Musk’s Boring Co. Unveils Nashville Plan

By: Sarah Grace Taylor
Source: Chattanooga Times Free Press, Tenn. (TNS)

Elon Musk’s The Boring Co. shared more details of the proposed Music City Loop at a meeting of the Nashville Convention Center Authority on Thursday, but still offered limited information about the project greenlit by the state.

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Just nine days after the public became aware of the project, which seeks to create a 10-mile underground tunnel for Teslas to connect Nashville’s airport with a parking lot near the state capitol, the company had a preliminary discussion about expanding the project, including looping in the Music City Center to bring convention-goers into the fray.

David Buss, a vice president for the Boring Co., described the airport pitch as the first leg” of what the company hopes will ultimately be an expansive transit system under the city.

“We’re doing this because we want to solve a problem. We really do,” Buss said. “And with the growth, with the congestion, we think this is a highly useful system that will support the people of Nashville, the visitors, and bring more economic activity faster to the areas that it needs to go.”

At the meeting, Buss largely presented the company’s comparable Las Vegas Loop and offered a bird’s-eye view of what similar construction could look like in Nashville.

Buss promised to bring “dozens if not hundreds” of jobs with the project and focused on a long list of reasons that board members should be impressed by the company’s technology and process.

He showed the company’s crane-less boring machine and described a likely blast-free tunneling process that would keep the project work more discrete and minimize disruptions to the community. He assured board members that there had been no “serious” emergencies in the existing tunnel and that largely unmanned tunnel equipment would reduce the likelihood of injury during construction. He promised myriad safety features in the completed tunnel, ranging from air flow controls to rigorous driver training to minimize accidents.

But Buss kept it vague when asked about Nashville hurdles, including public scrutiny, environmental obstacles, route choice, fare costs and what happens if the project is abandoned, like the company has done in other cities.

In the dark

Though the Convention Center co-hosted the announcement of the project recently and some board members seemed supportive of the project during the meeting on Thursday, skepticism about how the project would benefit locals still seeped into the discussion.

Robert Davidson, a board member and CPA, questioned whether the airport-to-capitol route was the most practical for Nashvillians, even though it would allow convention-goers and tourists to reach the center more quickly and benefit those involved in tourism.

“Yeah, maybe we like that, but in Nashville, this isn’t the tough traffic spot,” Davidson said of the board. “The average Nashvillian could care less if bachelorettes get here.”

In fact, Davidson said, Nashville’s airport is reasonably convenient to downtown, and doesn’t necessitate this kind of project. If the tunnel bridged a commuter “hotspot” like Murfreesboro to Nashville or East Nashville to downtown, he argued, that would benefit locals rather than tourists.

“That would be more attractive for the community than the airport-to-downtown,” Davidson said.

Buss defended the route, but acquiesced that Davidson made a good point.

“Obviously, we looked at ridership, and we think there’s value to this system as it is,” Buss said. “But one of the things that you’re suggesting right there is exactly what we want. We want to solicit opinions from the community.”

Although Buss said the company will seek public input, one of the primary concerns from locals has been a lack of transparency and opportunity for community input on the project, which appears to have been decided before it was announced to the public.

Scores of community members denounced the project, specifically questioning the route and process, during a special meeting of the State Building Commission, which was called suddenly after the public announcement of the project. At that — the first and only public meeting about the project before the state approved a lease with the Boring Co. — no members of the public spoke in favor of the project and no representatives of the Boring Co. spoke at all.

Buss slipped out of the Convention Center Authority meeting after his presentation was over, accompanied by other members of the Boring Co. staff. When reporters attempted to obtain further details of the project, Buss largely declined to answer questions.

When asked about public input, Buss told the Nashville Banner it’s a priority for the company.

“We’re very much engaged in trying to do community outreach. And again, a lot of that, I think you’ll see coming,” Buss said. “This was announced as an intent to do business, and we’re excited to now reach out to more of the community and understand more about their concerns as well as their questions and the opportunities that they have for us.”

