Elon Musk is more than a bit busy building Model 3s, launching rockets, and saving the world from the AI apocalypse, but that isn't keeping him from digging in to his holy mole-iest venture yet: a mildly mystifying scheme to find a faster, cheaper way of boring tunnels, and using it to destroy traffic.

As cool as that sounds, Silicon Valley's version of Tony Stark hasn't said much about his mysterious Boring Company, which now employs six people and shares office space with SpaceX in Hawthorne, California. Just what are its goals? How does he expect to disrupt tunneling? And when will LA traffic ever improve? Musk still isn't talking, but documents the Boring Company provided to the city of Hawthorne, and comments employees made to the city council, provide a few tidbits.

Those clues provide a clearer picture of what Musk is up to. Good thing, too, because the Hawthorne city council just gave the Boring Company permission to begin digging a 1.6-mile tunnel so it can test its technology. Which, by the way, doesn't seem terribly innovative so far.

The Boring Company

For those who've been too busy ordering a Tesla Model 3 or watching SpaceX launches to keep up with Musk's latest Big Idea: The Boring Company launched in January, less than a month after Musk tweeted a complain about Los Angeles traffic and pledged to "build a tunnel boring machine and just start digging." He envisions a transportation Upside Down that duplicates LA's maze of highways underground. But wait. It gets weirder. A series of tunnels—30 or even 40 levels of them—could shuttle individual cars on electric skates at more than 120 mph. Need to travel beyond the city? No problem. Elon's got a plan for that too. He's proposed a 200-mile tunnel connecting New York and Washington, DC, via hyperloop. (You remember hyperloop, yeah? That's Musk's plan to whisk people hither and yon in tubes at something like the speed of sound.)

To make this happen at cost and speed commensurate with his taste for disruption, Musk must first conquer tunneling. Like the stodgy space and auto industries, boring seems ripe for revolution. Digging any tunnel of consequence takes years, costs millions, and requires navigating labyrinthine bureaucracies. Seemingly minor problems can prove debilitating: When Seattle's boring machine, Big Bertha, unexpectedly hit a lead pipe and damaged its cutting blades, it spent two years stranded underground.

Musk thinks he can do it faster and cheaper than anyone else—including, presumably, this guy—by tweaking the tools and engineering. So he bought a used boring machine, named it Godot (the man sure does hate waiting), and dug a test trench 160 feet long and 16 feet deep in the SpaceX parking garage. Pleased by those results and eager to hone his skills, Musk wants to keep going beyond SpaceX property and into, or rather under, the city of Hawthorne. Now the city council has given it the go-ahead, after a vote of four to one. (There are still more a few more papers to sign before work on the tunnel can begin, including permits from state departments of transportation and labor.)

City of Hawthorne

The Test Tunnel

The Boring Company's plan calls for extending that tunnel 1.6 miles to a point somewhere beneath 120th Street. The company insists the five-month construction process won't interrupt traffic, and says locals won't even know there's work going on because the tunnel will be 22 to 44 feet beneath the surface of the road.