The Boring Company has raised US$675m, which will be used to increase hiring across engineering, operations and production for its Loop underground transport projects and to accelerate the research and development of its Prufrock tunnel boring machines and future products.
The company reckons that Prufrock machines will be able to construct mega-infrastructure projects in a matter of weeks instead of years.
Musk has said that he founded The Boring Company (TBC) to revolutionise transportation. The company’s stated missions include “solving” traffic. “To solve the problem of soul-destroying traffic, roads must go 3D. Tunnels minimise usage of valuable surface land and do not conflict with existing transportation systems. A large network of tunnels can alleviate congestion in any city,” it said.
Another aim is to clear cities of traffic. “In many major cities around the world, roads take up an extraordinary proportion of available real estate, often monopolising an astounding 20% to 30% of space, and up to 60% if you include parking,” the company says. “By placing transportation systems underground, valuable surface land can be used for pedestrians, green spaces, and recreation.”
The third part of the mission is to enable rapid point-to-point transportation. TBC’s planned Loop is an express public transportation system that it said resembles an underground highway more than a subway system.” If a subway or traditional light rail line had 100 stops, a train would typically stop at each station, so the trip between Stop 1 and Stop 100 would be long,” it explained. “In contrast, Loop passengers travel directly to their destination, anywhere between Stop 1 to Stop 100, without stopping at the intermediate stations. In Las Vegas, for example, if a train stopped at every hotel on Las Vegas Blvd, a trip from the airport to the convention centre would take over 25 minutes vs 5 minutes with TBC’s system. This transportation architecture can be applied intra-city (Loop) and, with increased boring speed, can be applied inter-city (Hyperloop).”
TBC’s first major Loop project, Vegas Loop, is located in Las Vegas, Nevada. In October 2021, the Clark County Commissioners unanimously approved Vegas Loop, a 29-mile tunnel network connecting 51 stations.
TBC has spent the last five years developing core technologies, including its proprietary tunnel boring machine called Prufrock. “Prufrock is a next generation tunnel boring machine designed to construct mega-infrastructure projects in a matter of weeks instead of years, and at a fraction of the cost,” said the company. The current iteration of Prufrock, called Prufrock-2, is designed to mine at up to a mile a week. Prufrock-3 is designed to be even faster, said TBC, with the medium-term goal of 1/10 human walking speed, or 7 miles/day. “In the short term, if each Prufrock-2 mines at 1 mile/week, and TBC produces 1 new Prufrock machine per month, then TBC will be introducing 600 miles/year of capacity. As a point of reference, less than 20 miles of underground subway tunnel has been constructed in the United States in the last 20 years.”
TBC said that core technological innovations driving Prufrock’s progress are:
- Porpoising – Prufrock is designed to “porpoise”, meaning it launches directly from the surface, mines underground, and re-emerges upon completion. This allows Prufrock to begin tunneling within 48 hours of arrival on site, said TBC, eliminating the need to excavate pits for launch and providing the capability to ultimately retrieve the machine for rapid reuse.
- Continuous mining – installing the tunnel’s precast segments simultaneously while mining eliminates the need to stop the TBM every couple of metres.
- ZPIT (Zero People in Tunnel) – Prufrock is designed to be capable of operating completely remotely and autonomously via computerised systems and requires zero people in the tunnel to operate.
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