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Comment by JumpCrisscross | Hacker News Reader

The Boring Company’s mission is in its name. Better boring tools. The Teslas running around inside it are dumb, but that’s almost the point: it’s a PR project. We wouldn’t be talking about it if it were a train.

From what I can tell, TBC has failed to revolutionize tunnel-boring machines to date.

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But that just shows they didnt really do anything. While european and other companies are building extremely long rail tunnels, this company built a short single-lane car tunnel with LEDs...

That's what I thought too. Boring equipment that could dig tunnels for extremely cheap. Don't know the current status, but I didn't think it was set up like picturing set of interconnected tubes like, for instance, the interwebs.

> From what I can tell, TBC has failed to revolutionize tunnel-boring machines to date.

Also, if you look at those Vegas tunnels, they’re just wide enough for a single car. Every single subway system in the world has better tunnels than that, and many of them have existed for well over a century.

The BC “mission” seems to be marketing hype that’s not quite as bad as “Mars colony”, but it’s still very far in the future at best.

Cost. The boring tunnels are basically free to the city. Just permission to build. Look up SF or NYC or Seattle cost per tunnel mile.

That's just financial structuring. The tunnels still have a cost to build, which I'm guessing is unknown since BC is private. It's received on the order of a $1 billion in funding, though, which might give some idea of just how much those tunnels cost.

Cost to the customer is not just financial structuring. It is how much you have to pay.

How did you reach the conclusion that it is a PR project? Since Elon Musk is pushing ahead to colonize Mars - and Martian cities will probably be built underground - it is just as likely that he is using this company to develop one of the critical technologies for interplanetary expansion.

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