Elon Musk's company just promised to save Nashville's traffic problems. We've heard this story before
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Nashville officials on Monday announced a massive public transportation partnership with Elon Musk's The Boring Company to alleviate the city's significant traffic congestion problems for travelers bound to the airport. But Musk has previously made many similar promises in a host of other American cities with little to show for it.
At an announcement in Nashville, Gov. Bill Lee said the tunnel will be known as the 'Music City Loop' and that the project is '100% privately funded, there will be no cost to Tennessee taxpayers.'
Lee did not detail who the funders are or the expected cost.
The system aims to be the second such 'loop' by Musk's Boring Company, which currently operates an underground tunnel system in Las Vegas, where Tesla cars ferry people around and near the city's convention center.
Lee said that a trip through the tunnel system will take eight to 10 minutes and that the plan is to complete the project within two years. The trip between the airport and downtown Nashville takes roughly 20 minutes on the road without traffic, according to Google Maps. But officials say traffic congestion in the city, especially around the airport, has been increasing.
Construction will begin immediately following the approvals process, Lee's office said in a statement, and the first part of the operation is expected to open next year.
Even at the announcement, there seemed to be some surprise at the proposed speed of the project. 'I know our engineering team was looking down — two years!' said Doug Kreulen, CEO of the Metropolitan Nashville Airport Authority, in a tone that seemed to mock supposed shock from the engineers.
The Boring Company's president, Steve Davis, who also helped lead the Department of Government Efficiency, said during the announcement that they chose Nashville because they wanted to build where 'the system had to be useful and the community had to be welcoming.'
Secretary of Transportation Sean Duffy also attended the event and spoke. But Musk, who has distanced himself from the Trump administration after leading DOGE, was not mentioned, and Musk did not promote Monday's announcement on X, his social media platform.
Musk's xAI has also invested in Tennessee, setting up its supercomputer campuses in Memphis last year.
Musk's AI company has also made some charitable overtures in the area, helping Memphis-Shelby County Schools with HVAC upgrades and other needs, as well as clearing some roads near schools and homes, the company said this month. Last week, Musk also announced his foundation donated $350,000 to the Boys and Girls Club of Greater Memphis to help cover funding gaps after losing government COVID pandemic era funds.
Between 2017 and 2021, The Boring Company canceled or postponed similar projects in Chicago; Fort Lauderdale, Florida; the California cities of Los Angeles, San Bernardino and San Jose; and one from Baltimore to Washington, DC.
The Boring Company has had a rocky existence ever since Musk first posted in 2016 that traffic was driving him 'nuts' and that he was going to 'build a tunnel boring machine and just start digging.' The Boring Company completed a test tunnel for regular electric vehicles in Los Angeles in 2018, but Musk said his ultimate vision included a 'hyperloop,' a low-pressure tube through which specially designed capsules would whisk passengers between cities at hundreds of miles per hour. Musk posted in 2017 that he had 'verbal government approval' to build a hyperloop between New York and Washington, DC.
But it was unclear what official could give such an approval, given the dozens — if not hundreds — of municipalities and organizations that would be involved in such a project. By 2021, a proposed Baltimore-to-Washington segment evaporated from the company's website, though the company continues to tout the hyperloop idea without any specific plans or projects.
Musk's smaller-scale vision, which he simply dubbed 'Loop,' continued to inch along, however — if not with similar themes of grand ideas and scaled-back realities. In April 2017, Musk presented an animated video at a Ted Ideas conference showing vehicles lowered into tunnels by elevators that seamlessly blended into curbside parking spots, with the vehicles then being whisked away on electric sleds.
The Loop that has been built is also quite different than the Loop that was envisioned. The first segment, under the Las Vegas Convention Center, was completed in 2021, but instead of city denizens flitting across the city, convention-goers are simply driven by humans in normal Teslas through a fairly standard road tunnel.
The Boring Company has since completed five more stations — for a total of eight — and the company says that 'Clark County and the City of Las Vegas have approved 68 miles of tunnel and 104 stations.'
Musk's tunnels have had an even harder time spreading outside of Las Vegas. While multiple projects have been announced – most recently in Dubai in February 2025 – few have moved beyond the initial fanfare. Projects in Los Angeles, Chicago, and Baltimore all appear to have been quietly dropped, and despite an announcement for a Fort Lauderdale tunnel in 2021, the project appears to be suspended. In 2025, Fort Lauderdale Mayor Dean Trantalis told the South Florida Sun-Sentinel that the city needed to 'to see if they're still interested in fully funding the project as they had originally proposed.'
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