Elon Musk’s Boring Company will focus on hyperloop and tunnels for pedestrians and cyclists



Last month, we learned that Elon Musk’s Boring Company’ is not just about digging tunnels, but it will also electrify transport in the process by putting cars and passengers on “electric sleds”.
The company released this week new images of its electric sled concept for passengers that they plan to use in those tunnels.

There were two kinds of “electric sleds” in the video. One without anything on top but a platform in order for cars to park on it before it goes into the tunnels to connect to an electric railing that propels the vehicle.
The other vehicle had a passenger enclosure and unlike the other sled, it has wheels which mean it should be able to drive on the streets too.We only saw a glimpse of it in the original video, but now the company released more renders of the concept (pictures via Boring Company):


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The company aims to reduce the cost of boring tunnels and one of their main ideas to achieve a significant cost reduction is to reduce the diameter – something they think will be possible by stabilizing the vehicles on sleds.
If the vehicle is locked on a rail instead of swerving between two lines, the tunnel’s diameter can be much smaller. Musk estimates that reducing the diameter alone will reduce tunneling costs by 3-4 times.
In a sense, it sounds like this vehicle could also replace Tesla’s planned electric minibus that Musk announced in Tesla’s product lineup last year.
The minibus was supposed to be built on the Model X chassis and feature Tesla’s latest autonomous features in order to enable a point-to-point public transport system, but Musk said earlier this month that he wasn’t so sure “if that’s actually going to be something that makes sense in the shared, fully autonomous environment.”
A higher density of passengers would help for traffic, but Musk thinks that the cost of a fully autonomous shared fleet would be so low that a bus, even if autonomous, wouldn’t be economically attractive anymore.
On the other hand, the same concept in tunnels would enable passengers to bypass traffic and achieve greater speeds since they think they can reach 125 mph on the electric rails.
The concept is actually similar to Hyperloop One’s idea to use pods that can both drive on the streets and enter their hyperloop tubes:

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