At a launch event in December 2018, CEO Elon Musk said that the company is working on its third-generation gorging machine called Prufrock. For that machine, they are working to increase the power of the machine by a factor 3, modify the cutter design, and add an automated segment erection system. Musk said existing tunnel boring companies spend only about 10 minutes mining per hour, as the rest is spent installing the reinforcement and deploying all the logistics behind: power, dirt removal, etc. They see a potential 15x improvement in the speed of boring versus the next-best boring technology by engineering a system that automatically takes care of that at the same time as they dig. At the time, Musk said that the new system would be ready “relatively soon.” Now just over a year later, the Boring Company has shared an image of a boring machine with the caption “Prufrock is alive”: Prufrock is alive pic.twitter.com/VH2YDAw4rb