Innovation and tunnelling: The Elon Musk’s Boring Company

Agostino Viglione, Young Member of Società Italiana Gallerie (SIG)

The world of tunnelling growed up very fast through the last decades and in the last years Elon Musk, one of the most famous entrepreneur at the world, decided to further accelerate this business trying to revolutionize the way that people travel.

The vision of Musk’s new corporate, “The Boring Company”, is based on the believe that the roads must go 3D. His ambition is not only to change the tunneling industry with faster, more efficient boring machines, but also to use them to build networks of tunnels aimed at easing congestion on busy city streets. © www.boringcompany.com

In other words, that as cities get more congested we’ll need to find other traffic solutions beyond the streets and railways. The “3D” solutions could be a whole bunch of tunnels underneath cities for people to travel in.

Cars, as well as foot passengers and cyclists, will be lowered from street level via an elevator system

and transported at very high speeds to multiple destinations across the city. Using Boring Company’s tunnel network, the vehicles and passenger pods will be connected at all the way to residential garages so that commuters can enter the high-speed loop directly from their homes to the office avoiding the city center congestion. © The Boring Company | Tunnels - www.youtube.com/watch?v=u5V_VzRrSBI&feature=youtu.beLast 18th December, has been held in Hawthorne (California) a d

emonstration of how the prototypal system works. A car, modified with an additional set of alignment wheels, was lowered beneath the ground level with off lifts capable of operating in very small footprints and then driven through a tunnel with an inner diameter of 3.65 meters at the speed of 40

miles per hour. When the final system will be available the passenger pods, as well as the vehicles will zoom through bored tunnels at up to 150 Mph. Are we ready to welcome these new technologies?

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