Elon Musk wants to create underground 3D tunnel network by drilling narrow tunnels
Elon Musk, the chief executive of SpaceX and Tesla, said at the TED conference that to create a 3D network of underground tunnels for cars, he wants to reduce the cost of drilling by drilling relatively narrow tunnels.
Musk has said he hopes to have created a 3D network of underground tunnels in the future to reduce current traffic and congestion. The idea is to use narrow tunnels that the cars enter via a lift system. These are in fact electrically powered platforms on which the cars remain stationary, and which travel through the tunnel at a speed of about 200 km/h. Because no allowance has to be made for space for exhaust gas ventilation and extra space to prevent crashes, the tunnels only need to be about 3.5 meters wide.
The problem is that tunneling is time consuming and expensive. Because the diameter of the tunnels that Musk provides is twice as small as the average tunnels that are used today, the costs for drilling are also a lot lower, according to Musk. He also wants to prevent that the tunnel boring machines are only busy drilling half the time. The other half of the time is used to reinforce the bored tunnel. Musk wants to do this drilling and amplification at the same time through a machine yet to be designed that can do both. He hopes this will speed up drilling and reduce costs by a factor of eight, making his tunnel project feasible.
The idea for the tunnel project originated when Musk was stuck in Los Angeles traffic last December. This frustration led Musk to the idea of building a tunnel boring machine, under the name The Boring Company. The idea is not only to solve urban traffic jams, but the tunnels could also become part of the hyperloop. The hyperloop concept is based on a vacuum tube in which you can move from place A to place B at high speed, which in theory makes it a useful concept for transport.
Musk previously said he likes flying vehicles, but he can’t imagine how the flying car could be a “scalable” solution to the congestion problem. He sees a number of problems associated with flying cars, such as the downward force that must be generated to take off and stay in the air, the noise the vehicles will make and the risk of mid-air collisions, which are also dangerous. can be for people on the ground.
Speaking at the TED conference, Musk also said he thinks it will be another two years before self-driving car technology has advanced to the point where we can fall asleep at the wheel. He also indicated that it is still quite a challenge to make it function properly 99.9 percent of the time. Because if a car crashes once out of a thousand cases, it is not yet a completely safe technology. Musk said it will never be perfect. According to him, we gradually have to accept that although the system is very safe, it can fail one in a thousand times and lead to a crash.
Musk also briefly touched on the Tesla Model 3, which is likely to go into production in July. This model will have an autopilot that only uses cameras and GPS; lidar or a radar system is not used. In fact, a passive system is applied that corresponds to what a person sees. Musk says the autonomous driving system based mainly on cameras is ten times better at safe driving than humans. He thinks it will be possible to drive a Tesla Model 3 completely autonomously from Los Angeles to New York by the end of this year, without the need for a single human intervention.