Elon Musk’s Boring Company Provides Details Of Chicago O’Hare Express Service

The Boring Company — the tunneling venture of SpaceX and Tesla CEO Elon Musk — has landed its first commercial deal, “to design, build, finance, operate and maintain an O’Hare Express service.” The official announcement about the City of Chicago awarding the contract to the Boring Company would be made Thursday by Mayor Rahm Emanuel and Musk, but the company provided details on its website about what the proposed system would be like.

The network will be based on Musk’s Loop concept — “a high-speed underground public transportation system in which passengers are transported on autonomous electric skates traveling at 125-150 miles per hour.” Each skate, built on top of a modified Tesla Model X chassis, would carry between 8 and 16 passengers, and would have “a climate controlled cabin, luggage storage space, and Wi-Fi.”

The commute between O’Hare Airport and Block 37 in downtown Chicago would be completed in 12 minutes, but the company hasn’t yet released the alignment map for the tunnel inside which the all-electric, zero-emission electric skates would move. Those would cut down the existing travel time between those two points by well over half.

Fares for the trips have not yet been decided upon by the company but they would “be less than half the typical price of taxi/ride-share services, though higher than the Blue Line,” the Boring Company said on its website. The Blue Line subway takes about 40 minutes and $5, while a taxi would usually cost something between $25 and $30.

Frequency of the Loop electric skates could be as high as one leaving each station every 30 seconds. The Chicago Express Loop — the company’s name for the service — will run seven days a week, for 20 hours a day.

It is not yet known how much the whole project will cost the Boring Company, but it will fund the entirety of it privately, it said. According to a report in the Chicago Tribune, the company’s estimate for the cost of the project is under $1 billion. In return, it would make money from not only the sale of tickets — likely priced at $20-25 each — but also from advertising spots and branding inside the vehicles.

This would be the first serious endeavor for the company, which began its life following a tweet by Musk expressing frustration with urban transport congestion. (The company still has that mindset, with the Chicago section on its website referring to its aim “to alleviate soul-destroying traffic.”) Previously, the company has only made money selling branded hats and flamethrowers, through which it has raised over $11 million. That is a tidy sum in of itself, but nowhere near enough to fund the construction of the Chicago Express Loop.

It would also be the first real test for the Boring Company’s technology and its ability to execute a large public undertaking. Until now, it has only dug one tunnel under Los Angeles (the Chicago project would have two) and has started to build another connecting New York and Washington, D.C.