Boring Company LA Information Session
Questions on ElonsFAQ asked in this interview (1)
Transcript
0:01HostIt has been our great good fortune to make relationships with important business leaders, entrepreneurial visionaries who have been able and willing to dream big when it comes to a transportation revolution that could transform the way we connect with one another, not only here in the city of Los Angeles, but throughout the country and even throughout the world.
0:24HostFor us to be able to talk about that here this evening and to achieve dream of a world where we can achieve those type of writ large victories, not only for our quality of life, but for the preservation of our natural resources is a great, great honor.
0:39HostDelighted, therefore, to welcome our presenters this evening, the Boring Company and all of you as our guests for an evening that I am sure will help all of us to be inspired about a future that could be bigger, better and brighter for us all.
0:53HostIt is my pleasure to introduce Jen from the Boring Company who will introduce our panel for this evening.
1:02ModeratorHey everyone. Thank you all for coming and for tuning into the live webcast. Elon and Steve are going to take us through the vision of the Boring Company. We're going to talk about our project in Los Angeles and we're going to close with questions with that.
1:17ModeratorTake it away, guys.
1:29Elon MuskAll right, so yeah, thanks for coming. So we're, yeah, we're going to talk about what we're planning to do, answer whatever questions we can. And there's quite a lot of education, I think that that needs to be done with respect to what's possible with what probably to be described as like personalized mass transit effectively.
1:56Elon MuskAnd I mean, there's some things that are conceptually quite different from other modes of transport. And we think this is the only way that we can think of to address chronic traffic issues in major cities.
2:15Elon MuskAlmost every major city in LA is, I mean, arguably the worst, but certainly among the worst in traffic. In fact, part of the reason we were late was we're stuck in the damn porridge.
2:29Elon MuskI mean, that is like. But everyone's, you know, almost every city in the world has severe traffic issues and there really don't seem to be solutions that are anywhere around the corner or like even that might work that I'm aware of.
2:50Elon MuskAnd I've been living in LA since 2002. In 16 years, it's like the 405 has gone. It varied between like the seventh and eighth level of hell. It's like sometimes seven, sometimes eight.
3:05Steve DavisIt is not improved.
3:07Elon MuskExactly. The point is that it's just not improved over all that time. And so we're not suggesting that this is, it's the way that we think is probably the best way to solve the problem.
3:19Elon MuskBut there may be ideas that others have. We're not suggesting this to the exclusion of other approaches, but it's the one that we think could work and is worth trying and.
3:36Elon MuskYeah, so we'll tell you how we're going, how we're doing it. So there's the problem. Exactly. We're going to start with the problem statement soul destroying traffic. Know there's a few ways to skin this cat.
3:55Elon MuskI don't think this is pro. Like the problem with this is that there will be like zillions of these things flying all over the place and you know, inevitably somebody's not going to service their car properly and they're going to drop a hubcap and it's going to guillotine somebody.
4:13Elon MuskSo. And it's going to be noisy with a lot of, I feel like a, like a hurricane. I mean, can you imagine how much air force a little drone has?
4:21Elon MuskLike one of the little, little drones. And, and these would just be huge by comparison. And so I think this is a, you know, maybe I actually don't know any way to make the physics of this work just because of the sheer amount of wind force that has has to occur in order to lift something that's carrying a person like you.
4:43Elon MuskYou. You really can't even fly the quietest helicopter through neighborhoods without bothering people. So I think it's really hard to imagine going 3D up. So if you can't go 3D up or if it's unlikely that you go 3D up, then what about going 3D down?
5:01Elon MuskThat's the other direction. And you can go to very many levels down. So you could in theory can have like hundreds of levels of tunnel and arbitrarily solve any level of traffic.
5:18Elon MuskSo we often get this question of induced demand. Like if you add a tunnel or some new transport system, will demand then not just increase and we'll be back where we started.
5:32Elon MuskIf you look at say the 405, you add a lane to the 4, 405. Usually you go through definitely in the worst level of hell while the lane is being constructed.
5:41Elon MuskAnd then when it's finished, it seems like it was hardly different. But the thing is, what's actually happening with highways is that the highways are at the outer limit of their capacity and you're really just barely moving the needle in of front in capacity.
6:02Elon MuskBut for tunnels, you could have hundreds of lanes and there's no real limit. In fact, the fundamental issue that we face is that so much of our life is 3D.
6:17Elon MuskYou're in a tall building or in a dense office environment and then we go to this 2D plane of streets and the consequences are obvious. You're going from, you're like losing an entire dimension and everyone wants to go to and from the buildings at the same time.
6:36Elon MuskYou know, sort of want to arrive at work the same time and then leave around the same time. So then obviously you're going to get stuck in traffic. This is guaranteed.
6:47Elon MuskBut if you can do hundreds of tunnels and you can have many small stations woven through throughout the fabric of a city, you can actually, without even the city even appearing different, you could solve the transport problem.
7:03Elon MuskBecause one of the other issues with say a subway tunnel, and by the way, I'm not against subways. It's just one of the challenges with subways is that when you've got very large stations then you're going to put a lot of people will need to go to the station, come from the station and it creates a lot of congestion around that station.
7:24Elon MuskYou have to reserve real estate for the station. And it's very difficult to weave large stations into the fabric of a city. But if you have many small stations that are not much larger than a parking space, then you could have, you could really seamlessly integrate a new transport network into a city and it wouldn't affect things in a bad way.
