It sounds like the plot of a James Bond movie: A charismatic billionaire wants to build a network of high tech tunnels beneath America's cities and slay an enemy in the process. But this isn't a summer blockbuster. It's Elon Musk's latest Big Idea. In addition to building electric vehicles, launching rockets, and colonizing Mars, Musk wants to reinvent tunneling and destroy soul-sucking traffic. Just how Musk's latest venture, the wonderfully named Boring Company, will do that remains rather opaque, perhaps even to Musk himself. “We’re just going to figure out what it takes to improve tunneling speed by, I think, somewhere between 500 and 1,000 percent,” he said in February, with the nonchalance of someone ordering a latte. “We have no idea what we’re doing—I want to be clear about that.” "We have no idea what we're doing" are not words that reassure city planners, let alone the folks elected to represent the people of Hawthorne. That's the Los Angeles suburb where SpaceX—Musk's space venture—is located, and the home of the Boring Company's first big dig. And so it was that the Hawthorne city council wanted just a bit more information as it pondered a Boring Company proposal to extend that tunnel two miles beyond the SpaceX property line. Musk dispatched a lieutenant to brief the council during last week's meeting. “Although we are very excited about this innovative project, we want to make sure that we follow the legal procedures that we as a city council were elected to follow,” Mayor pro tempore Haidar Awad said before presiding over a forum marked by general enthusiasm but moments of wariness. And even if the city seems genuinely excited by the project, the 42-minute meeting provided a sense of just how many hurdles the budding infrastructure firm must clear to complete its test tunnel—much less a network of tunnels filled with car-toting sleds or pods flinging people about at nearly the speed of sound. First, the Why If digging tunnels seems grandiose, even for Musk, he would like you to remember that the average LA driver spends more than 100 hours slogging through hellish traffic each year. Musk, never known to do anything the easy way, thinks the solution is to duplicate the city's vast network of roads underground. Building tunnels in as many as 30 layers, he says, creates more than enough space to overcome the rule of induced demand that says expanding roads simply creates more congestion. For short distances, Musk imagines cars taking an elevator underground, then zipping along on “electric skates” riding on rails at up to 125 mph. (It is worth noting that a civil engineer suggested to my colleague Alex Davies that Musk's idea belongs "in the bullshit category.") For longer trips—say New York to Washington, DC—the Boring Company expects its tunnels to house a hyperloop. For the three or four of you who haven't heard, hyperloop is Musk's idea for whisking people between cities in levitating tubes shooting from one place to another at about 700 mph in near-vacuum. Say hello to Godot, the Boring Company's tunnel boring machine. The Boring Company The key to making these things work is tunneling. And the key to making tunneling work, Musk says, is improving the speed, efficiency, and cost of digging big ol' holes. Of course he's very optimistic about his prospects for this. "It's quite difficult to dig tunnels normally," he said in a February TED Talk. "I think we need to have at least a tenfold improvement in the cost per mile of tunneling." Eager to make that happen, Musk bought a used boring machine in May and rechristened it “Godot”. But he isn't waiting. OK, So What’s This Tunnel? The Boring Company wants to build a 2-mile test tunnel 20 to 24 feet underground. The plan calls for making it about 12 feet wide, or about the width of a standard highway lane. No need to make it any wider, SpaceX senior director of construction Brett Horton told the city council, because those car-carrying skates don't need a shoulder. For all his talk about revolutionizing everything but revolutions, Musk isn't doing anything radical here. The Boring Company will use thoroughly conventional tunneling. “This is a proven machine that has already done a tunnel in Sunnyvale,” California, Horton said. “Same segment design, same tunnel-boring machine design. We’re not reinventing the wheel on that.” Digging this tunnel, he said, would let the Boring Company learn about the capabilities of the machine and find ways of making improvements. Horton also told the council members that the tunneling process, which should take just eight months, would prove the company can build “safely, reliably, and for significant cost savings to traditional tunneling projects.” Elon's World