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On May 25th, Elon Musk had a speed battle with two Tesla electric vehicles: one in the underground tunnel and the other on the road.

Two Tesla cars, one at the SpaceX headquarters in Hawthorne, California, is 1.14 miles long. 83 km) in the long tunnel. And the other is driving on ordinary street kilometers. In the end, Tesla in the tunnel only took 3 minutes and 8 seconds to complete. In fact, Tesla on the ground had just passed the first traffic light when the game was over.

Tesla, who was driving in the tunnel, reached a top speed of 207km / h, much faster than The Boring Company demonstrated at an event held in December. Although, the previous tunnel is not as evenly divided as it is now.

In 2016, Musk decided to set up the company, Boring Company, to dig an open tunnel at the bottom of Los Angeles to solve the city's traffic jams. After two years of digging the tunnel, Musk announced on his personal Twitter that the first tunnel, 1.8km long and at a cost of about $10 million, would allow Tesla to drive at a top speed of 240km / h.

At present, the demonstration tunnel route is from downtown to Los Angeles International Airport, which can be completed in about 10 minutes. It usually takes more than half an hour to get there when there is no traffic jam on the ground.

The tunnel does not allow vehicles to drive in at will, but takes the vehicle to the tunnel, and then needs to install guide wheels at the bottom of the vehicle to keep the electric car in the track, which costs about $200 to $300. With this guide wheel, your Tesla electric car can fly on a fixed track, which is safer than a highway. Because of this extremely high speed and safety, only Tesla's autopilot mode is allowed in this tunnel.

The company also plans to use a $1 billion budget to build a tunnel between Chicago and the airport and an underground tunnel from Washington, D.C., to Baltimore.

However, transport activists worry that the new network of car tunnels could cause more congestion on the ground, especially when vehicles line up to enter the tunnel. Even Mr Musk has been criticized for building a tunnel that can only accommodate cars, rather than a means of transport such as the subway, which carries more people.

But is the purpose of The Boring Company holding the competition just to answer a simple question: which is faster, surface roads or underground tunnels?

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