Texas is home to both Tesla and The Boring Company, and it looks like the two companies could be gearing up for a project that could see several underground tunnels built at Giga Texas.
Back in 2022 The Boring Company filed an application with the City of Austin for a project called the “Colorado River Connector Tunnel, with the application describing the project as a “private access tunnel along with associated improvements” at 12733 Tesla Rd. That was about it for information related to the project, but in the early days of ramping the Model 3 at the Fremont factory CEO Elon Musk had said Tesla could build tunnels between its facilities to streamline production.
If the latest sightings at Giga Texas are any indication, Tesla might finally be following through on Musk’s ambitions. In a drone flyover of the factory this week, pilot Joe Tegtmeyer spotted an unusual collection of large concrete pieces that had recently been delivered near the newly constructed warehouse across the highway and to the west of the main Giga Texas factory complex.
In his initial video Tegtmeyer wasn’t exactly sure what these pieces were, but after some investigation he discovered they are concrete tunnel linings from The Boring Company. To support this Tegtmeyer provided a comparison to images he captured during one of his drone flights from last month above The Boring Company, showing the same concrete pieces at the company’s facility in Bastrop.
The obvious question is why would The Boring Company be delivering this pieces to Giga Texas, when it has its own facilities nearby? According to Tegtmeyer, this development suggests at least one, if not several tunnels will soon be built underneath the highway connecting Giga Texas and Tesla’s facilities to the west. Once complete these tunnels would then be used to transport newly built vehicles from the factory to a new, larger outbound lot on the other side of the highway.
While these tunnel liners have been delivered, the one big piece of equipment that hasn’t shown up yet is the tunnel boring machine itself. As luck would have it Prufrock-1 completed the Westgate-2 tunnel in Las Vegas earlier this month, and is being transported back to Texas. The good news is that the massive machine will be difficult to hide, so if it does end up at Giga Texas, it will be easy to spot.
You can watch Tegtmeyer’s full drone flight above Giga Texas below. The tunnel liners appear at the 27:00 mark.
