A Tesla in the boring company tunnel in las vegas | Image Credits:The Boring Company
The Boring Company, Elon Musk’s tunnel-digging company, and Tennessee Governor Bill Lee have announced a plan to build a 10-mile “loop” that will connect Nashville’s downtown and its convention center to the area’s airport.
The project will be privately funded by The Boring Company “and its private partners,” according to the Governor’s press release, though those partners are not named. The Boring Company and local officials will now begin a “public process to evaluate potential routes, engage community stakeholders, and finalize plans for the project’s initial 10-mile phase.”
Construction won’t begin until the project clears the approvals process. But the governor’s office said the first segment of the loop could be operational as “early as fall of 2026.”
If that happens, Nashville would become the second city where The Boring Company has opened such a system, with the first being Las Vegas. The company has spent the last few years in Sin City digging and opening tunnels around the Las Vegas Convention Center, and claims to have given 3 million rides in Teslas to date.
Musk launched The Boring Company in early 2017 (after publicly noodling about the idea on Twitter while stuck in traffic in late 2016), and it has taken many forms since then.
The original video detailing Musk’s idea — now set to private on YouTube — showed vehicles getting removed from surface street gridlock by an elevator-meets-sled system and lowered into a three-dimensional underground network of tunnels. Musk also claimed during the first Trump administration that The Boring Company had received “verbal govt approval” to dig tunnels from New York City to Washington, D.C. that, leveraging hyperloop technology, could make the trip in just 29 minutes.
None of that ever happened. The Boring Company abandoned plans to dig a major tunnel system underneath the greater Los Angeles area after pushback from locals. A similar thing happened in Chicago. And the Boring Company has essentially ghosted many other cities around the country.
The idea of the hyperloop, which Musk admitted to biographer Ashlee Vance came from his hatred of California’s high-speed rail system, was also cast aside. Even the Teslas that traverse the Las Vegas tunnels are being driven by humans, despite Musk’s obsession with self-driving cars.
Instead, The Boring Company now more closely resembles a glorified convention center people-mover, although there are some potential benefits to its approach versus the typical monorail setup. Construction should be less disruptive to Nashville’s daily traffic. And, in its current form at least, it’s not costing taxpayers money.
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