Elon Musk’s Boring Company is launching a new competition that will see teams bore tunnels, and the goal is to beat the speed of a snail.
While the Boring Company already has several projects under way, it’s still trying to develop better tunnel-boring technology.
The symbolic goal is to beat the speed of a snail, which is actually a lot harder than it sounds.
In order to attract innovation in order to reach that goal, the Boring Company announced a new tunnel-boring competition today:
This competition challenges teams to come up with tunneling solutions and answer the question, ‘Can you beat the snail?’ The Boring Company is gauging interest from everyone (students, companies, hobbyists, etc.) from around the world to design, build, and race their own tunneling solution at The Boring Company’s Dig-a-Factory in the first Not-a-Boring Competition in Spring 2021.
More specifically, the teams will compete to bore a 30-meter tunnel with a cross-sectional area of 0.2 square meters (equivalent to a circle with a 0.5-meter diameter).
There will be three categories:
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Fastest to complete tunnel
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Fastest to complete tunnel and a driving surface (we will drive a Tesla remote-controlled car through the tunnel)
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Most accurate guidance system — how far away is the tunnel from its target?
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Apparently, they’re going to have a remote-controlled Tesla vehicle as a tool to judge the driving surfaces built by the different teams.
The competition is in the same vein as SpaceX’s hyperloop competition, which is not happening this year.
Earlier this month, Musk announced that the company is working on a longer vacuum tunnel for a new version of the competition and also referenced the new tunnel-boring competition announced today:
We need to finish building a much longer vacuum tunnel for speed tests & probably have an additional competition for tunneling itself
— Elon Musk (@elonmusk) July 1, 2020
Teams interested in the new “Not-a-Boring Competition” can apply here.
In the meantime, the Boring Company is completing its Loop tunnel system at the Las Vegas Convention Center and expanding it to the rest of the city.
Electrek’s Take
Elon often uses these types of competitions to recruit for his companies.
Therefore, if you’re an engineering student looking to land a job at the Boring Company, or even Tesla or SpaceX, it might be a good idea to participate in this competition.
We were at the SpaceX Hyperloop competition two years ago and it was really fun. I loved talking to all the excited engineering students there.
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