Since The Boring Company began operating in 2017 it has announced massive car tunnel projects all over the world, including Washington D.C., Los Angeles, San Jose, Chicago, San Bernardino and even Sydney, Australia. There have been discussions about hundreds more, but the Texas-based tunnel company has, so far, only completed one 2.2-mile tunnel under the Las Vegas Convention Center. Almost every project outside of Las Vegas appears to have been abandoned entirely.
During this week’s SEMA show I took the opportunity to test out the Convention Center Loop Tesla tunnel. The last time I was in town for the convention the tunnel hadn’t been built yet, and it’s been operating for three years now, so I wanted to check it out first hand. Folks, let me tell you, it continues to suck out loud.
Earlier the same morning I rode on the Las Vegas Monorail with thousands of other attendees across the city. It’s an autonomously operated multi-car train that shifts a few hundred people every six minutes on both north and southbound tracks. This is what The Boring Company should have delivered, but instead they have put together a lackluster tunnel with cars in it.
I waited at a parking stall for a car to pull up. Since I was solo, I was forced to wait until enough other people joined me for the ride to fill the car, and the attendants tried to force me, a 300-pound 6’2″ American-sized person, to sit in the middle seat of a Tesla Model Y. Thankfully, everyone in the back seat objected and we left the middle seat empty. OK, ready for takeoff.
Wait, these cars still can’t even run on Tesla’s Full Self Driving while in these tunnels? The driver might have been able to use the regular driver assist systems, like lane keep assist and cruise control, but they’re forced to throttle on and brake and steer. The steering felt a little jerky in the curves, in a way that felt like he needed to take over from the car steering itself into the wall. One of my co-passengers asked the driver “Hey, has anyone hit the walls yet?” and he paused for a while before answering, “Uh, probably.”
While driving through the tunnel, Tesla’s onboard computers were finding ghost cars which weren’t next to us, because what was next to us was a wall. This post isn’t really about Tesla Full Self Driving, but if a car can’t tell the difference between a wall and another car, can it ever really be trusted to be fully autonomous? These tunnels were built specifically for Tesla cars. These are the only cars that have ever driven in these tunnels.
It’s been three years and Tesla hasn’t even bothered to develop a bespoke set of controls or screen displays for the cars in the tunnel? What’s going on?
The Boring Company is currently extending this tunnel from the Convention Center to Steve Wynn’s Encore hotel just a short half mile away. The long-term goal of this program has always been to connect every major hotel on the strip with a 52-stop 16-mile double loop. The Boring Company was granted an extension of that to a 69-stop 65-mile loop which would connect the strip to the airport. Eventually the company says it will built a loop between Las Vegas and Los Angeles, which is 265 miles away.
Obviously I don’t have much in the way of insight into the inner workings of The Boring Company, other than the fact that the company’s CEO is ranked 19th in the world in Diablo IV, and tweets over 100 times per day. If you were to ask me, the company that has dug a grand total of 2.2 miles of tunnel in seven years probably won’t be digging a 265 mile tunnel for 35 mph taxis to drive through. Why do states keep falling for this massive con job?
Apparently The Boring Company is currently working on a tunnel on site at the Tesla Gigafactory in Texas. According to reports this tunnel will get finished Cybertrucks from the end of the assembly line to the staging area for shipping, and they will drive there using the Smart Summon feature. I’ll believe it when I see it.