The Boring Company, Elon Musk’s company that wants to reduce traffic jams in cities, made its first public demonstration at CES 2022. The videos posted by journalists there are quite ironic. Indeed, the tunnels seem to be the source of many… traffic jams.
Should The Boring Company, literally “the boring company”, rename itself the disappointing company? But it’s a certain revolution presented by Elon Musk in 2018. The principle is simple, but at the very least ambitious: dig tens of kilometers of tunnels under cities to pass part of the traffic. Thanks to the many stops, similar to metro stations, this solution could reduce traffic jams on roads in the open air.
But for now, the result does not seem to be up to par. At CES in Las Vegas, the richest man in the world invited many journalists to test his service in life size. The videos that emerge are somewhat appalling. Indeed, the tunnels are at the very origin of the problems which they seek to avoid: the traffic jam. To get to our destination in record time, we’ll come back.
Elon Musk’s anti-traffic jam solution disappoints
On the videos, we can thus observe several Tesla lined up in the tunnels, driven by drivers and dropping off up to three passengers at the various stops. The demonstration could have been impressive if the cars weren’t moving less than 10 km / h – and if we let ourselves go to appreciate the retro-futuristic design, a bit claustrophobic of the walls.
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Another rather worrying observation: you should obviously not drag yourself out of your vehicle if you do not want to keep the person behind you waiting. In other words, at the current stage, the service can only be viable if it supports only a few users. Not very practical for a solution aimed at eradicating traffic jams, therefore. However, it should be noted that the tunnel was constantly at its maximum capacity, namely 70 vehicles, which did not improve its efficiency.
