Two Teslas race, one above ground, one underground. Guess which one won?

Finally, Elon Musk's original idea of traveling underground has been put to the test.
By Stan Schroeder  on 
Two Teslas race, one above ground, one underground. Guess which one won?
It's so much faster underground. Credit: Boring Company

In 2016, while stuck in dreadful LA traffic, Elon Musk envisioned a faster way of transportation in busy cities -- by driving underneath them.

Soon after that, Musk started the Boring Company, dedicated to alleviating traffic issues by building underground tunnels, just wide enough for a Tesla car to blaze through.

Now, Boring Company has put Musk's original idea through the test, by racing two Tesla cars; one through normal traffic, and the other through the company's test tunnel in Hawthorne, California.

The company posted the results in a video, below.

Even though the drive is quite short (either way), the underground Tesla reaches its goal in about one and a half minutes. It takes more than four and a half minutes for the other one to arrive at the same spot.

The video is a cool illustration of just how fast driving underground could be, but it doesn't take into account other factors which will surely play a part once the Boring Company's tunnels go commercial, such as wait times at the tunnel elevator.

One interesting tidbit from the video is the lack of any sort of platform or wheel guide for the car in the tunnel, which were planned in initial design. One commenter asked whether the car is driving "127mph in a narrow tunnel just in autopilot," and Elon Musk said that this is "pretty much" the case.

The Boring Company won its first commercial contract yesterday -- it will be building two tunnels to connect the four halls of the Las Vegas Convention Center (LVCC), with the deadline being January 2021.

Topics Tesla

Stan Schroeder
Stan Schroeder
Senior Editor

Stan is a Senior Editor at Mashable, where he has worked since 2007. He's got more battery-powered gadgets and band t-shirts than you. He writes about the next groundbreaking thing. Typically, this is a phone, a coin, or a car. His ultimate goal is to know something about everything.


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