Elon Musk Claims U.S. Approval for World’s Longest Tunnel
July 21st, 2017My guess is that there are so many secret underground facilities in and around Washington DC that this will simply not happen. But if this does somehow get approved, an additional guess is that you’ll be able to slap a Mr. Fusion on your Tesla before the DC hyperloop is running.
In any event, Musk seems to be channeling his inner Steve Jobs Reality Distortion Field on this one:
The RDF was said by Andy Hertzfeld to be Steve Jobs’s ability to convince himself and others to believe almost anything with a mix of charm, charisma, bravado, hyperbole, marketing, appeasement and persistence. RDF was said to distort an audience’s sense of proportion and scales of difficulties and made them believe that the task at hand was possible.
Via: Bloomberg:
Elon Musk says he won “verbal” government approval to build the world’s longest tunnel for an ultra-high-speed train line to connect New York to Washington.
The train, known as a hyperloop, would make the 220 mile connection in 29 minutes, Musk said in a post on Twitter Thursday. He provided few details, and a spokesperson for his new digging enterprise, called the Boring Company, declined to comment on the project.
Just received verbal govt approval for The Boring Company to build an underground NY-Phil-Balt-DC Hyperloop. NY-DC in 29 mins.
— Elon Musk (@elonmusk) July 20, 2017
It’s not clear what Musk is doing with these announcements on Twitter. Such an ambitious project would require billions of dollars in funding and extensive approvals from federal, state, and local authorities. The tunnel would be more than twice as long as the current record holder: the Gotthard Base Tunnel, a rail line that runs through the Swiss Alps. For some urban context: a recently opened stretch of subway in New York cost $4.5 billion for less than 2 miles of rails. It was first proposed in 1919 and opened to the public in January 2017. These things take time.
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Whatever this new “verbal approval” means, the posts on Twitter are probably little more than an attempt to generate interest in future Boring Co. projects. Musk himself suggested as much Thursday. David Lee, a Silicon Valley reporter for the BBC, questioned Musk’s promises: “Verbal? Not on the dotted line? Seems premature to announce … unless you’re drumming up support for the project?”
Musk’s response: “Support would be much appreciated!”