7:53Elon MuskAnd it has compared to an above ground system or like compared to a flying car, you don't have to worry about bad weather. You can't see it, hear it, feel it.
8:03Elon MuskYou're not dividing communities with lanes. And we think we can make this really fun.
8:09Steve DavisSteve was like, yeah, no, absolutely, you're right. You have to stay three dimensional. Flying cars are, they don't reduce anxiety, they don't really exist. While tunnels do exist and are very buildable and it's all about building them better.
8:25Elon MuskYeah. The third experiment with flying cars, like you say helicopter with wheels, Thor was that add wheels to a helicopter. Anyway, so the keys are we got to figure out how to tunnel fast, safely and at a cost that's not crazy.
8:46Steve DavisCan I give the cool speed facts for the snails and just show.
8:51Elon MuskThis is our little friend, little chum,
8:52Steve DavisGary the snail, the company mascot. Yeah, yeah. So just like order of magnitude, I mean a human walking speed is approximately two to three miles an hour. The fastest boring machine in the world is about 0.003 miles an hour.
9:12Steve DavisAnd a snail is about 0.03 miles an hour. So you have the boring machine which is 10 times slower than the snail, which is 100 times slower than a human.
9:22Steve DavisSo what Elon has challenged the company to do is at least beat the snail. And so hence our mascot.
9:30Elon MuskYeah, exactly. Yeah. It's not like this tunnel is going to be ripping through the neighborhoods. It'll be like, you know, like a fish called wonder. Like when the. You know, I don't remember that scene with the steamroller.
9:43Elon MuskIt's like, watch out, the tunnel's coming.
9:45Steve DavisIt's just a crazy image that if you take this and you put it on the ground and you put a boring machine, this thing will like pull ahead in a time lapse.
9:52Elon MuskLike 10 times faster.
9:53Steve DavisYeah, yeah.
9:53ModeratorIt's.
9:56Elon MuskAnyway, so we do want to be faster than a snail, which is way harder than it sounds. And then ultimately, if we could, like, the dream would be to be maybe 1/10 walking speed, which would be, you know, if it could be 0.3 miles an hour, that would be.
10:13Steve DavisWow.
10:14Elon MuskYou know, then you could get a mile done every, you know, 3.3 hours.
10:21Steve DavisYeah, yeah. It'd be LA to San Fran in like a few weeks. Yeah, yeah, exactly.
10:29Elon MuskBut you're still like 1/10 walking speed.
10:31HostYeah.
10:32Elon MuskStill in, like you definitely run away. You could crawl away from it with one arm.
10:36Steve DavisYeah, yeah.
10:39Elon MuskLike pretty not scary.
10:41Steve DavisYeah. I don't know if you want to talk about some of the ways we're doing it.
10:45Elon MuskSo some of the key things to. To make it go faster, you've got to get continuous mining. So you drill continuously and then put in the reinforcing segments while you're drilling.
10:56Elon MuskSo typically what happens right now is that you drill for a bit and then stop and you put in all the reinforcing segments. And that takes ages. In fact, it takes way longer to put in the reinforcing segments than it even takes the tunnel.
11:07Elon MuskSo if we can just dig continuously and put in the reinforcing segments at the same time, that would be really more than a doubling of speed, maybe a tripling or quadrupling of speed.
11:19Elon MuskFor the in house design for the boring machine, we've tripled the tunnel boring machine power. So it has three times as much power we have. I mean, a lot of things.
11:31Elon MuskThis is really not like brain surgery or rock from science. So we're using really first rate engineering talent to solve problems that I think are pretty straightforward. One of the biggest challenges is how do you get all the dirt out?
11:48Elon MuskAnd it's really quite laborious to get dirt out normally. So we figured out designs to remove the dirt Quickly automate segment erection and yeah, just in general go faster.
12:04Elon MuskA lot of the time that's required for these boring machines is for laying tracks and for really long power lines. So if you're like a mile long tunnel or two mile long tunnel, you need a couple of miles of high voltage cable, which is really big, heavy cable because the boring machines themselves are all electrically powered.
12:30Elon MuskBut having two miles of high voltage cable is pretty expensive. And you've got to keep laying out more cable. We want to make this more like a cordless drill.
12:38Elon MuskSo it'll be using Tesla battery packs and whatever to drill and then it can drill without you having to have this crazy cable behind it.
12:51Steve DavisAnd the tiny things, while it's lighthearted, is actually not. It's actually rare in the United States there's one school that specializes in mining, but in General there's almost zero R&D in tunnels in America.
13:03Steve DavisMost of it's either in Japan or in Europe. So it's really trying new things has actually been very helpful for us.
13:16Elon MuskThis is our made an electric locomotive. So. So we think this is the biggest battery powered locomotive to be precise. So electric battery powered locomotive. It's actually just using some Model 3 motors and batteries to haul the rail muck cars.
13:38Elon MuskThose are like £250,000 or something. Yeah, yeah. Like quarter million pounds of muck off dirt on the rail cars pulled by
13:46Steve Davistwo electric motors and a battery pack.
13:48Elon MuskYeah. But the other tunnels at scale all use a diesel locomotive in a tunnel, which is kind of a crazy thing to do. You have all these diesel fumes and it's dangerous and smelly and you have poisonous fumes.
