To give him his credit, Elon Musk has this grand vision that, the future of land transportation lies in massive tunnelling. He envisions a land transportation revolution with many tunnels at different depths connecting inter/intra city destinations, Cris-crossing under the ground.

He plans to achieve this financially difficult-to-attain vision, by radically lowering tunnel construction costs. For this, he aims to develop a new Tunnel Boring Machine (TBM) “up to 10–15 times faster" than the current TBMs in the market.

Invented by the USAians (The Robbins Company) and its technology improved radically in 70's and 80's by the Japanese, and later improved by the Germans, the basics of the TBM technology have not changed much since then.

Pointing to obvious, makes you a genius, obviously

One of Elon Musk's mantra is something like "current TBMs bore half the time and stop in the other half", meaning boring and the segment laying cycles. Even if we assume that nobody has told him about the double-shield TBMs (at least for hard ground), it is amazing that pointing to this obvious fact, in the eyes of many, makes him regarded as a "genius", as someone who can see what nobody else can...

Though Elon Musks’ “Prufrock” TBM, when developed, aims to speed up tunnelling at an earth-shattering “10–15” times, we are yet to see any real product. Or any sign of it coming at all. How realistic is it to hope that, some geniuses are working away in some secret hangar without any progress information leaking out and that they will be dropping a miracle Prufrock TBM like a bomb shell in the TBM market?  It may well be possible, but how likely is it really, in this information age?

Current reality is hearsay from groupie websites

It is hard to get any information over this miracle TBM that TBC is producing from the company's website or any other reliable source. Any information coming out is from some TV interviews that Mr Musk participated some time ago or from websites following Mr Musk's ventures and are almost without exception from non-industrial media with arguable trustworthiness.

So far all we know about The Boring Company is that; they bought a TBM from another company (Lovat or Lovsuns?) and tweaked here and there. They are using such TBM at their test tunnel and Las Vegas tunnelling work. We are also reading at some groupie websites that there is some road map with some TBM models achieving modest (at least comparable to Prufrock claims) improvements to be followed by the nirvana of all, the "up to 10 to 15 times faster" Prufrock.

The problem is, we hear such information, but we are presented with no (none what so ever) of any official data to back it. So far it is all lip service and hearsay.

Cheap Tunnels. Compared to what?

One trustworthy piece of information that we hear is that; The Boring Company builds their tunnel(s?) cheaply, prompting interest especially in Florida's mayors. They build cheaply, but compared to what? So far, all we have seen is they have built a tunnel in Las Vegas which would pass more as an amusement-park, with some small Tesla cars driving in comical speeds under psychedelic lighting. How can you compare the costs of such a tunnel with that of a highway tunnel, metro tunnel or a rail tunnel? In addition, TBC plans to avoid shafts to decrease costs, which is not always avoidable in real life projects.

I am sincerely hoping that Elon Musk will succeed in revolutionizing the tunnelling. I would really find an improvement similar what SpaceX did in rocket business spectacular, yet alone a 10-15 fold improvement. Any radical improvement he will bring to TBM tunnelling will help defeat the technological stagnation that industry suffers from in recent years and will take the TBM tunnelling to the next level. But there are no serious signs of it, as of now.