The Boring Company, Elon Musk’s tunnelling business, is working on a tunnel between Austin and San Antonio that would carry passengers at more than 200 miles an hour, Musk said on Sunday.
He called it a “simple, precursor Hyperloop tunnel” in a post on X. The drive between the two Texas cities can take up to two and a half hours in traffic, he wrote, and the tunnel could cut that to under 30 minutes every time.
The two downtowns are about 80 miles apart by road, so a vehicle averaging 200 miles an hour would cover the distance in around 24 minutes before slowing for stations.
Musk gave no route, cost or timeline, and no permits or government approvals have been announced. He made the claim in a reply to an AI-generated video of a science-fiction future with colonies on other planets. The company’s own account reposted it and said it was ready to take part.
The Boring Company raised $3 billion this month in a funding round led by investors from the United Arab Emirates.
Its only working system is the Vegas Loop in Las Vegas, which carries passengers in Tesla cars through tunnels beneath the convention centre and the surrounding area. The company began building a tunnel in Nashville this year and plans to start work on a Dubai Loop at the end of 2026. It is also digging tunnels in Bastrop, Texas, to connect properties Musk owns and let staff from Boring, SpaceX, Tesla and X move between them.
Earlier projects in Chicago and Los Angeles were never built.
Musk first described a hyperloop in a 2013 paper, proposing passenger pods that would travel through low-pressure tubes at close to the speed of sound. Several companies tried to build one, and none now carries paying passengers.
The route he has picked does have a real traffic problem. Austin and San Antonio are among the fastest-growing cities in the United States, and Interstate 35 between them is one of the most congested roads in Texas. The state transport department is studying traffic across a dozen counties in the corridor.
Musk is the richest person in the world.