14:04Elon MuskBut like it's kind of a silly thing, but we think we're probably the first to use a battery electric locomotive for that size. Of that size. Yeah.
14:14Steve DavisAnd if you ever see the pictures, you can kind of see it up there of that enormous ventilation duct at the top. It's a 3 inch ventilation pipe and it's solely there for when we before we made the electric Loki for the diesel Loki, you have this gigantic ventilation.
14:27Steve DavisAnd the second you went to electric, you barely need that. Which is great.
14:31Elon MuskYeah, exactly. So the vertical integration, we're creating our own concrete segments and we're creating them on site using dirt that we dug out of the ground. Which again may seem like an obvious thing, but this is almost never done.
14:49Elon MuskOr we're not aware of a case where the concrete segments, reinforcing segments, actually use dirt that's dug out of the hole. It's typically Using some construction company far away and they that bring in the construct in the concrete segments.
15:06Elon MuskBut we actually just make the concrete segments on site at the start of the tunnel. And then we're making bricks out of the dirt. And these are bricks that are made by compressing the dirt at extremely high pressures, adding a little bit of just a small amount of concrete.
15:25Elon MuskAnd we have bricks that are rated for California seismic loads. And then these bricks, we actually think we can sort of sell the bricks for like 10 cents a brick or something like that.
15:40Elon MuskAnd they're really great bricks,
15:49Elon MuskLike build houses with them and things. So these are like way better than, like way better than cinderblock. Because cinderblock's kind of not that strong and kind of rough and grainy.
16:00Elon MuskThese are super strong. They're more like, you know, I don't know, like wood material. They're incredibly smooth. Yeah. Like, there's not really, like, not really good analog for these because these are bricks that are way better than any bricks I've ever seen at a construction site site that they're capable of taking extremely high loads.
16:27Elon MuskAnd they made it like 5000 psi or something.
16:30Steve DavisYeah, they have higher compressive strength than concrete. And you can always just keep pumping it up more displacing the machine.
16:36Elon MuskYeah. So higher compressive strength than concrete. And then we're going to do some fun things like make life size LEGO kits where you can order a set and build, you know, anything.
16:50Elon MuskI think we're thinking of starting with the Egyptian pantheon.
16:54Steve DavisAnd secretly you told us to build a pyramid. We're building a pyramid and a temple for you.
16:59Elon MuskCool. Temple of Horus. Okay, so start with a Temple of Oris pyramid and a sphinx and a few other things. And then if you want, you can sort of order the kit and kind of build this in your backyard.
17:15Elon MuskAnd it seems like a fun way to spend an afternoon. And. Yeah. So then if we can actually take the dirt from the tunnel and instead of just dumping it somewhere, we can turn it into something useful that can be used for fun or for real buildings.
17:33Elon MuskAnd I think this could be for affordable housing, like really compelling.
17:42Steve DavisI mean, if you look at the cost of a tunnel, about 15 to 20% of the cost of a tunnel is muck removal. It's just putting it in trucks and sending it to a fill.
17:52Steve DavisSo if you do something useful and actually make a brick, even if you give away the brick, you've just cut the cost of tunneling by 15 to 20%, which is pretty great.
17:59Steve DavisAnd then one other thing to note. On the costs is the cost to build a highway, I mean to answer you asked, was between 1 and 4 million a mile.
18:07Elon MuskSo if tunnels were, is it per lane mile?
18:10Steve DavisWell, yeah, no, at a lane one, to add a lane one to 4 million. So if tunnels were there, why is everything not tunnels in that case?
18:21Elon MuskRight, yeah.
18:23Steve DavisOkay. Everything.
18:25Elon MuskWell, this would be a lot of road space. If this works out, there would be a lot of road space that could be converted into. To sort of park space.
18:32Elon MuskYeah, yeah.
18:39Elon MuskSo this gives you a sense for like you really need a very small footprint to enter the tunnel network. It's like not much bigger than a parking space. And then you can interleave these entrances and exits throughout the city.
19:06Elon MuskSo in some ways this would be like a car in that it's really personalized mass transit. And you have, unlike a traditional subway, you have a highway system and kind of like a series of off ramps.
19:25Elon MuskSo when you're going through the tunnel network, you would enter the main arteries and then automatically transition from one artery to another and then eventually go out through one of the little sort of microstations, if you will, or mini stations.
19:44Elon MuskAnd you'd be going very fast the whole time. And the only time you'd actually stop would be when you exit. One thing about say a subway or a bus is that particular subway.
20:00Elon MuskSubways usually stop at every station. You might occasionally have an express, but obviously one subway train can't go past another subway train. Very difficult. And so a subway ends up being like a series of stops, stop streets.
20:15Elon MuskWhereas this system is designed to be more like you have a highway and a bunch of off ramps and loops connecting to the highway. Kind of like cars. They're sort of like almost like an autonomous underground multi level car system.
20:33Steve DavisYeah, that costs a dollar.
20:35Elon MuskThat costs a dollar. Yeah, exactly. So we think we can probably just charge about a dollar a ticket or something like that. A typical bus ticket, I think average price bus ticket is about $2.
20:46Elon MuskSo if you like less than a bus a ticket.
20:49Steve DavisYeah, and just in Los Angeles, I mean if you kind of just do it out with the available routes, it would be like downtown Los Angeles to a specific terminal in LAX in about eight minutes, which would be wonderful.
