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Elon Musk's First LA Tunnel Nears Completion, With Free Rides To Kick Off This Summer (newatlas.com)
The Boring Company has made some pretty impressive strides in its relatively short existence. Elon Musk first shared his vision for the company in December 2016, promising to solve traffic woes with networks of tunnels for city centers. It is now adding the finishing touches to its first burrow. From a report: In a video shared on Instagram today, Musk showed what a trip through one of these tunnels would look like. He also declared the Boring Company's first tunnel under LA to be almost complete, and that "pending final regulatory approvals, we will be offering free rides to the public in a few months."
Try opening the page in Firefox, then click the little reader mode button in the address bar. Honestly, reader mode is the best feature in any web browser at the moment...
It depends on what you mean by "this". This was their first prototype tunnel, working to develop their boring tech (the whole point of Boring Company is to get TBM speeds up and costs down by 1/2 to 1 order of magnitude). It's just a tunnel. They'll also be testing out their first Loop vehicles in it. Since it's just one leg, they'll just go from one end to the other.
Now, as mentioned, this tunnel is just a prototype. It's to be extended to form an LA Loop system, they're getting started on a NY/DC Loop system right now, bidding for a Chicago Loop system, and planning to start a LA/SF Hyperloop system later this year (confirmed by Musk last night - with the interesting addendum that they have a straightforward way to branch in and out of the Hyperloop tunnels to serve smaller cities en route).
Loop is underground PRT (Personal Rapid Transit). Relatively small vehicles take either people or cars. People generally - and cars always - go directly to their destination, rather than on fixed routes. At peak traffic times, passenger capsules get routed to optimal paths with a few stops on each end that group together people going from and to the same general areas (ala Uber Pool). Underground, the main routes are limited access (like highways); there's never any stopping or significant slowing down / speeding up in them. Feeder tunnels branch on and off (again, akin to a highway system rather than a subway system). Control is 100% automated. Access to and from the surface is from numerous small pod elevator shafts rather than fewer, larger stations; the surface footprint is 1-2 parking spaces per shaft (the surface footprint use is justified by how many vehicles it takes off the roads - even when people travel by car, as they're off all of the roads between the start and end of their journey).
Hyperloop is a low-pressure variant of Loop, designed for near-supersonic speeds (and with the potential to operate in environments with higher speeds of sound as well). Several orders of magnitude lower pressure than atmosphere, many orders of magnitude higher pressure than a hard vacuum (and thus several orders of magnitude easier to maintain the reduced pressure, per unit surface area). Some air in the tubes is essential, at least to the "true" Hyperloop proposal (Hyperloop Alpha; there are now lots of other things calling themselves "Hyperloop" that are just maglev vactrains). In the HA design, the vehicles are suspended by air bearings (like an air hockey puck or hard drive platter), which is comparable to maglev in terms of energy losses. The air bearings are fed by a battery powered, water-cooled compressor, which also shunts the air ahead of the vehicle past it (preventing it from building up a high pressure zone ahead of it). Acceleration is provided by short accelerator segments. Wheels propel the craft at low speeds (akin to Loop) and in emergencies. (And to head people off, yes, Thunderf00t the Biochemist-Pretending-To-Be-An-Engineer does not know what he's talking about)
For anyone who's curious as to what's actually proposed in Hyperloop Alpha, and what's been addressed, Link. Note that this document is several years old, so there's plenty of work that's been done since then. This predated Boring Company, so boring costs were estimated at then-current (much higher) rates, and thus boring segments were minimized. They also had to stop the route on the edges of town (like an airport) to save money, as this also predated Loop.
"WANTED: Sinking ship seeks rats."
That's a rather poor analogy choice. Yes, Model 3 production is late, but it is following a hockey stick growth. Through Q4, production averaged a couple hundred per week. Through most of Q1 it was at 1k/wk. At the end of Q1 it jumped to 2k/wk. Now they're hitting 3k/wk not even half a quarter later.
General rule with Musk projects: Increase estimated timelines by roughly 20-100%, depending on the project and how far ahead you're talking; he always sets ridiculously short timelines for himself. But he generally delivers in the end.
"WANTED: Sinking ship seeks rats."