Elon Musk’s Boring Company wants to hold its first tunneling competition

Elon Musk’s Boring Company is asking the public to run a snail next year.

The side project of the founder of Tesla and SpaceX tries to measure interest in a kind of tunnel drilling Olympiad, which the company calls its first “Not-A-Boring competition”.

“The teams will fight for a 30-meter tunnel with a cross-sectional area of ​​0.2 square meters,” says the company’s website.

The winning categories include the fastest to complete a tunnel, the fastest to complete a tunnel and A driveway on which a remote-controlled Tesla can navigate and the most precisely drilled or targeted tunnel.

Currently running:
Look at that:

Take a ride with Elon Musk in the …

2:18

Musk and the Boring Company have set themselves the goal of making tunnel drilling more efficient, more economical and faster.

“We are working on significantly increasing the speed of the tunnel boring machine (TBM),” explains the company’s FAQ. “TBMs are very slow. A snail is effectively 14 times faster than a soft-ground TBM. Our goal is to defeat the snail in one race.“”

So the Boring Company says competitors are asked to answer the question, “Can you hit the snail?”

The Boring Company grew out of Musk’s ambition to revolutionize both inner-city and inner-city transit with its hyperloop and loop designs. Hyperloop is the almost supersonic tube transport from Musk that he started developing open source and some startups. Loop is an underground tunnel system This would allow commuters to avoid traffic by being driven underneath on sledges that travel at twice the speed of the highway.

Because the above concepts are based on the fact that many tunnels can be drilled, the Boring Company was born.

A demonstration tunnel was completed at the SpaceX headquarters in Hawthorne, California. More recently, the company has been digging tunnels under the Las Vegas Convention Center that could be opened for conferences next year if we ever held conferences again.

Overall, however, the promise of Loop and Hyperloop has largely not been implemented. The Boring Company hopes an old-fashioned competition and camaraderie among ambitious innovators could change that. First, however, only a list of potential teams from schools and companies around the world is collected to determine if there is actually enough boring interest.