21:01Steve DavisAnd that's, and what's kind of neat about it, it's not just downtown LA to LAX downtown because the station's going to be small, it's downtown LA to LAX Terminal 1, LAX Terminal 2.
21:11Steve DavisAnd you would go directly there is the entire concept.
21:15Elon MuskThis is sort of just route like packets on A network sort of like the Internet, kind of like the way the Internet works. The packet. Like you sort of end up wherever you want to be.
21:26Elon MuskThe entrance would be very close to where you want it to be and the exit would be very close to where you want it to be. Because instead of having dozens of stations, you'd have hundreds and possibly thousands over time.
21:40Elon MuskThat means the granularity of each station is much finer and people can be dropped off really within a few blocks of where they need to go. Yeah.
21:49Steve DavisAnd each side tunnel itself could have a bunch of side tunnels. So you literally, I mean in the extreme you could have a station in everyone's driveway.
21:56Elon MuskThat's sort of in the limit. Yeah, absolutely.
22:04Elon MuskSo, yeah.
22:09Elon MuskAnd then, so then going now going between cities, you'd want to evacuate the air and have a pressurized pod. Now what we're talking about doing here in LA is not, not the hyperloop, but we're talking about a loop.
22:24Elon MuskSo we're trying to distinguish loop versus hyperloop. Hyperloop would be where we draw a vacuum on the tunnel, have a pressurized pod and go very fast. And this would be good for long distances, say going from LA to San Francisco, going from Washington D.C.
22:42Elon Muskto New York, that kind of thing. And so hyperloop would connect to a loop and you have a sort of smooth transition. Yeah.
22:55Steve DavisDo you want to give the warning about the video?
22:57Elon MuskOh, the next video. If you are subject to seizures. I would not. Look at this.
23:37Elon MuskThat was a video of, of a test pod ride that we did in the Hyperloop tunnel. So we have like a roughly 0.8 mile vacuum tube at just by SpaceX.
23:51Elon MuskIt's about 5 or 6ft in diameter. And we been able to go a couple hundred miles an hour. And we think probably we're aiming for around to go over 300 miles an hour, but accelerate all the way to 300 miles an hour and brake.
24:13Elon MuskAnd that's in a vacuum tunnel. So it's really just refining the technology necessary for ultra high speed transport from city to city. And yeah, it's kind of funny. We can go faster than a jet.
24:32Elon MuskLike you don't really have sort of Mach problems, you know. You know, like you're creating like massive sonic booms because you evacuated the air.
24:47Steve DavisThere's no upper limit based on physics. It's just how straight is the tunnel to make the ride comfortable?
24:52Elon MuskExactly. Yeah, it's essentially constrained by the G loading that would be comfortable for a person in the tunnel. Tunnel.
24:58Steve DavisAnd one of the wonderful events that Elon puts on at SpaceX and the boring company is a hyperloop competition, which we do every year. And the first year, actually, this is true, over a thousand universities worldwide entered, which was amazing.
25:13Steve DavisAnd then we narrowed it down to 20 and then 20 came and actually competed at SpaceX. Fastest pod wins. And last year a team went at 202 miles an hour.
25:21Steve DavisThat's a student team building a podcast. Nine months. So it shows the tech is very doable.
25:26Elon MuskYeah. And this is all running in a vacuum tube. And while Steve the credit, by the way, for the hyperloop competition, really, Steve deserves the credit. Steve really is the guy who made that competition happen and who runs it.
25:45Elon MuskSo thank you for doing that.
25:47Steve DavisThanks for letting us do it.
25:55Elon MuskAll right, so what we're aiming for with this tunnel is a north south tunnel, parallel to the 405. And it's really intended to learn more about what it takes to build a tunnel on the sort of north south.
26:12Elon MuskGeology of Los Angeles, essentially is like New York is for like plays. If you can build a tunnel in.
26:26Elon MuskIf you can succeed in building tunnels here, man, because we've got seismic, we've got the water table. You've got like very complicated
26:41Steve Davisutilities everywhere.
26:42Elon MuskYeah, utilities everywhere. So it's a very, very complex thing. And now we have an east west tunnel that's almost completed in Hawthorne, that's parallel to the 105. So we have an east west kind of research test tunnel.
26:59Elon MuskAnd we think it would be good to have a north south one as well. So we're going to have a good cross section of the geology in la. And then besides building the tunnel itself, we wanted to see what the user experience is going to be like and what the public would prefer the tunnel operation to be like.
27:16Elon MuskSo if you, you know what feels good, get public feedback by having people use the tunnel, we wouldn't be charging on what people would like or not like.
27:49Elon MuskYeah, so the people are wondering, like, well, how is this going to affect me? And the important thing is that we know street closures. We're not tunneling beneath any homes or businesses.
28:02Elon MuskIf anyone can detect that we're digging a tunnel, we'd be glad to hire them because they have some very impressive detection equipment. Literally walking on the surface creates more vibration than the tunnel boring machine.
28:18Elon MuskSo it's really quite difficult to detect when a tunnel is being. Is being dug.
28:26Steve DavisIt's important, like with this test tunnel, the community and it's our goal and if we ever don't, please let us know that nobody knows we're there. Because it's really important that if, you know, if we want to build very long tunnels from LA to San Fran, it's important to be an amazing neighbor and that you don't disturb anyone.
