A Boring New Entrance
Last week saw a few days of heavy activity at Giga Texas - but not for Tesla. Elon Musk’s other project, The Boring Company, began to set up their enormous new Prufrock 3 tunneling machine on the Giga Texas property, and was spotted assembling the giant robot on January 18th.
The job appears to be a new tunnel digging under the highway bordering the Giga Texas property, to what looks like a new lot for outbound product on the other side. Applications for this construction were filled out back in 2022, and described a “private access tunnel along with associated improvements” - which definitely sounds like a Boring Company tunnel.
It’s an idea that has been thrown around before by CEO Elon Musk - that Tesla’s properties in Texas could be connected with private tunnels that could allow newly built vehicles to automatically ship themselves to different locations in the network without having to move over public roads.
Tunneling supplies like concrete wall linings were spotted at Giga Texas just last month, and it’s probably unsurprising to find out that Austin’s resident Tesla Drone photographer Joe Tegtmeyer was the one to find them - and of course he has also taken a bunch of good shots of the new boring machine coming together on the site.
But that’s not all, because Joe has gathered some experts in the tunneling field and put out a fairly comprehensive analysis of how this project will likely play out - using Joe’s drone flyovers of the site for reference.
From the photographs of the site, this new tunnel will likely be around 300 meters, or 1000 feet long - and could go longer if the company wants to build it directly into the warehouse building on the other side of the highway.
That distance will likely take somewhere between 2-4 weeks to dig - even though Prufrock 3, TBC’s newest and most powerful tunneling machine yet - is supposed to be around 7 times faster than its predecessor. The reason is that even if Prufrock 3 can theoretically chew through 7 miles per day - the experts think this is ultimately not going to be realistic, as the speed of any tunneling machine is dictated more by the speed at which technicians can remove the dirt being spit out the tail section, than the actual drilling speed.
And just to reinforce that, a rough estimate shows that for this tunnel, about 20 thousand cubic meters - or 710 thousand cubic feet of dirt would have to be removed from the site per week to keep this project moving. The conveyors would have to move something close to 180 tons of dirt per hour - which just isn’t likely to happen.
The distance the tunnel will need to dig under the tunnel is a problem as well - with the angle of the start position of Prufrock 3 showing about 14 meters or about 55 feet of clearance under the roadbed. The problem here is that the ground in this area has a relatively shallow clay bed, so the water table is about 10 feet above where the tunnel is looking to pass through. Not a huge issue, but the company will need to install some robust drainage to help keep the tunnel dry.
Logistics aside though, this is a fairly good way to demonstrate not only a brand new tunneling machine - but showcasing how useful a loop can be for transferring large goods in Texas could go a long way to getting some interested investors in the area.