Hawthorne Test Tunnel

The Hawthorne Test Tunnel is the first tunnel The Boring Company built. It runs 1.14 miles (1.83 kilometers) under Hawthorne, California, from a pit in a SpaceX parking lot beside Crenshaw Boulevard west under West 120th Street, and it opened to the public on December 18, 2018. The company dug it to show that a small team could build a usable tunnel quickly and cheaply and then drive electric cars through it.

What is the Hawthorne Test Tunnel?

At the opening, members of the public climbed into Tesla Model X cars fitted with guide wheels and rode through a tunnel that had not existed two years earlier. The lined tube has room for one car. The Boring Company calls it its Loop Test Track and counts it among seven research tunnels in three cities: Hawthorne and Adelanto in California, and Bastrop, Texas.

Why the Hawthorne Test Tunnel Exists

On December 17, 2016, stuck in Los Angeles traffic, Elon Musk posted: “Traffic is driving me nuts. Am going to build a tunnel boring machine and just start digging...” The company was registered on January 11, 2017.

Elon's target was the price of digging. The Boring Company's original FAQ said some tunnel projects cost as much as $1 billion a mile, a price that keeps new underground roads and rail out of reach for most cities. The company set out to cut that cost by more than 10 times and to dig 1 mile of tunnel a week, and Hawthorne was its first test of the cost target in real ground.

How it Works

The digging was done by Godot, a secondhand Lovat tunnel boring machine (TBM), a giant rotating cutter that grinds forward while the crew lines the tunnel behind it with concrete segments. Godot carved a bore about 14 feet across, and the lining took up the difference, leaving the company's standard internal diameter of 12 feet.

Riders at the December 2018 opening moved through the lit tube at up to about 40 mph. In later testing a Tesla Model 3 reached 116 mph under human control, and The Boring Company says it still uses the track for Loop testing at speeds up to 140 mph.

The Economics of the Hawthorne Test Tunnel

Rides through the tunnel were free and for demonstration only. Its return was a proven price: 1.14 miles of tunnel for under $10 million. The company's first paying system, the Las Vegas Convention Center (LVCC) Loop, opened in April 2021 at a fixed price of about $47 million, and Hawthorne stayed behind as the place to test machines and cars before they go to customers.

Current Status of Hawthorne Test Tunnel

The Boring Company lists the Hawthorne tunnel as complete and operational and uses it as its Loop Test Track. Paying passengers ride in Las Vegas, where the Vegas Loop has carried more than 4 million people through 14 stations.

What Comes Next

The company's attention has moved from the tunnel to the speed of the machine. Godot was a refurbished, conventional TBM, and the Prufrock machines that followed were designed from scratch to dig faster with no people in the tunnel during normal work. In September 2025 the company called Prufrock-4 its smartest, fastest, and safest TBM.

In 2022 the company set Prufrock a goal of up to 1 mile a week, about six times Godot's pace. Faster digging spreads the cost of each machine and crew over more finished tunnel, which pushes the price per mile below what Hawthorne cost.

The Bottom Line

The Hawthorne Test Tunnel took The Boring Company from a December 2016 post to a working 1.14-mile tunnel in two years, for under $10 million. It showed what a mile of tunnel could cost before the company bid on Las Vegas, and the company still runs test cars through it.