28:43Steve DavisSo this is in our mind. You won't hear us, you won't see us, you won't feel us, you won't, you won't even know we even exist. The only way you'll know we exist is the fact that there are trucks on the road.
28:54Steve DavisAnd that was what the haul route hearing had been. And then, so that's the haul route we were given, for those who are curious, the direction, it's south on Sepulveda, east on national, onto the I10 east.
29:06Steve DavisAnd then our trucks were limited, especially during rush hour and were not allowed to truck before 8am and 6pm the concept being we are going to do everything right.
29:14Steve DavisWe are going to be the best possible community member. And if anyone has suggestions, please, please let us know. But the goal is that literally we're invisible. And it's really, really important.
29:25Elon MuskAbsolutely, yeah. In fact, this is really important because it's not going to scale. If the creation of the tunnel, if we can't do, say a two mile tunnel without disturbing people, then how could we do hundreds of miles of tunnels without disturbing people?
29:40Elon MuskSo this really needs to be something that people just don't even know it's there unless they look for it. And even then it's tricky. And then like I said, once we're done, we want to, in order to get public feedback, we want to sort of offer free rides and sort of like a weird little Disney ride in the middle of la.
30:01Elon MuskBut I think we can make it really fun. Bring your flamethrower.
30:18Steve DavisHe's got a good point. Not a flamethrower.
30:20Elon MuskSorry, keep making that mistake. All right, so we're working closely with the city of LA and with Metro to make this happen. So sometimes people wonder like, hey, are they just going and building this crazy tunnel and nobody is even looking at it?
30:41Elon MuskAnd they're seeking like exemption from all oversight. This is not the case. There are a zillion permits that need to be approved for this tunnel. So there's a huge number of city permits, county permits, state permits.
30:58Elon MuskThe nature of the exemption that we are seeking is simply from ceqa, because getting a CEQA approval can take sometimes a year or sometimes two years. And we need to figure out what the large network will be then and use this sort of research tunnel to figure that out.
31:21Elon MuskAnd then. And then apply for the larger environmental. Or submit the larger environmental impact report to the state of California which has the most stringent environmental rules in the country.
31:35Elon MuskMaybe the world, but certainly. Yeah, like probably the world.
31:38Steve DavisYeah.
31:40Elon MuskAnd the nature of CQIZ is that it's very much a permission based system that takes a long time. So this would be a very safe tunnel and would still fall within all of the permitting requirements that LA would normally require, which is something 600 pages of permits that are required for this tunnel.
32:05Elon MuskSo it's not like, here, fill in this form. This is like 600 pages at least, maybe more.
32:13Steve DavisOur CEQA study alone actually was. Was 1500 pages.
32:16Elon Musk1500, wow. So we haven't done the CEQA study.
32:20Steve DavisYeah. So the way for CEQA to work is you don't just. It's not like we said, oh, we want an exemption. No, you do an initial study and an initial study determines your next steps.
32:30Steve DavisAnd so I mean like we were talking about literally there's no environmental impact. And so we did this 1500 page study, submitted the study and then the city of LA determined determine that an exemption was appropriate.
32:43Steve DavisBut the main thing is it's not being done to be controversial. It was the result of the study and we're always going to do the right thing. We're always going to do.
32:49Steve DavisAnd so we'll keep working with the city and kind of go with that. But yeah, there are enormous amount of permits and then for a larger system, I mean, to be frank, we don't right now know what that system would be because we need such an enormous amount of community feedback and to know Elon's always very clear with me and the team, we must do the most useful, helpful thing possible.
33:12Steve DavisAnd I don't think we yet know what that correct alignment is yet. And we can't wait to get feedback on what it is and then, yeah, then we go through a full EIR and go for it.
33:21Steve DavisBut right now the goal is really that test tunnel and then with the Metro. The metro has been wonderful and our goal is to complement the Metro as much as possible.
33:29Steve DavisOne thing we do talk about is, and this is just to us, is that the Purple line's amazing, the Expo line's amazing. It would be neat to connect them.
33:38Steve DavisTwo minute trip, which would be really, really interesting. And so just thanks to the Metro for their support.
33:42Elon MuskYeah, absolutely. I want to feel like, just reinforce what Steve is saying. We want to connect with and supplement existing transport systems. So if we do things like help connect two Subway lines in la, that would be great.
34:00Elon MuskObviously having many stations come out at subway stations, at bus stops, at LAX and Dodger Stadium and various other places, that's going to make a lot of sense. We're trying to maximize the usefulness of this system while having it not affecting people's lives as it gets created.
34:30Elon MuskYeah, it's pretty green.
34:41Elon MuskSo we think these times are actually real, which is pretty cool. And this is what you're seeing there is just like kind of an example network. Ultimately it would probably be something different from this exact diagram and probably be far more widespread.
35:01Elon MuskMaybe like really all over the greater LA area and. Yeah, so, but because of the nature of tunnel to the same, you can, as you reach capacity on one tunnel, you can simply put another tunnel underneath it and then keep going.
35:20Elon MuskAnd even if you want to have 100 levels deep, you could do 100
35:23Steve Davislevels deep, which also addresses the induced demand. Because unless everyone in the entire planet moved to la, we're pretty sure everyone
35:31Elon Muskis likely to move to la. Yeah, not all at once.
