne, California, headquarters.

@davesvanlife, via Business Insider

It’s unclear how Musk would proceed from this to the kind of tunnel network we see in the video. But hey, if anyone can do it, it’s the billionaire at the helm of both a space transport outfit with reusable rockets and a company with electric and semi-autonomous cars.