Elon Musk’s Boring Company announces plan to tunnel under Nashville

Elon Musk’s Boring Company has announced plans to dig tunnels under Nashville, creating a loop that will connect the city’s downtown with the Nashville International Airport. The Boring Company says it will begin construction “immediately” following approval and expects the first 10-mile phase to be operational as early as next year, as reported earlier by TechCrunch.

In 2021, The Boring Company opened its first “loop” in Las Vegas, where it uses a fleet of human-operated Tesla vehicles to transport people across the city’s convention center. It has since expanded the tunnel to connect the Las Vegas Convention Center (LVCC) route with nearby resorts.

Tennessee Governor Bill Lee says the Nashville tunnels will come at “zero cost” to taxpayers, and will instead be “entirely privately funded” by The Boring Company and its partners. Once completed, the “Tesla in tunnels” system will ferry people from the airport to downtown in around eight minutes.

Questions remain about whether this latest loop will actually come to fruition. As pointed out by TechCrunch, The Boring Company has floated and quietly dropped many of its tunnel-digging plans in the past, including in Los Angeles, Washington, DC, Chicago, and others. At the same time, workers at The Boring Company face many safety concerns, with one employee saying they have “consistently flirted with death,” according to a 2024 report by Fortune.