Elon Musk’s Boring Company has allowed the media a first look at the Las Vegas Loop, and it proved to be, well, quite boring.
The Las Vegas Convention Center Loop, The Boring Company’s first full-scale loop project, has been completed, and it’s about to launch commercially.
Musk’s tunneling startup completed the $50 million project in just over a year
A Boring Company Loop system consists of tunnels in which Tesla autonomous electric vehicles travel at high speeds between stations to transport people within a city.
While the ambition is to have complex tunnel systems underneath entire cities, the Las Vegas Convention Center Loop is only 1.5 miles long with three stops, but the hope is to eventually connect it to a larger Loop system under broader Las Vegas, especially the Strip and the airport.
This week, they invited some local media to try the loop for the first time and some of them shared videos:
The consensus seems that the name is fitting, since the experience is quite boring. The vehicles are not going faster than 35 mph, and they are not being driven autonomously.
The Boring Company has previously talked about speeds greater than 120 mph and the vehicles driving themselves within the tunnels.
For now, the fleet of 62 Tesla vehicles that use the loop have drivers.
The company released this very short video to explain the complex process of telling your driver where to drop you off:
While it’s certainly boring, it claims an impressive capacity of moving 4,400 people per hour through the massive convention center.
Eventually, the speed could be increased as Tesla moves to an autonomous version of the system, and the trips could get longer as the Loop is expanded.
Late last year, the expansion of the Las Vegas loop was approved, and it is expected to happen rather quickly with the capacity of the company’s latest boring machine achieving one mile of tunnel per week.
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Author: Fred Lambert
Source: Electrek
