Billionaire Elon Musk could be planning to connect some of the operations of his companies in Austin, Texas, by tunnel.
Musk’s The Boring Co. filed an application this week to build a private access tunnel at 12733 Tesla Road near Tesla's new electric vehicle factory in East Austin, according to city documents. Musk, founder and CEO of Tesla and the world's wealthiest person, opened the new Austin factory earlier this year.
The address for the proposed tunnel is located on the west side of state Highway 130 and diagonally across from the Tesla plant. The application refers to the project as the Colorado River Connector Tunnel. Additional details about the tunnel were not disclosed.
The application was filed by Hunter Brauer, a senior civil engineer with The Boring Co., a tunnel construction company founded by Musk in 2016. Musk relocated the headquarters of The Boring Co. to Pflugerville, Texas, north of Austin last year from California as well as the headquarters of Tesla to Austin at the car manufacturing site along the Colorado River.
The company didn't respond to requests to comment. The site plan filing lists the Colorado River Project LLC, a Tesla entity that owns about 2,500 acres off state Highway 130, as the previous owner of the proposed tunnel's address.
Musk launched The Boring Co. with the goal of building underground tunnels and hyperloops to help address commutes that have gotten longer and slower as cities across the country grapple with sprawl and traffic congestion. The company has a 1.7-mile loop under the Las Vegas convention center that transports tens of thousands of passengers in Tesla electric vehicles to various meeting halls that could be extended into the city of Las Vegas.
However, transportation analysts say underground tunnels may only be useful in limited circumstances and that more transportation systems often encourage more commuting rather than alleviating the problem.
Musk has proposed dozens of such tunnels across the country, but most of them have yet to be built. In Texas, The Boring Co. has filed paperwork to build at least two other proposed tunnels — one is a pedestrian tunnel in Kyle, a suburb about 22 miles south of downtown Austin, and the other is in San Antonio, about 60 miles southwest of Kyle. The plans in San Antonio, which added the most new residents in the nation over the past year, bringing its total population to nearly 1.5 million people, include building an underground tunnel that connects San Antonio International Airport and the city's downtown.
The Boring Co. also has a project in the works in Bastrop, Texas, using its Prufrock machine, which it describes as an all-electric tunneling tool that can help build mega-infrastructure projects in a matter of weeks instead of years, according to the company's website. Coincidentally, SpaceX, the rocket company founded by Musk based in Hawthorne, California, has been scooping up real estate in Bastrop, which is about 20 miles southeast from Tesla's Austin plant.
The Boring Co.'s website lists dozens of jobs it is hiring for in Austin and in Bastrop.
Meanwhile, Musk stated this week that Tesla is burning money at its new factories in Austin and in Germany.
“Both Berlin and Austin factories are gigantic money furnaces right now,” Musk said in a recent interview with Tesla Owners Silicon Valley, an official fan club following the electric vehicle manufacturer. “There should be a giant roaring sound, which is the sound of money on fire. Berlin and Austin are losing billions of dollars, right now. There’s a ton of expense and hardly any output.
“Getting Berlin and Austin functional and getting Shanghai back in the saddle, fully, are overwhelmingly our concerns,” Musk said during the interview, which was posted on Twitter on Wednesday.
Musk said challenges affecting Tesla’s Austin operations include struggling to manufacture the company’s newer battery product and not receiving tooling equipment from China to make its conventional, smaller batteries