Elon Musk’s other Earth-based transportation company, the Boring Company, has so far been living up to its name by digging featureless underground tunnels. These tunnels were once going to be the backbone of a wildly futuristic transportation system that used tubes with the air extracted to form a vacuum, through which magnetically levitated pods would bolt at incredible speeds. Then it became just a tunnel with a Tesla driving through it. If you’re disappointed, don’t be — Elon assures us that it’s “way more profound than it sounds.”
I mean, driving a cars through tunnels is something we’ve been doing as a society for over a century, so the bar to being “way more profound” than that sounds, I guess, is pretty low.
We simplified this a lot. It’s basically just Teslas in tunnels at this point, which is way more profound than it sounds.
— Elon Musk (@elonmusk) October 14, 2020
In a tweet yesterday, above, Elon revealed that a Tesla driving through an empty tunnel was profound. The tweet was his response to a fan who posted an earlier promotional image of a futuristic transport pod being lowered into a Hyperloop tunnel via an elevator platform inset into the ground. The tweet also eagerly reminded the world that Las Vegas would “showcase this for the world to see,” referencing the Boring Company’s test tunnel in Las Vegas.
Elon just popped on to let her know that, no, Vegas would not be showing anything like that for the world to see, but, again, that doesn’t matter because of the aching profundity of a Tesla driving in a tunnel.
You might expect people to be disappointed by the switch from futuristic mag-lev pods tearing future-arse through vacuum tunnels to driving through an empty, cramped tunnel in a normal Tesla, but you’d be underestimating the raw power of Elon-stans.
If you don’t believe me, look at this exchange from the same thread, where someone shared a two-second video of driving through the Las Vegas tunnel, with its “new lighting scheme”:
That looks cool
— syrupgoblin???????????????? (@sYrUPGobLinNn) October 14, 2020
That video of an empty, one-lane road in a featureless pus-coloured tunnel convinced someone to respond “That looks cool.”
Does it?
That looks cool? Does this person, actually, genuinely think that “looks cool?” Does this person walk down the street and see a discarded cardboard box that once held rolls of paper towels and do a double-take thinking, “Oh, shit, that’s tight!”
Look, in case you’re confused, it’s not cool. It’s a fucking empty tunnel. And when it’s done, this revolution in mass transit will be all of less than one mile long and transport excited Tesla-driving cool-seekers from the Las Vegas Convention Centre all the way to the Las Vegas Convention Centre.
I suppose, though, as usual, Elon is right. He’s always right. This is way more profound than it sounds, because not only is Elon building small tunnels to drive Teslas through for short distances with no clear way to scale them up to become anything close to useful, he’s also managed to build infrastructure systems that cause large numbers of people to experience incredible delusional thoughts, and even more people to experience vague and unsettling notions of loss and disappointment, as well as questioning the very idea of human progress.
That is way more fucking profound than I’d have ever thought possible. Right again, Elon!