Elon Musk shows the way to avoid LA traffic

Elon Musk’s world-changing ideas can sometimes sound like science fiction or the stuff of dreams, one of the most recent being his plan to tunnel beneath cities and create ultrafast networks for cars to zip across town.

After revealing his idea half a year ago, he set up the Boring Company to get to work in Los Angeles. And over the weekend, Musk shared a photo of the firm’s initial progress: a 500-ft long tunnel, complete with a track for vehicles, and finished surfaces.

This is just the beginning: Musk noted that the tunnel will eventually reach a length of two miles in three to four months; the goal is to build a tunnel that stretches “the whole 405 N-S corridor from LAX to the 101” in about a year. Musk, a man who certainly isn’t shy about championing grand ideas, first mentioned his futuristic boring plan last year, one that apparently came to him while stuck in his car on a gridlocked freeway.

“Traffic is driving me nuts,” he tweeted in December, 2016. “Am going to build a tunnel boring machine and just start digging…” At the time, no one knew what on earth he was talking about. They do now.

On his Instagram page where he posted the tunnel photo, Musk said the Boring Company‘s first route will go “roughly parallel” to Interstate 405 from Los Angeles international airport to Route 101, “with on/off ramps every mile or so.” Right now the tunnel is 500 feet long (152 meters), though it should reach around two miles (3.2 km) within about four months.

If it’s successful, the company will have a huge win on its hands, as it’s never easy securing the necessary permits and clearing regulations to build such infrastructure anywhere in the world as a private firm. But even after that, it’ll have to prove that it can safely send cars and people-pods hurtling through these tunnels at 240 kmph (150mph) to beat traffic. And with that, Musk’s new baby is quickly becoming his most interesting business to watch.