Elon Musk’s Boring Company to build Tesla tunnels under Nashville
The Boring Company, Elon Musk’s tunnel-digging company, and Tennessee Governor Bill Lee have announced a plan to build a 10-mile “loop” that will connect Nashville’s downtown and its convention center to the area’s airport.
The project will be privately funded by The Boring Company “and its private partners,” according to the Governor’s press release, though those partners are not named. The Boring Company and local officials will now begin a “public process to evaluate potential routes, engage community stakeholders, and finalize plans for the project’s initial 10-mile phase.”
Construction won’t begin until the project clears the approvals process. But the governor’s office said the first segment of the loop could be operational as “early as fall of 2026.”
If that happens, Nashville would become the second city where The Boring Company has opened such a system, with the first being Las Vegas. The company has spent the last few years in Sin City digging and opening tunnels around the Las Vegas Convention Center, and claims to have given 3 million rides in Teslas to date.
Musk launched The Boring Company in early 2017 (after publicly noodling about the idea on Twitter while stuck in traffic in late 2016), and it has taken many forms since then.
The original video detailing Musk’s idea — now set to private on YouTube — showed vehicles getting removed from surface street gridlock by an elevator-meets-sled system and lowered into a three-dimensional underground network of tunnels. Musk also claimed during the first Trump administration that The Boring Company had received “verbal govt approval” to dig tunnels from New York City to Washington, D.C. that, leveraging hyperloop technology, could make the trip in just 29 minutes.
None of that ever happened. The Boring Company abandoned plans to dig a major tunnel system underneath the greater Los Angeles area after pushback from locals. A similar thing happened in Chicago. And the Boring Company has essentially ghosted many other cities around the country.
The idea of the hyperloop, which Musk admitted to biographer Ashlee Vance came from his hatred of California’s high-speed rail system, was also cast aside. Even the Teslas that traverse the Las Vegas tunnels are being driven by humans, despite Musk’s obsession with self-driving cars.
Instead, The Boring Company now more closely resembles a glorified convention center people-mover, although there are some potential benefits to its approach versus the typical monorail setup. Construction should be less disruptive to Nashville’s daily traffic. And, in its current form at least, it’s not costing taxpayers money.
While the Tennessee governor’s office cites The Boring Company’s safety record in Las Vegas in the announcement — the loop “recently earned a 99.57% safety and security rating” from the Department of Homeland Security and Transportation Security Administration, according to the press release — it is careful not to mention the trouble that Musk’s tunnel-digging effort has experienced during construction. (The governor’s office could not be reached for comment.)
Like with other Musk companies, the pace at which The Boring Company operates — the same speed that the Tennessee governor’s office praised in its announcement — has been a concern for some of its workers.
Last year, Fortune’s Jessica Mathews reported that a Boring Company employee told his then-safety manager: “I have watched my friends get injured due to the fast pace we’ve been running… I refuse to be the first fatality in this company’s history. No tunnel is worth a single person’s life.”
That same safety manager even spoke to Fortune on the record, saying: “The conditions they were told to work in were honestly almost unbearable … I couldn’t fix any of the things that were wrong.”
Sean O’Kane is a reporter who has spent a decade covering the rapidly-evolving business and technology of the transportation industry, including Tesla and the many startups chasing Elon Musk. Most recently, he was a reporter at Bloomberg News where he helped break stories about some of the most notorious EV SPAC flops. He previously worked at The Verge, where he also covered consumer technology, hosted many short- and long-form videos, performed product and editorial photography, and once nearly passed out in a Red Bull Air Race plane.
