The Boring Company, owned by Elon Musk, has built a similar underground system in Las Vegas.
Elon Musk is partnering with the Dubai government to develop the “Dubai Loop,” an underground high-speed transportation system aimed at connecting the city’s most densely populated areas and reducing congestion.
Omar Sultan al Olama, the United Arab Emirates’s minister of state for artificial intelligence, digital economy, and remote work applications, announced the collaboration during the World Governments Summit in Dubai on Feb. 12.
Al Olama said the project will cover Dubai’s busiest areas and allow people to go from point to point seamlessly.
The Boring Company, owned by Elon Musk and headquartered in Bastrop, Texas, has created a similar underground transportation system called the Vegas Loop in Nevada, which serves the Las Vegas Convention Center.
It took two years to build and has been operational since 2021.
Musk, the world’s richest man, appeared at the Dubai summit via video link and explained that the new transportation system in the UAE would work like a “wormhole.”
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“It’s going to be like a wormhole–you just wormhole from one part of the city—boom—and you’re out in another part of the city,” the Tesla and SpaceX CEO said.
“I think once people try it out, they’ll be like, ‘This is really cool.’ And it’s going to seem so obvious in retrospect, but until you actually do it, you don’t know.”
Details regarding the deal—such as how much it will cost to build or when development might begin—were sparse, but Musk said he was “looking forward” to working with the Dubai government.
Musk’s existing Vegas Loop uses Tesla Model 3 cars to shuttle passengers to four stations between the center complex and other transportation connections in the city.
The eventual plan is for the Vegas Loop to expand to 68 miles of tunnel featuring 104 stations, transporting more than 90,000 passengers per hour, according to The Boring Company’s official website.
While speaking via video at the summit in Dubai, Musk addressed safety concerns regarding the underground tunnels, telling the audience the transportation system would be safe even in the event of earthquakes or extreme weather.
“One of the safest places to be in an earthquake is an underground tunnel,” the tech mogul said. “Earthquakes are largely a surface phenomenon—so they’re like the waves of a surface [of an ocean]. Being in a tunnel, it’s like being in a submarine, even if there’s a storm above you, the waters are calm as a submarine.”
Musk also joked that the underground tunnels would be safe during global thermonuclear warfare.
“Of course, if there is global thermonuclear warfare, I think you’d really want some tunnels. Underground’s a good place to be in a worst-case scenario for global thermonuclear warfare,” the businessman said.
On a more everyday note, however, building such infrastructure underground is incredibly useful for alleviating traffic and congestion in cities, which is becoming a growing problem, Musk stated.
