Elon Musk has unveiled his futuristic underground transportation tunnel in a bid to curb “soul-destroying” urban traffic.
The tech entrepreneur invited reporters and guests to take the first rides of what he claims will be a revolutionary mode of transport on Tuesday.
The system is simply called “the loop” by Mr Musk, and it is hoped it could work in cities across the globe.
Tuesday's reveal comes almost two years to the day since Mr Musk announced on Twitter that "traffic is driving me nuts" and he was "going to build a tunnel boring machine and just start digging."
Guests were given an insight to the new tunnel, which Mr Musk hopes will help people get around quicker than the subways.
On Tuesday, he explained for the first time in detail how the system, which he simply calls "loop," could work on a larger scale beneath cities across the globe.
Autonomous, electric vehicles could be lowered into the system on wall-less elevators, which could be placed almost anywhere cars can go. The cars would have to be fitted with specially designed side wheels that pop out perpendicular to the car's regular tires and run along the tunnel's track. The cost for such wheels would be about $200 or $300 a car, Musk said.
Reporters described the rides as bumpy but impressive. At least one experienced motion sickness while another yelled, "Woo!"
The tunnel, meant to be a "proof of concept," runs just over a mile under Musk's SpaceX headquarters in Hawthorne.
Mr Musk described the first ride as “epic”.
The Telsa boss said: “For me, it was a eureka moment. I was like, ‘this thing is going to damn well work’.”
Mr Musk said the bumpy ride was “because we kind of ran out of time” and there was some problems with the speed of the machine.
"It'll be smooth as glass," he said of future systems. "This is just a prototype. That's why it's a little rough around the edges."
