The Boring Firm, Elon Musk’s tunnel-digging firm, and Tennessee Governor Invoice Lee have announced a plan to construct a 10-mile “loop” that may join Nashville’s downtown and its conference middle to the realm’s airport.
The undertaking might be privately funded by The Boring Firm “and its personal companions,” based on the Governor’s press launch, although these companions will not be named. The Boring Firm and native officers will now start a “public course of to guage potential routes, have interaction group stakeholders, and finalize plans for the undertaking’s preliminary 10-mile section.”
Building received’t start till the undertaking clears the approvals course of. However the governor’s workplace mentioned the primary section of the loop might be operational as “early as fall of 2026.”
If that occurs, Nashville would turn out to be the second metropolis the place The Boring Firm has opened such a system, with the primary being Las Vegas. The corporate has spent the previous few years in Sin Metropolis digging and opening tunnels across the Las Vegas Conference Heart, and claims to have given 3 million rides in Teslas thus far.
Musk launched The Boring Firm in early 2017 (after publicly noodling concerning the thought on Twitter whereas caught in site visitors in late 2016), and it has taken many types since then.
The unique video detailing Musk’s thought — now set to personal on YouTube — confirmed automobiles getting faraway from floor road gridlock by an elevator-meets-sled system and lowered right into a three-dimensional underground community of tunnels. Musk additionally claimed through the first Trump administration that The Boring Firm had obtained “verbal govt approval” to dig tunnels from New York Metropolis to Washington, D.C. that, leveraging hyperloop expertise, might make the journey in simply 29 minutes.
None of that ever occurred. The Boring Firm deserted plans to dig a serious tunnel system beneath the greater Los Angeles area after pushback from locals. A similar thing happened in Chicago. And the Boring Firm has essentially ghosted many other cities around the country.
The thought of the hyperloop, which Musk admitted to biographer Ashlee Vance got here from his hatred of California’s high-speed rail system, was additionally forged apart. Even the Teslas that traverse the Las Vegas tunnels are being pushed by people, regardless of Musk’s obsession with self-driving vehicles.
As an alternative, The Boring Firm now extra intently resembles a glorified conference middle people-mover, though there are some potential advantages to its strategy versus the standard monorail setup. Building needs to be much less disruptive to Nashville’s day by day site visitors. And, in its present type a minimum of, it’s not costing taxpayers cash.
Whereas the Tennessee governor’s workplace cites The Boring Firm’s security file in Las Vegas within the announcement — the loop “not too long ago earned a 99.57% security and safety score” from the Division of Homeland Safety and Transportation Safety Administration, based on the press launch — it’s cautious to not point out the difficulty that Musk’s tunnel-digging effort has skilled throughout building. (The governor’s workplace couldn’t be reached for remark.)
Like with other Musk companies, the tempo at which The Boring Firm operates — the identical velocity that the Tennessee governor’s workplace praised in its announcement — has been a priority for a few of its employees.
Final yr, Fortune’s Jessica Mathews reported {that a} Boring Firm worker instructed his then-safety supervisor: “I’ve watched my pals get injured because of the quick tempo we’ve been working… I refuse to be the primary fatality on this firm’s historical past. No tunnel is value a single individual’s life.”
That very same security supervisor even spoke to Fortune on the file, saying: “The circumstances they had been instructed to work in had been truthfully nearly insufferable … I couldn’t repair any of the issues that had been flawed.”