When asked why the company had not solicited input before beginning the project, Buss stopped speaking to reporters entirely and briskly left the building.

The Banner has contacted the Boring Co. with a list of questions about the project multiple times since the announcement, including to an email provided by Buss, and has not received any response.

The governor’s office has also not responded to related questions asked by the Banner more than a week ago.

Drilling in

Part of the public distrust of the project comes from the company and Musk’s less-than-sterling track record on similar projects.

Musk first proposed futuristic transit in 2013 in the form of the “Hyperloop,” a pressurized tube system that would theoretically move people in pods across long distances like “The Jetsons.” The project has fizzled and been reimagined several times, including a recent plan for an underwater version, but has gone chiefly belly up, alongside its company, Hyperloop One, though a Texas version of the project is still proposed on the Boring Co.’s website.

The past decade has seen a number of non-Tesla ventures from Musk with varying degrees of success, including buying Twitter and rebranding it X, some successful rocket launches, more than a dozen failed rocket launches and trips, and selling bold consumer products like “not a flamethrower” branded flamethrowers and a perfume called Burnt Hair, which is described as “the essence of repugnant desire” on the Boring Co.’s website.

As they announced the project to the public, Tennessee Gov. Bill Lee and other state officials bragged about Nashville being chosen for this “innovative” and “cool” opportunity. Nashville is the latest city on the list of places where this has been attempted by Musk’s company.

Some iterations of Musk’s underground transportation tunnels, such as those proposed in Washington, D.C., Los Angeles and Chicago between 2017 and 2018, stalled relatively early in the planning stages as people insisted on environmental studies.

Several versions of the loop, usually estimated to cost around $100 million with the promise of completion in a couple of years, were abandoned in Florida, even after Fort Lauderdale originally agreed to pursue the project in 2021, before cooling on the plan in 2022, also before the completion of feasibility studies. Ontario, Baltimore and other cities have similarly flirted with but ultimately abandoned tunnel proposals of their own.

Currently, two tunnels are listed as “in design” on the Boring website: the Music City Loop and one in Dubai.

The only projects listed as completed and operational are in Las Vegas, the home of a functioning Tesla tunnel, similar to the one proposed in Nashville, which hauls visitors around the city’s sprawling convention center at $4-6 per ride, according to Buss.

But even in Vegas, where the company has built part of a tunnel project, completion has been substantially slower than what Boring is proposing in Nashville. The Nevada project resulted in OSHA fines for construction workers and is still only a fraction of the proposed route.

The Vegas plan, pitched initially in 2019, began making trips around the less-than-one-mile loop at the convention center in 2021. Then, the company pitched a 68-mile track across the city with more than 100 stops.

As of 2024, the company has expanded that loop to 2.1 operational miles, five years after the project began.

That construction speed is significantly slower than the company’s proposal in Nashville, where they claim—and the new state lease suggests—that the 10-mile airport loop will be completed in around two years.

With Nashville’s limestone bedrock, which the company has already described as more challenging to dig through, it’s unclear how the tunnel could be built faster than in Vegas. The timeframe becomes harder to imagine when Nashville’s average annual rainfall of 50 inches is compared to the 4 inches typical in Vegas, making flooding and sinkholes more likely to delay the project.

These environmental concerns also translate to safety and property damage concerns for members of the public, like those who opposed the project at last week’s meeting.

Asked whether private property owners would be consulted before the company was allowed to burrow under their lots, Buss said that the company would “work out easement agreements” with each individual owner. When asked what would happen if they abandoned the project, Buss offered less detail.

“So we’re working out the finalization of the agreements with the state on that, but generally speaking, there are clauses in there of what happens (if the company abandons the project),” he said.

Though Buss acknowledged the feasibility concerns during his presentation, he was unable to provide specifics about how the company had or would research geological concerns.

“We’ve been doing it throughout the process, and we’ll continue to do it throughout,” Buss said. “It’s a long stretch, which each one has its own unique areas, and I’m certainly not a geotech.

This story was originally published by the Nashville Banner.

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