After introducing the company with a joke in 2016, Elon Musk’s The Boring Company garnered a lot of attention by signing deals with large cities around the U.S. to build tunnels filled with high speed autonomous vehicles to ferry people from one location to another while avoiding above-ground traffic. As time has elapsed, though, every element of Musk’s plan appears to have fallen apart.
A scathing report from the Wall Street Journal found that the company has slowly stopped advertising the autonomous aspects of its plan, has ghosted several clients, and just given up on building the majority of its proposed tunnels. In the one tunnel that it has built, it hasn’t even been able to avoid traffic, as the tiny 0.8-mile loop that is filled with human-driven Teslas frequently suffers from traffic jams when the volume of users rises.
In other places, such as Ontario, California, the tunnel never even happened. Musk’s company initially said that it could build a four-mile tunnel from the Ontario International Airport to a commuter train station for $45 million, a fraction of the $1 billion street-level rail connection that was initially suggested.
By late 2021, though, the cost projection for the tunnel rose to almost $500 million. The real kicker came, though, when the San Bernardino County Transportation Authority asked for a third-party environmental review, as is required by state law, and The Boring Company simply gave up.
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Traffic is driving me nuts. Am going to build a tunnel boring machine and just start digging…
— Elon Musk (@elonmusk) December 17, 2016
“We tried to reach agreement with them,” Carrie Schindler, the authority’s deputy executive director, told the WSJ. “We went through the standard request for proposal process. And ultimately at the end of that process, they decided not to propose.”
Despite blaming government and bureaucracy for getting in the way of progress, Musk’s company has failed to produce results even when government officials did everything they could to get a boring project going.
In Maryland, the company had once planned to build a high-speed tunnel system between Baltimore and Washington, D.C. There, Governor Larry Hogan granted the company conditional permits in October 2017 and an environmental permit a few months later. According to Maryland officials, all The Boring Company had to do was show up and start digging. And yet, years have now passed, and the project has not started. The company, however, has taken the Maryland project off its website.
Although much of the excitement surrounding The Boring Company has been around how little it claimed it could build these major infrastructure projects for, some has also come down to bold claims made by Musk about the company’s supposedly innovative digging technology.
The one boring machine that the company currently owns, though, is second-hand and the claims that Musk has made about the company’s industry-leading abilities (electric tunneling machines, continuous construction of tunnel linings, digging from above ground) aren’t actually new or unusual in the boring industry.
According to Lok Home, the president of Robbins Co., a tunnel-boring machine manufacturer, Musk’s claims about digging speed have been “totally unrealistic.” The one place his company has actually managed to complete a tunnel, Las Vegas, has conditions that are “about as easy as it gets.”
Surprisingly, though, the tunneling industry appears to be the only stakeholder to benefit from Musk’s bloviating and broken promises. While The Boring Company has left cities and states in the lurch, they have, at least, started considering tunnels as a viable alternative to above-ground transportation solutions. Ontario, California, for instance, is now looking at bids from other tunneling companies.