interview (1)

Elon Musk discusses his vision for a 3D tunnel network to alleviate traffic congestion. He explains the concept of integrating tunnel entrances and exits seamlessly into the city using elevators and car skates. The tunnels would have no speed limit and could operate at 200 kilometers per hour. Musk addresses concerns about the cost of tunneling and proposes ways to significantly reduce the cost per mile. He also mentions his goal of beating the speed of a tunnel boring machine with his pet snail named Gary. The interviewer acknowledges Musk's ability to dream big and thanks him for inspiring others to do the same. Hey, welcome back to TED. It's great to have you here. Thanks for having me. So, in the next half hour or so, we're going to spend some time exploring your vision for what an exciting future might look like, which I guess makes the first question a little ironic. Why are you boring? Yeah, I ask myself that frequently. We're trying to dig a hole under L.A., and this is to create the beginning of what will hopefully be a 3D network of tunnels to alleviate congestion. So, right now, I think one of the most soul-destroying things is traffic. It affects people in every part of the world. It takes away so much of your life, and it's horrible. It's particularly horrible in L.A. I think you've brought with you the first visualization that's been shown to this. Can I show this? Yeah, absolutely. So, this is the first time, just to sort of show what we're talking about. So, a couple of key things that are important in having a 3D tunnel network. First of all, you have to be able to integrate the entrance and exit of the tunnel seamlessly into the fabric of the city. So, by having an elevator, sort of a car skate that's on an elevator, you can integrate the entrance and exits to the tunnel network just by using two parking spaces. And then, the car gets on a skate. There's no speed limit here. So, we're designing this to be able to operate at 200 kilometers an hour or about 130 miles per hour. So, you should be able to get from, say, Westwood to Alley X in five, six minutes. So, possibly, initially, Dan, it's like on a sort of toll road type basis. Yeah. Which, I guess, alleviates some traffic from the surface streets as well. So, I don't know if you will notice in the video, but there's no real limit to how many levels of tunnel you can have. You can go much further deep than you can go up. The deepest mines are much deeper than the tallest buildings are tall. So, you can alleviate any arbitrary level of open congestion with a 3D tunnel network. This is a very important point. So, a key rebuttal to the tunnels is that if you add one layer of tunnels, then that will simply alleviate congestion, will get used up, and then you'll be back where you started, back with congestion. But you can go to any arbitrary number of tunnels, any number of levels. But people seem traditionally, it's incredibly expensive to dig, and that would block this idea. Yeah. Well, they're right. To give you an example, the L.A. subway extension, which is, I think it's a two and a half mile extension, that was just completed for two billion dollars. So, it's roughly a billion dollars a mile to do the subway extension in L.A. And this is not the highest utility subway in the world. So, yeah, it's quite difficult to dig tunnels normally. I think we need to have at least a tenfold improvement in the cost per mile of tunneling. And how could you achieve that? I guess, actually, if you just do two things, you can get to approximately an order of magnitude improvement, and now you can go beyond that. So, the first thing to do is to cut the tunnel diameter by a factor of two or more. So, a single road lane tunnel, according to regulations, has to be 26 feet, maybe 28 feet in diameter, to allow for crashes in emergency vehicles and sufficient ventilation for combustion engine cars. But if you shrink that diameter to what we're attempting, which is 12 feet, which is plenty to get an electric skate through, you drop the diameter by a factor of two and the cross-sectional area by a factor of four, and the tunneling cost scales with cross-sectional area. So, that's roughly a half order of magnitude improvement right there. Then, tunneling machines currently tunnel for half the time, then they stop, and then the rest of the time is putting in reinforcements for the tunnel wall. So, if you design a machine instead to do continuous tunneling and reinforcing, that will give you a factor of two improvement. Combine that and it's a factor of eight. Also, these machines are far from being at their power or thermal limit. So, you can jack up the power to the machine substantially. I think you can get at least a factor of two, maybe a factor of four or five improvements on top of that. So, I think there's a fairly straightforward series of steps to get somewhere in excess of an order of magnitude improvement in the cost per mile. And our target, actually, is we've got a pet snail called Gary. This is from Gary the snail from South Park. I mean, sorry, SpongeBob SquarePants. So, Gary is capable of... Currently, he's capable of going 14 times faster than a tunnel boring machine. Okay. You want to beat Gary? We want to beat Gary. He's not a patient little fellow, and we want... That will be victory. Victory is beating the snail. Beautiful statement. I think everyone here would agree that it is not... None of this is going to happen inevitably. The fact that in your mind you dream this stuff, you dream stuff that no one else would dare dream, or no one else would be capable of dreaming at the level of complexity that you do. The fact that you do that, Elon Musk, is a really remarkable thing. Thank you for helping us all to dream a bit bigger. But you'll tell me if it ever starts getting genuinely insane, right? Thank you. That was really, really fantastic. That was really fantastic. Thank you.