Gary Zhou 
Key Points
- 🚇 The Boring Company, led by Elon Musk, completes the Westgate-2 tunnel in Las Vegas as part of its larger loop project.
- 🏗️ Prufrock-1, the tunneling machine, has constructed its fourth tunnel in Vegas and the company’s seventh overall in the city.
- 📅 The Westgate-2 tunnel is expected to open to the public in Q1 2024, connecting to the existing Vegas Loop.
- 🌐 The Boring Company’s Vegas loop project aims to cover much of downtown Las Vegas with underground tunnels.
- 🚀 The company has a medium-term goal for Prufrock machines to tunnel at one-tenth the speed of human walking, around 7 miles per day.
- 🛣️ The Prufrock machines currently tunnel more than 1 mile per week, six times faster than the previous Godot machine.
- 🌍 The Boring Company envisions an extensive network of stations for the Vegas loop, with the Westgate station at the Northernmost end.
- 🎥 The completion of the Westgate-2 tunnel follows the company’s Engineering Day recruiting event in Bastrop, Texas, showcasing the Prufrock machine.
- 🌐 The Boring Company continues to make progress on urban transportation infrastructure, focusing on efficient tunneling technology.
Elon Musk-led tunneling company The Boring Company has completed a new tunnel in Las Vegas as it continues to make progress on a larger loop covering much of the city’s downtown.
On Friday, The Boring Company page on X posted saying that the Prufrock-1 tunneling machine has completed the Westgate-2 tunnel, marking the massive tool’s fourth tunnel constructed in the city. In addition to Prufrock-1, the post also says that its the seventh tunnel the company has built in Las Vegas, while the other three were completed using Godot and its latest iteration of the Prufrock machine, the Prufrock-2.
The post also included a photo of Prufrock-1 emerging from the construction site beside the Westgate hotel, which you can see below.
The company initially reached the Westgate and Encore hotels in July, both of which are on the outskirts of the area currently being used by The Boring Company’s first underground loop.
The Westgate-2 tunnel comes as a part of the company’s larger Vegas loop and in addition to the initial Las Vegas Convention Center (LVCC) loop, which is currently active after having been built in roughly a year. The first loop of the underground tunnel system includes three stations over about 1.7 miles of underground tunnels.
You can see the full map of stations The Boring Company eventually plans to include in the Vegas loop, along with the Westgate station at the Northernmost end of the LVCC loop.
According to the company’s website, it has set a medium-term goal that the Prufrock machines will be able to outpace one-tenth of the speed of human walking, which it says is around 7 miles per day. Currently, the Prufrock machines can already tunnel more than 1 mile per week, which is roughly six times faster than the company’s last boring machine, the Godot.
In late September, The Boring Company held an Engineering Day recruiting event at its Bastrop, Texas facility, during which the company talked about and showed off its Prufrock machine, with the discussions lasting much longer than originally planned.
