Enlarge / Human driver will continue to be a job at the Boring Company Las Vegas Loop for the foreseeable future. (credit: PATRICK T. FALLON/AFP via Getty Image)
Autonomous driving capabilities are a central component of Tesla’s stratospheric share price, with CEO Elon Musk repeatedly telling investors that they’re the difference between “being worth a lot of money or worth basically zero.” But real-world performance on the road lags far behind Musk’s claims, with the latest data point coming from another Musk venture, the Boring Company, and its tunnels under Las Vegas.
The Boring Company might be Elon Musk’s strangest side hustle. Whether it was sparked by a desire to avoid traffic commuting to SpaceX or part of an insidious plan to undermine rail projects, the results for the sewer-sized tunnels have been about what you’d expect: Proposed tunnels between Washington DC and Baltimore, underneath I-405 in Los Angeles, and from Chicago to its major airport remain literal pipe dreams.
So far, there’s just a 2.2-mile loop with three stations serving the Las Vegas Convention Center, albeit with the potential to expand the subterranean system to 68 miles (110 km) in total.
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