The Boring Company wants to build tunnels right under your garage
A Southern California city gave the go-ahead this week to Elon Musk's tunnel-digging venture, The Boring Company, to build an underground car elevator.
Yes, a car elevator that would take your vehicle from your garage on street level to a below-ground chamber that connects to the Boring Company's growing tunnel network.
Musk is deep in testing what he says will one day be an underground high-speed transportation system and the latest development is testing direct access from people's homes to the 100 mph-plus electric pod system in tunnels below.
A 2-mile test tunnel in Hawthorne, California (just south of the Los Angeles International Airport) is almost complete, so this appears to be part of the next phase. The Boring Company, or TBC, headed back to the Hawthorne City Council Tuesday and got full approval to build a garage-connector test shaft.
From documents submitted to council members and from a presentation at the meeting we can get a sense of what Musk is envisioning: cars descend 45 feet down via an electric elevator, which then hooks up with Loop, the name for the TBC's transit system.
At the meeting, the Boring Company explained it had acquired a Hawthorne home to test the elevator system. The test site will be for research and development, and not for public use.
The test elevator is a way to show the Boring Company's Loop high-speed underground public transit plan connecting stations (the base of the elevators) to the tunnel network on electric skates, or pods. It's not entirely clear what happens to your personal vehicle in this scenario, but during testing the cars will travel underground and up the shaft to an enclosed garage.
The Mercury News went into more detail as to what the city council approved TBC to build in what looks like an unassuming, palm-tree-lined Los Angeles area neighborhood in the Los Angeles area.
It all sounds and looks like a complicated way for commuters to avoid any car traffic, which Musk -- who also builds cars -- despises.
Topics Elon Musk
Sasha is a news writer at Mashable's San Francisco office. She's an SF native who went to UC Davis and later received her master's from the UC Berkeley Graduate School of Journalism. She's been reporting out of her hometown over the years at Bay City News (news wire), SFGate (the San Francisco Chronicle website), and even made it out of California to write for the Chicago Tribune. She's been described as a bookworm and a gym rat.
