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Boring Company will make tunnels for sewers and cheap bricks for housing

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Elon said the Boring Co. is also going to do tunneling for water transport, sewage, electrical.

The Boring Co.’s first test project opens next month in Hawthorne, a Los Angeles suburb. In a few years, Boring Company tunnels could take passengers to L.A.’s Dodger Stadium via underground transit pods and from downtown Chicago to O’Hare Airport, as well as several potential transit projects in East Coast cities.

Moving cars underground in cities is expensive, but having power, water, sewer, communications and other utilities underground in cities is essential. And a lot of these systems are old and in bad shape.

LA Mayor Garcetti asked Elon if Los Angeles could get the first sewage tunnel from The Boring Company. Elon said yes.

Low Cost Housing with Bricks that are three to six times cheaper

Elon said the first Boring Brick Store would be opening soon. The price for the bricks is just 10 cents per piece. Red clay standard brick from Lowe’s cost 65 cents each. Masonry Concrete Block cost 34 cents per piece.

Elon’s bricks can handle California’s seismic loads and could reduce the cost of affordable housing.

28 thoughts on “Boring Company will make tunnels for sewers and cheap bricks for housing”

  1. If you were one of those people that wanted a tunnel connection to your garage, you could build your house out of bricks supplied by the tunnel network on electric carts. That takes care of the transportation, at least, and would in part subsidise actually having a ridiculous car elevator in your garage in the first place.

  5. What happens to these ‘brick’s when exposed to fire? Just curious. Clay-fired bricks obviously don’t burn much.

  7. “I’m all for what Mr. Musk has done with his ideas but this one’s a boner.”

    Careful, such reasoned criticism of Musk will have the Kool-Aid drinking Musk Fluffers descent upon you!

  8. “Elon’s bricks can handle California’s seismic loads and could reduce the cost of affordable housing.”

    I would NEVER build/buy a house with brick in it other than the fire place, in California. No matter what some bureaucrat says is ‘safe’.

    Fireplaces exploding with brick shrapnel during an earthquake is bad enough.

  9. “Elon said the Boring Co. is also going to do tunneling for water transport, sewage, electrical.”

    Now THAT would probably be a good niche market to pursue in and of itself.

  10. Calculate the cost of transporting and getting rid of the excess soil in a place like California….

    Also the idea is to use the bricks to also build the tunnels which saves on concrete cost.

  11. Nobody buys bricks for $0.65 each at a big box store to build a structure. Besides, the real cost of masonry isn’t the raw material. It’s the transportation, the mortar and the labor to put it all together. None of those things change so even if the bricks were free, the cost would hardly be any lower than they are now.

    I’m all for what Mr. Musk has done with his ideas but this one’s a boner.

  12. Apparently compressed earth with a small amount of cement as a binder. If you process the dirt to have the right fraction of particles in each size range, you can get the packing fraction pretty high, and dramatically reduce the binder requirements.

  14. Is the low cost of the bricks due to using clay obtained by boring? Or is it just by not pushing the price up as high as the market will bear?

  15. If you were one of those people that wanted a tunnel connection to your garage, you could build your house out of bricks supplied by the tunnel network on electric carts. That takes care of the transportation, at least, and would in part subsidise actually having a ridiculous car elevator in your garage in the first place.

  21. “I’m all for what Mr. Musk has done with his ideas but this one’s a boner.”

    Careful, such reasoned criticism of Musk will have the Kool-Aid drinking Musk Fluffers descent upon you!

  22. “Elon’s bricks can handle California’s seismic loads and could reduce the cost of affordable housing.”

    I would NEVER build/buy a house with brick in it other than the fire place, in California. No matter what some bureaucrat says is ‘safe’.

    Fireplaces exploding with brick shrapnel during an earthquake is bad enough.

  23. “Elon said the Boring Co. is also going to do tunneling for water transport, sewage, electrical.”

    Now THAT would probably be a good niche market to pursue in and of itself.

  24. Calculate the cost of transporting and getting rid of the excess soil in a place like California….

    Also the idea is to use the bricks to also build the tunnels which saves on concrete cost.

  25. Nobody buys bricks for $0.65 each at a big box store to build a structure. Besides, the real cost of masonry isn’t the raw material. It’s the transportation, the mortar and the labor to put it all together. None of those things change so even if the bricks were free, the cost would hardly be any lower than they are now.

    I’m all for what Mr. Musk has done with his ideas but this one’s a boner.

  26. Apparently compressed earth with a small amount of cement as a binder. If you process the dirt to have the right fraction of particles in each size range, you can get the packing fraction pretty high, and dramatically reduce the binder requirements.

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