35:42Elon MuskWe should have A few stations would be bigger, like maybe at LAX where you've got a single port, like an airport or seaport, you'd see a larger station and then those would all go and drop people off very close to their home or work.
36:00Steve DavisIt's really based on land availability. If you're in a very urban area, you make small stations. If you're at a, you can make larger others. That's a lot of questions.
36:12Elon MuskI think there's also a bunch of questions that we'll have, I think from the audience and from social media and that kind of thing. But these are commonly the questions that we will get.
36:22Elon MuskIt's like, will we run into utilities? No, because we are below the utilities. So the level, the depth of the tunnel is below all of the plumbing and utilities.
36:34Elon MuskOnce you get below about 20 or 30ft, there's almost nothing. There's not even no moles or very few earthworms. It's just rock. Basically.
36:48Steve DavisA cool rule of thumb is that if you're two tunnel diameters below the surface, noise and vibe are imperceptible. So our boring diameter is 14ft. So times two is 28.
36:57Steve DavisWe usually round up to 30. And so we're pretty much always a minimum of 30ft below the surface. Sometimes 40, sometimes 50, but always a minimum of 30. Just so we don't disturb anyone.
37:05Elon MuskYeah, it's whatever the depth is that's necessary to ensure that we do not run into anything. And then we'll be using the test tunnels for public transit. We'll be using them to get feedback from the public and figure out how to make it an amazing experience.
37:25Elon MuskAnd I guess technically somebody could go from one, you would start off from one place and end up in another. But it wouldn't be. It would be more for interest sake that I think people would take it as opposed.
37:38Steve DavisAnd to give us feedback.
37:39Elon MuskYeah, exactly. Give us feedback. So we're prioritizing. So the commitment we've made is like we're always going to prioritize pods that, that carry pedestrians and cyclists. That'll be a nice sort of higher density pod.
37:57Elon MuskAnd yeah, seems like that's probably the right thing to do. And then earthquakes is probably the single biggest question we get. And people don't realize that earthquakes are primarily surface phenomenon.
38:13Elon MuskThey're like waves on the ocean. And so if you're in a tunnel, it's like being in a submarine in the ocean it could be a hurricane on the surface, but in the submarine everything is quite smooth.
38:23Elon MuskAnd that's actually how it is for tunnels. And when there have been major earthquakes, such as there was a Mexico City earthquake, I believe they used the tunnels for evacuation because all the roads were disrupted.
38:38Steve DavisThe two cool factoids about the earthquake. The safest place place to be in an earthquake is in a tunnel. And so LA was just hit with the, I think it was 5.3 or 5.6earthquake.
38:47Steve DavisAnd our office trailers were rocked, as I assume everyone else was. And the people in the tunnel who were working did not know an earthquake had occurred. And a way to think about it from a physical standpoint is if a tsunami hits you, where do you want to be?
39:00Steve DavisYou don't want to be at the surface. You want to be. If you somehow could be at the bottom of the ocean where you would not feel it at all.
39:06Steve DavisSo no, it's a very big misconception. But earthquakes, and they're designed for seismic loading is standard for any tunnel design, especially in this area. Metro does it, we do it.
39:15Elon MuskYeah. It wouldn't be possible to have a subway tunnel in la, which a lot of people do not realize exists. But there is a subway in la. But if earthquakes really were dangerous, there's no way that a subway in LA would be approved.
39:29Steve DavisSame with Japan.
39:31Elon MuskAbsolutely.
39:32Steve DavisExactly.
39:33Elon MuskJapan's very seismically active and has one of the best subways in the world. Sinkholes. Yeah. I think. Would we agree that if you could actually detect any, with any instrument, detect that there's been a ground movement, we will take corrective action and then ask you for what that instrument was.
39:56Elon MuskBecause there'll be no change change and no sinkholes, no nothing.
40:01Steve DavisYeah. And we actually is. If you're ever driving on 120th street in Hawthorne, you'll see these little prisms on the road and we actually put them there. And we have an autonomous system monitoring the settlement of the road.
40:12Steve DavisAnd if it ever goes above a twentieth of an inch, which I think it maybe has happened, it might even be zero times. It almost never happens. The entire company gets an email and people stop.
40:23Steve DavisSo we over like at this because obviously that would be something that would not be good. So we monitor this and very closely as all the elementor do the same thing.
40:32Steve DavisAnd we've seen great numbers.
40:34Elon MuskI mean it has zero effect. It does dig the tunnel, you put in super strong reinforcing segments and those maintain the diameter that you've cut out of the ground.
40:45Elon MuskAnd there's no volume change. And so as a result, sinkholes are not a factor. Yeah, our tunnels are. Will just basically go below the metro tunnels. So there will not be any interference with the LA subway system.
41:00Elon MuskTalked about ceqa. We absolutely will be doing environmental impact report for the larger system. And we have, as Steve was saying, done a very comprehensive report in the request for exemption which is public.
41:17Steve DavisIt's online.
41:18Elon MuskYeah. This is like good bedtime reading. Sixteen. Sixteen hundred pages.
41:23Steve DavisSixteen fifteen to sixteen.
41:24Elon MuskYeah. Yeah. So you know, we think it's like probably a fair thing to do and it will allow us to get this done sooner than might otherwise be the case because we can resolve a lot of questions with essentially the research and public feedback tunnels and we're told by induced demand.
41:43Elon MuskCool.
