Fire Experts Criticize Elon Musk’s Flamethrower

Elon Musk may be a lot of things, but boring is certainly not one of them. This makes the name of his latest venture a bit ironic, although The Boring Company isn’t actually about being boring, it’s about doing boring.

Musk has a vision for reducing traffic on our roadways, and this company is going to be the key to realizing that vision. As Musk says, our options for reducing traffic are to go up (flying cars) or down (tunnels). While we have all been expecting flying cars for decades, but there still isn’t a practical or even feasible option that has been brought to the market. Besides that fact, it seems almost certain that they’ll be too expensive for the general public to afford. So that leaves us taking the roads downward, and that’s where Musk sees the future of roadways.

Tunnels are not really affected by the weather, they don’t add to the eyesore that is our current highway system, and they won’t fall out of the sky if things go wrong.

Of course, tunnels already exist, but they’ve proven to be sluggish and expensive, costing up to a billion dollars per mile for some projects. Obviously that’s not a feasible cost, so Musk has tackled the problem of increasing speed while lowering cost of digging tunnels and, as he tends to do, he’s made some pretty significant strides in pushing the industry forward.

The Boring Company aims to build faster-to-dig tunnels that are smaller in diameter than current digs, since Musk’s vision sees “skates” being zipped through the tunnels instead of cars driving through, similar to subways.

To help raise funding for this venture, Musk decided to sell a product that’s proven to be a great seller, but also a tad controversial. Priced at $500, Musk marketed a self-contained “flame thrower” (it’s called a flame thrower but is more of a really powerful torch) that, while selling out completely, has caused concern among some, especially those in the fire fighting community. Watch this segment below from a California news station and see if you think these concerns are valid.