Elon Musk shared a video showing a race between two Tesla in the city of Los Angeles. The first takes a classic road route while the second is more than 200 km / h in the tunnel dug by The Boring Company. Who wins, in your opinion?
In 2016, while he was stuck in the traffic jams of the city of Los Angeles, Elon Musk had shared via Twitter his idea of digging tunnels to circulate cars and thus fluidize traffic. From there was born The Boring Company, which uncovered a 2.3 km long test tunnel under SpaceX headquarters in Hawthorne, California, and has just signed a contract with the city of Las Vegas for a project tunnel serving the Las Vegas Convention Center which hosts the Consumer Electronics Show.
And what better to demonstrate the benefits of the concept than to perform a small demonstration in real conditions? That’s what The Boring Company did by organizing a race between two Tesla Model 3s, one passing through the test tunnel, the other taking the road to a meeting point at the exit of the test tunnel.
Wanna race? pic.twitter.com/zDNpdsdHaM
— The Boring Company (@boringcompany) May 24, 2019
The guidance system finally abandoned?
The race starts with a stopwatch following the two electric cars. The Tesla borrows the tunnel takes about 1 minute 15 seconds to reach the destination by driving at over 200 km / h in the tube. At the same time, the other Model 3 is still stopped at a red light. It will take nearly 4 minutes, 50 seconds to reach the meeting point. QED.
The video gives a vital clue since we see that Model 3, which uses the tunnel, is not equipped with the guidance system presented last December. It was a pair of rollers unfolding on each side of the front wheels. The idea was to be able to equip any car so that it can circulate in these very narrow tunnels.
It is unclear whether the idea was abandoned, but in any case, Elon Musk confirmed that the system had not been used for this demonstration. “No more wheel guide/train platform? 204 km / h in a narrow tunnel just autopilot? Asked one of his subscribers on Twitter. ” That’s about it, ” replied the person.