Boring Company current and highly likely potential projects are mainly in Las Vegas, Texas, California and Florida. Boring Company will make over $600 million to build the Las Vegas system. There are about $1-2 billion of other projects under consideration for Boring Company.
IF Boring Company goes slowing it will take 2-3 years to complete the Las Vegas System. If other contracts get signed other projects get started then it would make sense to order more tunneling machines and increase the speed of tunneling and project completion. If Projects are costed at $10 million per kilometer then Boring Company would need to complete 100 kilometers per year to earn $1 Billion per year.
It seems like for demand to rapidly increase, then Elon’s other companies would need to be major customers to prove that these tunnels and construction are superior. Elon is getting some tunnels to connect SpaceX, Boring and Tesla facilities. The other major demand catalyst would be a prompt completion and successful operation of over half of the Vegas system. This could happen late in 2024.
Tesla and SpaceX will become vastly larger companies and they will have the need for tunneling infrastructure. SpaceX will eventually need extensive electric tunneling systems for moon and Mars applications.
The Boring Tunneling machines are operating at about 40 meters per day. The tunneling can be faster but there are construction logistics that prevent 46 meters per day.
The next Boring Tunnel machine should increase to 60 meters per day or more.
Will runs the A Boring Revolution youtube and has tracked Boring Company very closely.
Will believes that it will be difficult to get Boring Company tunneling machines to surpass meters per day. There are material issues for the digging parts and maintenance issues.
Even with these limitations 8 Version 4 Boring Company tunneling machines would be able to complete over 104,000 meters of tunneling for the 64 mile Las Vegas system in 7 months instead of 3 years with 3 version 3 tunneling machines.
The stations for Boring Company stations can be built at the same time as the tunnels. Tunnels must be completed with cement and other work after tunnels are made.
Boring Revolution has been tracking the Boring Projects.
Brian Wang is a Futurist Thought Leader and a popular Science blogger with 1 million readers per month. His blog Nextbigfuture.com is ranked #1 Science News Blog. It covers many disruptive technology and trends including Space, Robotics, Artificial Intelligence, Medicine, Anti-aging Biotechnology, and Nanotechnology.
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The Boring Company has dug about 3 miles of tunnel in 6 years. They would need to dig over 60 miles per year to make a billion. The Boring Company, along with the Hyperloop, has been a spectacular failure. A lot of people will lose a lot of money betting on Elon’s outlandish promises.
The original Skateboard was shown to enable moving existing ICE vehicles through Loop tunnels. That was dropped – at least as a priority – as Tesla production began to scale and just restricting Loop to Autonomous BEVs that could be controlled by the network made sense.
Yes, course it’s about fully autonomous vehicles. That’s what it’s for. It’s basically an underground expressway system for autonomous networked BEVs. No, “trains” make no sense for it at all.
The great advance of the Loop system over subways is it’s about end to end transport. ABEVs would pick up people anywhere and take them anywhere using surface streets and use the Loop tunnels for express travel. Yes the original renderings are correct. There would be elevators and direct access from surface streets too along with ramps and Stations. It is central to the idea that ABEVs can use surface streets AND loop tunnels. Tesla will build a 12-15 person van/pod as shown in the renderings but nothing bigger. It would just be less flexible and take longer to get on and off. There is no use case where a train carrying hundreds of people or a bus carrying 50 or 60 is more efficient than a stream of autonomous vehicles that can carry 12 or 15.
Trains can’t pick up where you are and take you directly to where you are going directly avoiding intermediary stops. This system can. Don’t be confused by elements of the Loop system in Las Vegas that are just there as temporary expedients to get it operating.
Not to confuse “the Loop” with Musk’s Hyperloop. The LVCC Loop is is being constructed by him, but not designed by him.
Whatever happened to the car sled, or the autonomous pod/bus? If it’s only going to be independent chauffeured taxis it’ll always be too expensive to be anything more than an amusement park type ride with disco lights, going at 40mph at best, or 5mph when it starts getting more interconnected and trafficked. And there’ll be congestion at the stations, slowing things down even more. It is NOT a sled system that descends from street level on car elevators to a sled that then whisks anyone – even anyone who only owns a Tesla car (not a Cybertruck) – to the destination of their choice, switching tracks automatically along the way, avoiding other carsleds. Musk really has to stop his aversion to trains to make this real for any kind of scale, even if he has to start a train company too, since standard trains won’t fit in a 12′ tunnel: https://www.nycsubway.org/wiki/Chapter_14:_Engineering_Features_of_the_New_York_Subway
Another thing, multi-station subways don’t just terminate the ride at each station, they pass through so some people get on/off at each station, instead of everyone out of the (Tesla) car at the single destination. Again, for scale, people have to be allowed to go through multiple stations, or you’re going to have a lot of tunnel dodging in 3D, which means deeper tunnels, and even some slopes up/down and logistical nightmares with other natural and manmade obstacles along the way.
It doesn’t look like this is though through all the way.