Elon Musk on Tuesday presented the first section of a planned high-speed underground network he hopes to create to beat Los Angeles's ‘soul-destroying traffic.’  The test tunnel, dug by Musk's subsidiary the Boring Company, runs between a parking lot near SpaceX headquarters in Hawthorne, south-western Los Angeles, and a closed business area about 3 kilometres away.

The so-called Loop, part bankrolled by the sale of 20,000 flamethrowers earlier this year, will see modified autonomous cars fitted with special retractable guide wheels lowered into the tunnels by custom created lifts.

Musk claimed that once in the tunnel, vehicles would be able to safely travel at over 240 kilometres per hour at one-second intervals.

‘At that speed, it will feel like teleporting within a city,’ he wrote on Twitter ahead of the launch, which came exactly two years after the businessman tweeted that traffic in Los Angeles was driving him ‘nuts.’   ‘Am going to build a tunnel boring machine and just start digging,’ he wrote on December 18, 2016.