Remember the Boring Company, Elon Musk’s tunneling venture that was supposed to revolutionize underground transit? Better yet, do you remember anything it’s actually done, aside from landing on a slightly amusing name? Well, despite its short list of accomplishments, Musk is insisting it could easily build something that puts one of the world’s most impressive public transit projects to shame — if he actually tried, that is.
On Thursday, he took to X to weigh in on reports that the projected cost of California’s infamously mired high speed rail line project is set to soar to $126 billion. When one commentator suggested that you could use that $126 billion to “subsidize free flights between LA and San Francisco at current demand levels” for up to 200 years worth of travel, Musk suggested he could do one better.
“The @BoringCompany could build a Hyperloop tunnel from downtown SF to downtown LA for <5% of this cost,” Musk proclaimed, “and it would be a technological marvel exceeding any high speed rail on Earth.”
So why hasn’t the Boring Company done it already? One issue is that experts have criticized the Hyperloop, an ambitious concept for transporting passengers in pods that zip through a network of subterranean vacuum tubes, as being wildly impractical and unsafe. But when Teslaconomics, a prominent (and clumsily named) Tesla booster account asked just that, Musk blamed one of his favorite bugbears: bureaucracy.
“The real reason for the ‘high speed rail’ is money-laundering to bureaucrats, consultants & unions, not actually transport. That is where the billions spent so far have gone,” Musk rationalized. “That is why they don’t want an actually cost-efficient high speed transport system.”
Musk is certainly touching on some more-than-warranted grievances around the US’s pitiable public infrastructure. And with the California project years, if not decades behind schedule, it’s undoubtedly being woefully mismanaged. This line of critique is only underscored by China’s head-spinningly rapid leaps in this field. Since California’s Los Angeles-San Francisco line was approved in 2008, only 80 miles of track have been laid. During that same period, China has constructed over 23,500 miles of high-speed rail across the country, with its cutting-edge trains reaching top speeds of over 210 miles per hour.
Even the most anti-China die-hards will agree that this accomplishment is a genuine engineering marvel. But because everything is either a dick-joke or a dick-measuring contest to Musk, he’s now legitimately insisting that his company would somehow put all that to shame.
The Boring Company’s track record, however, doesn’t exactly impress. Though Musk vowed in 2022 that the Boring Company would begin building a working Hyperloop in the coming years, no such project ever broke ground. The next best thing Musk’s company could do was the Vegas Loop, which would use a continuous stream of self-driving Teslas, traveling at speeds up to 155 miles per hour, to deliver tourists to a number of destinations across one of Las Vegas’s busiest areas in mere minutes.
In total, the Boring Company has only drilled 2.1 miles of finished tunnel so far, and 2.4 miles in total. The company claims its total fixed cost was $47 million, which translates to about $22 million for each mile of tunnel.
Now for some more crude napkin math. In 2017, The Economist reported that China spent $360 billion to build 13,670 miles of high-speed rail. That comes out to $26,000,000 per mile, more than the Vegas Loop. But you’re getting luxury bullet trains out of that cost which carry billions of passengers every year — not tiny Teslas that putter around in rinky-dink, RGB-lit tunnel so narrow that the cars don’t exceed 35 miles per hour.
Oh, and those cars? They’re also not self-driving yet, because in ongoing tests the cars somehow can’t even drive on what are practically rails without screwing up. This is the company that will build a “technological marvel exceeding any high speed rail on Earth”? Folks, we’re skeptical.
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