The Boring Firm, Elon Musk’s tunnel-digging firm, and Tennessee Governor Invoice Lee have introduced a plan to construct a 10-mile “loop” that can join Nashville’s downtown and its conference middle to the world’s airport.
The challenge can be privately funded by The Boring Firm “and its personal companions,” in accordance with the Governor’s press launch, although these companions should not named. The Boring Firm and native officers will now start a “public course of to guage potential routes, have interaction neighborhood stakeholders, and finalize plans for the challenge’s preliminary 10-mile section.”
Development received’t start till the challenge clears the approvals course of. However the Governor’s workplace stated the primary section of the loop may very well be operational as “early as fall of 2026.”
If that occurs, Nashville would turn into the second metropolis the place The Boring Firm has opened such a system, with the primary being Las Vegas. The corporate has spent the previous couple of years in Sin Metropolis digging and opening tunnels across the Las Vegas Conference Heart, and claims to have given 3 million rides in Teslas thus far.
Musk launched The Boring Firm in early 2017 (after publicly noodling concerning the thought on Twitter whereas caught in site visitors in late 2016), and it has taken many types since then.
The unique video detailing Musk’s thought — now set to non-public on YouTube — confirmed autos getting faraway from floor avenue gridlock by an elevator-meets-sled system and lowered right into a three-dimensional underground community of tunnels. Musk additionally claimed in the course of the first Trump administration that The Boring Firm had acquired “verbal govt approval” to dig tunnels from New York Metropolis to Washington, D.C. that, leveraging hyperloop expertise, may make the journey in simply 29 minutes.
None of that ever occurred. The Boring Firm deserted plans to dig a serious tunnel system beneath the higher Los Angeles space after pushback from locals. An identical factor occurred in Chicago. And the Boring Firm has basically ghosted many different cities across the nation.
The thought of the hyperloop, which Musk admitted to biographer Ashlee Vance got here from his hatred of California’s high-speed rail system, was additionally solid apart. Even the Teslas that traverse the Las Vegas tunnels are being pushed by people, regardless of Musk’s obsession with self-driving vehicles.
As an alternative, The Boring Firm now extra carefully resembles a glorified conference middle people-mover, though there are some potential advantages to its method versus the everyday monorail setup. Development ought to be much less disruptive to Nashville’s every day site visitors. And, in its present kind not less than, it’s not costing taxpayers cash.
Whereas the Tennessee Governor’s workplace cites The Boring Firm’s security file in Las Vegas within the announcement — the loop “just lately earned a 99.57% security and safety ranking” from the Division of Homeland Safety and Transprotation Safety Administration, in accordance with the press launch — it’s cautious to not point out the difficulty that Musk’s tunnel-digging effort has skilled throughout building. (The governor’s workplace couldn’t be reached for remark.)
Like with different Musk firms, the tempo at which The Boring Firm operates — the identical velocity that the Tennessee Governor’s workplace praised in its announcement — has been a priority for a few of its employees.
Final 12 months, Fortune’s Jessica Matthews reported {that a} Boring Firm worker instructed his then-safety supervisor: “I’ve watched my mates get injured as a result of quick tempo we’ve been working… I refuse to be the primary fatality on this firm’s historical past. No tunnel is value a single individual’s life.”
That very same security supervisor even spoke to Fortune on the file, saying: “The situations they had been instructed to work in had been actually virtually insufferable … I couldn’t repair any of the issues that had been mistaken.”
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