godot elon musk boring tunnel
Elon Musk's first tunnel boring machine: Godot. The Boring Company

The Boring Company is just one of Elon Musk’s many projects along with Tesla, SpaceX and Neuralink. The company is working on a network of tunnels under Los Angeles to cut down on “soul-destroying” traffic, as Musk calls it. He first introduced his idea for the network of tunnels at a TED2017 back in the spring and got to work quickly.

On Saturday, Musk tweeted and posted on Instagram a photo of “The Boring Company LA tunnel” which showed the tunnel with what appears to be tracks down the middle as well as pipes on the side of the wall along with wiring.

Musk usually posts updates about his latest work on either Twitter or Instagram, so it isn’t really a surprise that the first photo from within the tunnel came on a Saturday on Twitter. The tunnels have been in the works for months now, with the help of the company’s tunnel digging machine named “Godot.” Musk tweeted that the machine was hard at work back in June. The goal is to create a network that can take users from Westwood to LAX in just five to six minutes.

After the machine had been digging for about a month, Musk posted a video to Instagram of the car elevator the company created to bring cars down to the tunnels. This video of the elevator made it clear that Musk was making progress in creating something in reality that closely resembles a mock video from earlier this year. In the video the company shows how the tunnels will work, including the elevators that take the cars from street level down to the tunnels and onto the skate that the car then travels on. That platform is designed to travel up to 130 miles per hour.

While Los Angeles is the only city Musk and The Boring Company are currently digging under, he tweeted in July that he had gotten “verbal” permission to build a hyperloop underground connecting New York City, Philadelphia, Baltimore and Washington D.C. He estimated that the trip would take about 29 minutes from one end to the other and that the route would connect directly to each city center. This hyperloop would be different than the underground tunnels in that it likely wouldn’t be for vehicles like the tunnels in L.A. rather it would be a tunnel for a specific hyperloop vehicle like those Musk has been holding competitions for. The winning team created a hyperloop that could travel more than 200 mph, and the video of it is dizzying.