Ten years ago, after saying traffic was ‘driving him nuts’, Musk’s Boring Company started digging underground tunnels to help relieve road congestion. Did he promise too much and deliver too little? It’s another dazzlingly bright day in Las Vegas, but I’m 30ft below ground and buckled in for a rocket ride into the future. Well, it’s actually a Tesla ride into the future, and not a self-driving one. And it’s very slow – my driver says the speed limit down here is 30mph. It’s also very brief: the trip is over in just a few minutes. In truth, the Vegas Loop is a rather underwhelming experience: a short crawl through a white-walled tunnel only a little wider than the vehicle, lit by strips of LEDs that shift colour every few seconds in an effort to add some Vegas sparkle. I’d hoped to ask other Loop riders what they thought of it, but … there aren’t any. I’m the only person here. This is not the futuristic transport solution Elon Musk originally promised. When he first unveiled this technology in 2017, it came with sci-fi imagery showing a car leaving street traffic for an elevator platform, which then dropped into a tunnel network and sped along on an “electric skate” at 200km/h (124mph). “There’s no real limit to how many levels of tunnel you can have … so you can alleviate any arbitrary level of urban congestion,” Musk said. A few months earlier, with his usual edgelordly nonchalance, Musk…
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