Hawthorne Test Tunnel

The Hawthorne Test Tunnel is the first thing The Boring Company ever built, a 1.14-mile (1.83-kilometer) tunnel bored beneath Crenshaw Boulevard in Hawthorne, California, right beside the SpaceX campus, and it opened to the public on December 18, 2018. It was never meant to be a commercial route. It was a proof-of-concept, a single-lane underground corridor whose entire job was to show that a company could dig a usable tunnel quickly and cheaply and then run electric cars through it.

What is the Hawthorne Test Tunnel?

At the December 18, 2018 opening, members of the public climbed into modified Teslas and rode beneath the streets of Hawthorne through a tunnel that had not existed two years earlier. The bore runs about 14 feet across and more than 30 feet below the surface. Its purpose was research and development rather than transit, a place where the company could refine its machines and show cars moving through a narrow tube before any paying customer was ever involved.

Why the Hawthorne Test Tunnel Exists

The whole story happened in public, which is why it is so well documented. On December 17, 2016, stuck in Los Angeles traffic, Elon Musk posted: "Traffic is driving me nuts. Am going to build a tunnel boring machine and just start digging..." A follow-up post named the venture The Boring Company, and it was incorporated in California on January 11, 2017.

The joke in the name hides a serious idea. Surface roads are flat, but cities are tall, so all that empty space below a street is really unused road capacity waiting to be tapped. The obstacle was always cost, because traditional tunneling can run past one billion dollars a mile, which keeps underground transit off the table for most cities. So Elon set two goals: cut that cost by roughly ten times, and reach digging speeds of one mile per week. Hawthorne was the first attempt to prove those numbers in dirt instead of on a slide.

The entire 1.14-mile tunnel cost under ten million dollars, or roughly nine million dollars a mile, against a benchmark measured in over a billion a mile. That raw spread comes out to about a hundred to one, but the goal that really drove the company was more down to earth: bring the cost down by roughly ten times. A ten-times cheaper mile is what turns a tunnel from a giant public megaproject into something a private company can build on a fixed price.

How it Works

The digging was done by a refurbished Lovat tunnel boring machine (TBM), a spinning cutting head that grinds forward while it installs the tunnel lining behind it, and this one was nicknamed Godot. Its cutting head carved a bore about 14 feet across, which left a finished inside width near the company's 12-foot standard, wide enough for a single car and not an inch more. The lining behind the cutting head is what closes that gap, trading a couple of feet of raw bore for a smooth surface to drive on.

The ride itself is where the promise and the demo came apart a little. At the December opening, riders moved through the lit tube at roughly 40 miles per hour, even though the system was designed to carry cars far faster, up to about 140 miles per hour. The point was never the speed on demo day. The point was that a trip across campus that would be a long walk on the surface could become a couple of minutes underground, and that the same narrow bore could later carry traffic much faster once the idea grew into the self-driving Loop model.

The Economics of the Hawthorne Test Tunnel

Hawthorne's real payoff was the door it opened for everything after. By proving a dig could come in under ten million dollars, it gave the company the confidence to build its first paying-customer system, the Las Vegas Convention Center Loop, which opened in April 2021 under a fixed-price contract of roughly 47 million dollars. The tunnel itself never earned a dime, because it was free and for demonstration only. Its value was always in what it taught, a place to break machines, measure them, and refine them before they had to perform for real customers.

Current Status of Hawthorne Test Tunnel

Today the Hawthorne tunnel counts as one of seven research-and-development tunnels The Boring Company reports across three cities. It is still a test tunnel rather than a transit line, the proof-of-concept that made all the rest believable. The commercial weight has moved to Las Vegas, where the Vegas Loop now carries the passenger traffic that Hawthorne was built to make possible in the first place.

What Comes Next

The frontier now is not the tunnel, it is how fast the machine can dig. Godot was an ordinary, refurbished TBM. The Prufrock line that followed is built from scratch for the job, with Prufrock-4 (roughly 400 tons, designed to run with no people underground) operational by 2024 and Prufrock-5 starting to tunnel in December 2025.

The goal is more than one mile per week, roughly six times Godot's pace. That jump is the cost coming down in real time, because faster boring spreads a machine's fixed cost over more finished tunnel, which drops the price per mile that made the whole idea work. Each generation that digs faster makes the next contract cheaper to bid.

The Bottom Line

The Hawthorne Test Tunnel was a 1.14-mile experiment that proved a tunnel could be dug for under ten million dollars and driven through at speed, and it turned one frustrated post into a working business. Measured in revenue it earned nothing, but measured in what it made possible, it dug the foundation for every Loop that came after it. That is the kind of thing that happens when Elon decides a problem is worth solving.

Related

Keep reading: Hyperloop, Prufrock. Zoom out to the The Boring Company overview, or open the Ventures Map.