by Matt Konkle
Torque Editor-in-Chief
LAS VEGAS — This headline for our fifth day at the Specialty Equipment Market Association trade show may be a bit deceiving. Well, maybe a lot deceiving.
That’s because the trade show itself isn’t boring, not at all, but rather something outside the convention center halls is — and we mean boring as in a company, not just something dull and uninteresting.
Because what sits outside those convention center halls is anything but boring. Actually, for a lot of people, it is more like a lifesaver as the SEMA show Tuesday officially opened its doors to the automotive industry.
The Boring Company, an Elon Musk start up, is an infrastructure and tunnel construction venture that is working on below-ground transit systems in a variety of cities. You’ve probably heard the story before – the company is promising tunnel travel systems in the Los Angeles area, with the eventual goal to maybe have autonomous vehicle hyperloop tubes running underground from New York to Washington D.C, as well as between LA and San Francisco.
The idea behind all that is to cut traffic and transit times, as well as to utilize Musk’s Tesla vehicles to help reduce exhaust pollutants.
But all those ideas have yet to get off the ground are years from completion — if at all.
What isn’t years away is Boring’s tunnel system at the Las Vegas Convention Center. The LVCC is the country’s second largest and making your way from one hall to another can take upwards of 20-plus minutes through the crowd — with a long wait trying to cross Paradise Avenue if you miss the light.
Boring’s LVCC Loop system cuts that travel down to just a few minutes and consists of a three-station transportation hub with about 1.7 miles of tunnel. The loop itself has two tunnels and three stations (two surface and one subsurface) and connects the center’s South, Central and West Halls. More than 70 Tesla’s navigate those tunnels and the company says it can move about 4,400 people an hour between its stops.
We caught up with the system right after SEMA opened Tuesday morning, and jumped in a Tesla moving from West Hall to South, where the new product displays were located.
Despite the large opening-day crowd, we were in a vehicle and on our way within minutes, descending into the earth just outside West Hall and disappearing into the eastbound tunnel that flickered between purple, green and red ambient lighting.
Although the tunnel’s initial plans were to have autonomous vehicles, the current system has human drivers, and ours made some small talk during the quick trip — letting us know that the tunnel had been open since April, but this was the largest show so far they would accommodate.
The company also has agreements in place with a few resort properties to allow direct access to each hotel and the LVCC, as well as the Las Vegas Strip. At some point, Boring expects a direct tunnel from McCarran International Airport to the resort district as well.
Our trip from West Hall to South took a quick two minutes and 26 seconds. Later in the day, we retraced that route above ground back to West and it took 25 minutes.
Sure, it may be kind of gimmicky and would probably be way cooler if the whole thing was autonomous, but just having the system in place at the LVCC was nice when you need to make a quick (and free by the way) trip between halls.