41:44Steve DavisSo
41:47Elon Muskand so a lot of people that are at the boring company are ex SpaceX or even current SpaceX people like Steve is one of the first people to join SpaceX.
42:02Steve DavisThank you for the job.
42:03Elon MuskWell, you're welcome.
42:07Steve Davis2003. Wow. 2003, number nine right now.
42:10Elon MuskWow. Okay, well thanks for everything you've done.
42:14Steve DavisYou're number three, I believe.
42:15Elon MuskWhat the.
42:21Elon MuskSo yeah, we have a lot of SpaceX engineers that are either kind of working at SpaceX and the boring company or full time at the boring company. And so we get to use rocket technology to build tunnels and apply some pretty advanced techniques to create to tunnel technology, which hasn't generally gotten a lot of love.
42:47Elon MuskSo we're really taking world class engineering talent applying it to this problem and seeing if we can make some headway. And at SpaceX we're able to go from basically an empty warehouse in el Segundo in 2003 to the Falcon Heavy launch this year.
43:06Elon MuskWe were able to land two boosters at Cape Canaveral, the center port at the ocean. But we know how to solve that. And then as a demonstration, sent my old roadster to the asteroid belt.
43:27Elon MuskAnd, you know, it's like more interesting than launching a block of concrete.
43:42Elon MuskWe did that because, like, normally when rocket companies launch something, they launch something boring, like a block of concrete. And like, what's the least boring thing we could do?
43:49Elon MuskAnd ironically boring.
43:56Elon MuskSo I think if the team of people who did what you saw there, then if some of those resources were applied to personalized mass transit, then could have. There's the potential for significant breakthrough.
44:14Elon MuskBut obviously that can only happen with public support. And so hope that if we can ask for your support, that would be great. I really appreciate it.
44:37Elon MuskYeah, really like to thank everyone involved who've worked with the city's Lights Council Member Koretz, in particular, community members Temple and LA Metro, and really trying to make sure all the stakeholders are involved and that we get as much feedback as possible and do something that is useful and ultimately may delight those who use it.
45:04Elon MuskSo are there more questions that we should answer?
45:06Steve DavisI think. Okay, there we go.
45:14ModeratorSo I know we addressed a lot of the frequently asked questions, but when you guys came in tonight, you guys submitted some question cards as well as utilize our interactive Q and A platform.
45:24ModeratorSo the questions that you submitted have been voted and the ones that voted rose to the top. We'll address those now. First question, what engineering challenges are you expecting from drilling underwater?
45:38ModeratorAnd are you considering using immersed tube tunnels?
45:44Elon MuskYeah, actually the tunnels are, I believe, water and gas proof too. Well, Jen, why don't you answer the two?
45:56ModeratorOur alignment in Los Angeles. Our alignment in Los Angeles is actually above the water table. So we won't be tunneling underwater in la. But.
46:05Elon MuskBut, but we can't.
46:07ModeratorBut we can. Exactly.
46:09Elon MuskAnd really the gas permeability is a bigger issue than water because you have to be gas impermeable to call it roughly 5 atmospheres. So.
46:19ModeratorAnd I would just add that, you know, our tunnels are sealed to, you know, water and air.
46:24Steve DavisSo looking long term, I mean, hyperloop. The whole concept of hyperloop is keeping a seal. So we've obviously designed from day one for that, and that includes water, methane and just all air.
46:36Steve DavisSo I mean, it's really a sealing exercise which I think we've done pretty well with.
46:40Elon MuskYeah, it's Interesting. If you have a tunnel that is capable of holding 5 atmospheres of pressure, then if you draw a vacuum on that, you only subtracted one atmosphere.
46:53Elon MuskSo as long as your system has a very low leak rate, you can maintain a vacuum and still have 4 atmospheres of compressive resistance.
47:05ModeratorSo we'll take it to one of the question cards. You guys address this a little bit, but how much would it cost to travel from LAX to Sherman Oaks?
47:13Elon MuskWell, I think it was like a dollar one.
47:26Elon MuskWhat is the most tube tunnel?
47:29ModeratorAnother question we got from, from Slido is utilities. You touched on this. You know how. How far beneath are we for the utilities?
47:40Elon MuskYeah, we're way beneath the utilities. That's just. We'll essentially clear the utilities by at least 20 or 30ft at the very lowest end. So if we need to, we'll go as low as we need to.
47:53Elon MuskWe will go lower if we need to, but we can go hundreds of feet underground. It's no problem.
47:58Steve DavisYeah, it's generally the answer is just always go deeper. You pull the as built, you see where the utilities are and you design to make sure you're so far below them that they just don't care.
48:05Elon MuskYeah, yeah.
48:10ModeratorWhen are we going to get our flamethrowers? Our nada. Flamethrowers.
48:16Elon MuskI was hoping you wouldn't ask that question. We're working actually, I think quite soon. So we encountered some delivery challenges where I guess they don't like it if you ship things with propane.
48:37Elon MuskBut so we've got a solution. We have a solution which is custom delivery to your house or business with a. With a boring company delivery van.
48:48Steve DavisMe and Jen are going to show up at your house. This is true. With a flamethrower. Yeah, yeah. Not a flamethrower.
48:54ModeratorPersonal delivery.
48:56Elon MuskYeah. We're just going to deliver it to you with. We're just going to get some vans and people and deliver to. Yeah, yeah.
