[tim333]

They started that way, just buying a drill, but are now trying to innovate and build their own one. They are just starting using Prufrock-3. The Prufrocks are machines the Boring company have made themselves. They say "Prufrock's medium-term goal is to exceed 1/10 of human walking speed, which is 7 miles per day." which is way faster than anyone else. The Swiss machine in the video did 400m in 4 months. They are also experimenting with evacuated tunnels (https://youtu.be/nV07jqwCy0A?t=879) which may not go anywhere but is at least an attempt at innovation.

[sschueller]

"7 miles per day" is all talk and no proof it can actually be done. The Swiss dig a lot of holes from easy to very complex terrain. If there was an easy way go that much faster they would.

There was a derailment of a cargo train the the Gotthard base tunnel last year [1]. It caused a huge amount of damage and one tunnel will be close until September this year. They need to replace 7km of track. If there way anyone to do this correctly faster they would as it is costing millions not having this route open. Concrete needs time to cure etc. some things you can't just make faster because someone said so.

[1] https://www.swissinfo.ch/eng/business/gotthard-base-tunnel-t...

[kortilla]

It’s incredible how defensive people get around others’ ambitious goals.

Every Elon company sets super high goal targets. They are often completely unrealistic with current technology but it inspires certain types of people to innovate and it works quite well.

> The Swiss dig a lot of holes from easy to very complex terrain. If there was an easy way go that much faster they would.

Nobody said anything about “easy”. Also, The argument of “the established players don’t work on X so X isn’t possible” doesn’t work.

If the Swiss are happy with their industry the industry isn’t going to risk really capital intense experimentation to do better. See: Innovator’s dilemma

[j16sdiz]

> ... medium-term goal is to exceed ...

According to the roadmap, another Elon company should have attended fully automated driving years ago.

[avar]

    > The Swiss machine in the
    > video did 400m in 4 months.

No, a lot of the time the machine was stationary because the needed to manually reinforce what they were about to drill through, so the machine wouldn't get trapped and buried in gravel. Wouldn't Prufrock-3 be similarly slowed down!

In addition to that I assume that the 7 miles a day claim assumes 24/7 drilling, whereas I wouldn't be surprised if the swiss were doing 8/5 drilling.