-It's a pep rally.
It's a medieval castle.
It might be the beginning
of a transportation revolution.
It's the grand opening
of Elon Musk's first tunnel.
I'm Washington Post
tech columnist Geoff Fowler,
and I'm in Hawthorn, California,
near Los Angeles
for a ride
in a test tunnel from Boring,
the tunneling company
owned by Elon Musk.
Why is Elon Musk making tunnels?
It's not light he hasn't been
busy sending rockets into space,
trying to produce
the Tesla Model 3,
and battling regulators.
Well, in 2016, Musk founded
the Boring Company
to explore digging tunnels
as the answer to
soul-destroying urban traffic.
Some thought it was a joke,
but $40 million
and two years later,
Boring is ready
for an over-the-top watch party
and to let us go inside.
This test tunnel runs about
40 feet
underneath a mile of road
alongside the headquarters
of SpaceX,
another Musk venture.
At about 12 feet in diameter,
the tunnel is just wide enough
to fit in a single car,
which makes its way down to the
tunnel through an elevator.
Batman would be jealous.
The car that goes through
the tunnel
is a modified
Tesla Model X.
It's got these bumpers
added to the front
that keep it aligned
along the walls of the tunnel.
Boring wouldn't let me
film inside,
but provided
this footage of its own.
Once a light at the front
of the tunnel turned green,
the car was off.
How does it feel in there?
A lot more than riding a roller
coaster than I had expected.
The experience was turbulent.
The car jostled with many bumps
in the concrete
along the bottom of the tunnel,
even though our top speed
reached just 49 miles per hour.
-I do warn you, it's going to be
a slightly bumpy ride.
It's a little rough
around the edges.
-Once they smooth out
some of the bumps,
Musk said cars
could go through the tunnel
at up to 150 miles per hour.
At his launch party, Musk said
the Boring Company
is doing lots of things
to make tunneling faster
and more cost effective.
For one, it's selling bricks
made out of the dirt it digs up,
which Boring demonstrated by
building this medieval castle.
I knew there was a reason
it was here.
Like other Musk endeavors,
Boring is buzzy,
but requires a leap of faith.
For one, Musk's transportation
plan
depends on electric autonomous
cars going mainstream fast.
Then, Boring needs buy-in from
finicky cities and communities.
Last month, Boring withdrew
another project
under L.
A.
after community groups
sued the government.
It has plans for
another tunnel in L.
A.
, as was as ones in Chicago
and the D.
C.
-to-New York corridor.
Is this the future
of transportation?
The Boring Company went from
an Elon Musk tweet
to all of this
in just two years.
But it's gonna take a lot longer
than that before it tunnels
its way
into your neighborhood.
