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Elon Musk’s Boring Company tests new car elevator with a Tesla Model S

While talks of upcoming projects and planned routes of Elon Musk’s new Boring Company have changed to long distance hyperloop systems lately, their main project appears to remain a network of tunnels to carry cars on electric sleds under Los Angeles.

Now Elon Musk released a test of the company’s new car elevator to enter those tunnels – using a Tesla Model S.

Imagine the street in front of you being blocked by traffic. What can you do? Nothing.

The idea of the Boring Company’s network of tunnels is to actually have an option – to park on an elevator located on the side of the road, which then lowers your car into a tunnel where it is then parked on top of an electric sled, which carries your car at high-speed in the tunnel.

The main barrier is the cost of boring tunnels, which the company is trying to address by improving boring technology with their Boring Machine 1 (aka Godot).

But the very first step is lowering the cars into the tunnels and Musk released today a test of their first elevator using a Tesla Model S:

https://www.instagram.com/p/BW_-mlYAMrs/

The project is at SpaceX’s headquarters in Hawthorne, California, where Musk recently announced that the Boring Company completed the first segment of the LA tunnel network.

The elevator is right next to the tunnel entrance, which Musk showed on Instagram last month:

https://www.instagram.com/p/BV9C9vEgGNi/?taken-by=elonmusk

That’s the first segment of a tunnel that Musk hope will connect with LAX to Culver City, Santa Monica, Westwood and Sherman Oaks.

Electrek’s Take

They will certainly have to work on a way to prevent people from falling in those elevators after it has been lowered because it certainly looks like a hazard right now.

A regular ramp would seem like a more efficient way to enter a tunnel, but Musk’s vision includes several levels of tunnels, which would make ramps extremely difficult to manage. In this case, an elevator does seem more efficient.

https://youtu.be/u5V_VzRrSBI

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Avatar for Fred Lambert Fred Lambert

Fred is the Editor in Chief and Main Writer at Electrek.

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