49:02Steve DavisStarts in two weeks. Yeah.
49:03Elon MuskSo we're starting deliveries in two weeks.
49:05ModeratorYep.
49:05Elon MuskYeah.
49:11ModeratorAll right. What lessons did we learn from modifying Godot that we're able to apply to Linestorm?
49:18Elon MuskWow. There's a ton.
49:19HostA lot.
49:21Elon MuskYeah. With Godot, which is the name of the first machine, Gnome is a conventional. Essentially a conventional tunnel boring machine. And we did not know how to dig tunnels at all, actually.
49:36Elon MuskAnd like, wow. What is involved in digging a tunnel? What permits are required? What are the engineering challenges? And so Godot was all about, obviously a lot of waiting and like figuring things out.
49:48Elon MuskAnd so going from Godot to modified Highly modified conventional boring machine. But it's essentially a hybrid between a conventional boring machine and then Prufrock, which is the fully boring company design machine.
50:17Elon MuskSo, Prufrock, that'll be quite a radical change. Like Fearfrocket will be, we think, probably about 10 times aspirationally, 15 times faster than current boring machines aspirationally, but I think very likely 10 times.
50:36Elon MuskAnd then Linestorm would be hopefully three or four times, but at least, I think at least two or three times faster than current boring machines. As a hybrid solution, the main thing to do with Landstorm is to automate the segment direction and to be able to keep modifying it to where we can do continuous drilling and segment direction.
51:06Elon MuskSo there's a lot more automation. There's a lot more. Yeah.
51:19Elon MuskI mean, these things are.
51:21Steve DavisThe pit as well. The automated pit on the other side.
51:23Elon MuskYeah, Like a lot of these things, like they're like really, really simple. Like they're not. It's like not rocket science. We really need to get the dirt out fast.
51:39Steve DavisSo
51:41Elon Muskit's not actually the tunnel boring machine that, for example, is an issue there, but you need two lanes so that you're not going all the way into the tunnel, getting a bunch of dirt and then going all the way out.
51:52Elon MuskYou want to be able to cross. And so being able to have a place where we can switch, where there's like a passing lane, essentially, so you can bring tunnel reinforcing segments in and dirt out at the same time, that's actually quite a huge thing.
52:13Elon MuskThat alone would be probably a doubling or tripling of boring machine speed. A lot of these things are really quite boring. What about a passing lane? Yeah, sure. Ok, let's do that.
52:26Steve DavisBetween the passing lane, the fast muck dump in the automated segment reactor, that should be a tripling of speed.
52:32Elon MuskYeah, yeah.
52:35ModeratorWhere will the entrance and exit systems be and won't they create a line causing even more traffic?
52:42Elon MuskYeah. So where will the entrances and exits be and won't that cause traffic? Where the entrances and exits are. The reason we think that will not cause traffic traffic is that there will be a very large number of entrances and exits, all of which are quite small.
52:58Elon MuskAnd so they'd be the size of a parking space or a few parking spaces, and there'd be many of them. And they'd be woven throughout the fabric of a city.
53:07Elon MuskSo instead of having a small number of stations like a subway, which would then dump out a huge number of people all at once, and that does create a localized traffic jam, this would have Dozens or hundreds of stations.
53:21Elon MuskThat would only put a small number of people out at each station and not create a traffic jam where people at each point, because we're not concentrating the entrance and exit of the passengers.
53:34Steve DavisYeah, 16 people get out.
53:36Elon MuskYeah. Like, how much traffic can 16 people create? And that's sort of maximum. I think probably most of the time it'll be fewer than that.
53:46ModeratorA couple more questions. Sure.
53:48Elon MuskI mean, if they're. Yeah, yeah, sure. That's a good question. I don't know. I get like a lot of flack these days for questions.
54:01ModeratorAll right. Would the boring company be willing to do a full eir?
54:06Elon MuskYeah, totally. We're definitely going to do a full EIRO EIR for a much larger system. It'll just take us a while to formulate that EIR and then submit it for approval to the state, and then it takes a while for the state to digest that and provide the approval.
54:26Elon MuskWe don't expect there to be any issues with the eir. It's just something that takes a lot of time to do. And we want to make sure that the EIR is informed by.
54:36Elon MuskBy these research tunnels so that we submit the ideally most correct EIR that we can.
54:44Steve DavisYeah, exactly. EIR is a big deal and we want to do it and it takes over a year or two years, whatever the number is. So you want to make sure when you go into that, you know exactly what you are going to build and it is the most useful thing.
54:55Steve DavisAnd we don't have that knowledge today. And that's why we're looking for feedback and going out to the public, because we want to be sure when we do it that it is the right system.
55:03Elon MuskYeah.
55:04HostGreat.
55:05ModeratorAnd this will be our last question. This came from a question card. Will you organize a big party before the tunnel launch?
55:14Elon MuskOf course, yes. I was thinking, like, this would be like a really trippy place to throw a party, but it'd be really fun and feel like, I don't know, like pre, post apocalyptic or something.
55:33ModeratorYeah.
55:35Elon MuskSo bizarre. But I think partying a tunnel will be kind of fun.
55:39ModeratorYeah, I think so, too. You're on record saying it, so. Yeah, it's got to happen.
55:42Elon MuskAbsolutely.
55:44ModeratorAll right.
55:44Elon MuskAll right, thanks, everyone.