Elon Musk has a lot of side projects - he has the neural link, he has the Boring Company, he even postulated one of the first papers for hyper-loop which is kind of the pathway for the Boring Company aside from SpaceX and Tesla. After Los Angeles, the Boring Company had been building its tunnel network in Las Vegas, and now it is testing a system where it has Teslas in the tunnels in Las Vegas.
It has started shuttling passengers through the two tunnels it has built beneath the Las Vegas Convention Center (LVCC) as part of a test to get the system for primetime in June. There are multiple videos and photos of the system which is now operational. The LVCC Loop system has two 0.8 mile tunnels with three stops. The stations are at either end of the tunnel and above the ground, however, there is one station in the middle at the same 30-foot depth as the tunnels themselves.
A Boring Company Tunnel
Obviously, Teslas are being used to ferry the passengers. So far, there has been a combination of the Model 3, the Model Y and the Model X which have been deployed in the tunnels. The Boring Company is contemplating a system where riders can hail cars using an app. The tests that have been conducted so far involved the riders going from one station to the other two. Overall the test riders averaged between 7-12 rides.
Eventually, the Boring Company wants the loop to turn a 45-minute walk into a 2-minute ride though it isn't achieving this level of efficiency as of now. In one video, the test riders had to wait between 3-5 minutes and at a speed of 65 km/h, the ride would take anything between a minute or a minute and a half. The fact that the stations are underground also adds to the lead time. The drivers also have to manoeuvre around parked Teslas, with people getting in and out and cars queuing up to re-enter the tunnel.
Boring Company has said it plans to scale the system to speeds of upwards of 200 kmph, but the speeds during the tests are low right now. However, the bottleneck isn't in the speed of the cars inside the tunnel but the actual process of getting into the car itself. Eventually, with Tesla vision coming in, Musk perhaps, envisions all these logistical problems will be circumvented when the cars are driving on their own reducing the chaos the system brings with it right now.
