Tired of commuting on the 405 Freeway?

Tesla CEO Elon Musk is seeking approval from the city of Los Angeles to dig an underground tunnel for high-speed electric vehicles that parallels the notoriously gridlocked route.

His Boring Co. has applied for an excavation permit to extend its electric-vehicle tunnel in Hawthorne into Los Angeles, connecting the South Bay, Westside and San Fernando Valley, city officials said Tuesday.

The city’s Bureau of Engineering did not immediately release details of the permit request. But the application is consistent with Musk’s announcement in an October tweet that he planned to extend the tunnel “from LAX to the 101.”

On Tuesday, Los Angeles Mayor Eric Garcetti expressed early support for the idea.

L.A. has always been a place where innovators come to build new ideas that can change our lives. Looking forward to exploring how @ElonMusk’s Boring Company could help us build a better future for our city. https://t.co/doolkpsuZw pic.twitter.com/om7nWEmteD — Mayor Eric Garcetti (@MayorOfLA) November 22, 2017

“Los Angeles has always been a place where innovators come to build new ideas that can change how we live our lives,” Garcetti said. “We look forward to continuing our conversations about this new transportation technology, and exploring the ways that it can help us build a better future for our city.”

Construction on the tunnel began this summer, when SpaceX workers started digging up the company’s old parking lot across from its headquarters at 1 Rocket Road in Hawthorne. Musk is also CEO of Space Exploration Technologies Corp.

In August, the Hawthorne City Council approved construction of a 2-mile tunnel stretching from the lot near Crenshaw Boulevard west along 120th Street. Council members approved last week the price and terms of the roughly 8,600-foot-long tunnel easement.

Hawthorne Mayor Alex Vargas, who met with Musk and toured the tunnel, cheered on the progress.

“The city of Hawthorne is excited to see the rapid progress at which the tunnel is being completed,” Vargas said. “We are looking forward to seeing Elon Musk begin testing his system and making subterranean travel a reality here in our city.”

The tunnel, with a 13.5-foot diameter, is deep enough to avoid utility lines. It gradually extends from 20 to 43 deep in Hawthorne, where a tunnel-boring machine is currently working beneath 120th Street.

It’s also insulated from earthquakes, which experts say have less of an impact underground than on the surface.

As Musk explained in a tweet: “Earthquakes tend to have the biggest effect on the surface, like waves on water. That’s why LA can have a (lame, but getting better) subway.”

The digging causes no vibrations or disturbances at the street level — other than at the entrance to the tunnel, where excavated dirt is loaded into trucks for removal.

Inside the tunnel, a track is being extended to ferry a “skate” that could carry an electric vehicle or passenger pod. The skate would allow the vehicles to move autonomously and at high speeds over 100 mph.

A vehicle elevator also was built to deliver cars and pods carrying people and bicycles into the Hawthorne tunnel.

Boring Co. workers are using the latest technologies to advance tunnel-digging equipment, including advanced sensors to identify the slightest ground subsidence. In 1995, such a subsidence triggered the collapse of a massive chunk of Hollywood Boulevard into a subway tunnel under construction due to poor design plans.

The company also is testing the idea of using excavated dirt to make adobe-style bricks that could be used to line the tunnel.

All of this is being done to escape the region’s “soul-destroying traffic” and to further the development of electric-vehicle technology, Musk has said.

On the East Coast, the Boring Co. received approval in October to begin digging a tunnel to connect Baltimore and Washington D.C.

“To alleviate traffic, transportation corridors, like the buildings that feed into them, must expand into three dimensions,” according to a Boring Co. statement. “One option is to ‘go up’ with flying cars. The other option is to “go down” and build tunnels. There is no practical limit to how many layers of tunnels can be built, so any level of traffic can be addressed.”