Hyperloop to O’Hare
Gif: The Boring Company / Vimeo
Musk made a lot of bold predictions about the Hyperloop when he announced the concept back in 2013. But the billionaire insisted he wouldn’t be the one to develop the 600-mile-per-hour tech. Instead, Musk set his sights on a mass transportation idea that was much more humble.
“A Loop is like a Hyperloop, but without drawing a vacuum inside the tube. Don’t need to get rid of air friction for short routes,” Musk tweeted in Nov. 2017.
By the next year, Musk was holding a press conference with the mayor of Chicago to announce that the Boring Company would be building a tunnel covering the 18 miles between downtown Chicago and O’Hare Airport. It would deliver passengers in about 12 minutes, according to Musk.
The Loop system even had some fancy animation of the autonomous 16-passenger vehicles that were supposed to be whipping around underground, as you can see above. But that didn’t happen. Musk’s Loop has just one existing application and it’s in Las Vegas. But it doesn’t have any 16-passenger vehicles or incredibly fast speeds. It’s just regular Tesla vehicles being driven by human drivers slowly in a tunnel.
