ITS HAPPENING! Elon Musk Reveals NEW Boring Company Update!

The boring company has been making impressive moves lately and is on track to developing the most impressive underground system ever seen. The company is developing new machinery, building new tunnels, and expanding its famous Las Vegas Loop. So what progress has the company made and what plans does it have for the future? The Bastrop facility. Elon Musk revealed footage showing the zero-emission tunnel boring machine Proofrock 2 emerging from the ground in October from the company's Bastrop facility in Texas. This comes after the company released a video in 2021 showing the TBM come alive at the same facility. In contrast to other TBMs and the company's former tunneling machine Godot, Proofrock is electric, designed to combine mega-infrastructure projects in a matter of weeks rather than years. Its current design makes it much faster, more efficient, and environmentally friendly than most of the other machines in the industry. As with most of what Elon Musk does, this second-generation borer was produced in-house by the boring company. According to the tunneling company, each Proofrock 2 is designed to mine one mile per week, making it six times faster than the TBC's previous generation TBM. The speed of the TBM is one-fourth or one-fifth of a snail's pace, as your typical average garden snail has a speed of 0.05 miles per hour. The boring machine is going to be digging at a very slow pace, but tunneling is a slow game. The goal with Proofrock 2 is to produce one tunneling machine per month, all mining at one mile per week. When this happens, the total full capacity comes up to 600 miles per year and may increase when the machine finally beats the speed of the snail in 2024. Elon Musk didn't reveal the distance completed by the boring machine, but a Bastrop County resident, Chap Ambrose, provided aerial footage of the location and tunnel alignment drawings to give us an idea of the bigger picture. From the details received, the total length covered by the TBM from start to finish was 131 meters, or approximately 430 feet, not up to a mile. At the starting position, the machine went in at an angle of 17.5 degrees, continuing in that trajectory, flattened out for a bit, and returned to the surface at the same angle of 17.5 degrees. The difference between the surface of the ground and the deepest part of the root of the tunnel is close to 14 feet. As a point of reference, less than 20 miles of underground subway tunnels have been constructed in the United States over the last 20 years, and digging 600 miles per year is an astronomical increase. With the successful launch of Proofrock 2, the tunneling company is primed to perform its full-scale testing of the Hyperloop, a theoretical transportation system that can send passengers through a tunnel at a speed of 600 miles per hour. This means that a trip from Washington to New York will take about 30 minutes, and a trip from Washington D.C. to Baltimore will take just 8 minutes. Despite the idea being introduced in a white paper in 2013 and several competitions held to facilitate engineers' interest in the concept, no working example of the proposed Hyperloop has been brought to existence. According to Musk, it will take about $7.5 billion to complete such a project, including the vehicle transportation system. Still, the boring company aims to make Musk's dreams a reality, and will start working on building an operational Hyperloop in the coming years. Also, the company's not going to be hard-pressed for funds to complete its tunneling projects. During its Series C funding round, it raised $675 million, bringing the company's valuation to $5.67 billion. In a press release, it declosed that the funds would be used to scale current and upcoming loop projects by increasing hiring across different sectors like engineering, production, and operations. It will also aid the development of Proofrock 3, a model faster and more efficient than its predecessors. And if you want to hear more, make sure you hit the like button and subscribe to the channel. But every project still has its ups and downs. The company filed paperwork with the Texas Commission of Environmental, seeking permission to dump 142,500 gallons of treated water per day into the Colorado River. The residents of the area were quick to raise their objections about the matter, stating that no kind of wastewater should be dumped in the Texas water supply. It's not unusual for companies like TBC to make such a request, but the company didn't release any statements explaining what it means by treated water, and how treated the water's going to be. The Boring Projects Elon Musk and The Boring Company have been busy improving their technology and winning contracts. The company is in talks with Alamo City officials to develop an underground transit tunnel combining San Antonio International Airport with the city's downtown area. There are still a lot of complications surrounding the approval, considering that the construction will cost upward of $290 million and requires government approval. Last year, the company was awarded a contract to build a tunnel connecting downtown Florida to the beach. However, its signature project is the Las Vegas Loop. In 2019, the Las Vegas Convention Center Visitors Authority awarded TBC a $48.7 million contract to create an underground transportation system. Approval for the project was given by Clark County, and by February 2020, the first tunnel was completed underneath the West Hall of the Convention Center. Clark County later approved TBC to construct a tunnel system connecting the LVCC to casinos along the Strip, Alligiant Stadium, Harry Reid International Airport, downtown Las Vegas, and eventually Los Angeles. The Convention Center Loop consists of three stations at the West, South, and Central Halls, connected by two bi-directional tunnels running parallel to each other. That has been in operation for over a year, taking passengers to different areas of the Convention Center by using chauffeured Teslas. The second tunnel linking Resorts World to LVCC has been completed. However, it does not connect to the first loop. It runs from the hotel under Las Vegas Boulevard, then under Elvis Presley Boulevard, and ends at the new Riviera Station at the northwestern point of the Convention Center, and one block away from the Convention Center West Station. This is a unidirectional tunnel, and at the moment, it will only take passengers to different exhibition halls at the Convention Center. Since it is a one-way tunnel, passengers can only go in one direction at a time, with an expected travel time of two to four minutes. Phase two will involve the expansion of a unidirectional tunnel from the Convention Center Riviera Tunnel to the West Station, and phase three will then connect the Resort World Tunnel to the first Convention Center loop. The third phase is expected to start soon and will be completed in 2023. The system is designed to transport up to 4,000 people per hour across the Convention Center, but the loop isn't there yet, as the highest number of passengers transported so far is 1,355. Once the loop is completed, the company is targeting a throughput of up to 57,000 passengers per hour on the 29-mile, 51-station Vegas loop. The Boring Self-Driving Fleet Steve Hill, the CEO of the Las Vegas Convention Center, shared details regarding the self-driving Tesla fleet for the Las Vegas Tunnel. Elon Musk said on AI Day that the FSD Beta software would be ready for wide public release by the end of the year, giving its vehicles the ability to operate through any situation. The tunnels were built specifically for self-driving Tesla vehicles. By the end of this year, or sometime next year, the tunnels will be serviced by driverless, high-capacity cars driving from one station to another swiftly. This would not happen suddenly, as the cars will be switched to the full self-driving system one at a time. During this process, safety drivers will still be in place to ensure that the vehicles can perform adequately on their own, and once they have been proven, they will be removed completely. The advent of the pandemic pushed officials to stop the introduction of high-capacity vehicles as a means of transport, using the Tesla instead to carry three passengers at a time. But once the FSD is safely implemented and the system expands, Tesla's Robovan is expected to be used in the tunnels. The Robovan can easily be configured to carry either humans or cargo, or both, so designing a version of the loop system won't be a problem for the Boring Company. Tesla will focus on developing the Robovan after the Cybertruck, Semi, and Roadster. The Robovan will be constructed using the Cybertruck's platform, and Elon Musk commented on this three years ago, telling Jay Leno that the size of the Cybertruck will be reduced by three percent so that it can fit the Boring Tunnels. The Boring Company is gradually making the idea of a futuristic underground system a reality, and we can only wait to see what it becomes when completed. In case you want to watch more fascinating videos, click the videos on the screen now. If you enjoyed the video, don't forget to subscribe with all notifications turned on.