Vegas Loop carries 82,000 riders in Teslas during CONEXPO, as Prufrock-2 finishes a record 2.28-mile tunnel

The Boring Company had a big week in Las Vegas. During CONEXPO-CON/AGG, the largest construction trade show in North America, its Vegas Loop carried about 82,000 passengers in Tesla cars. Around the same time, the company said its Prufrock-2 boring machine had surfaced after digging the longest single tunnel in the network so far.

82,000 riders in five days

• The event: CONEXPO-CON/AGG ran from March 3 to 7 at the Las Vegas Convention Center, with more than 140,000 attendees.
• Ridership: about 82,000 Loop passengers over the five days, according to the company. Elon Musk summed it up on X as "82k pax moved fast".
• The vehicles: standard Tesla Model Y and Model 3 cars, driving point to point without stops in between.
• Time saved: on the convention campus, the Loop turns a walk of roughly 25 minutes into a ride of about two minutes.

That is an average of more than 16,000 rides a day for one event, on a network that is still only partly built.

Prufrock-2 sets a tunnel record

Underground, the company reached a construction milestone. Prufrock-2, its all-electric tunnel boring machine, completed a 2.28-mile (3.7 km) segment known as Westgate Tunnel #4, near the Westgate resort. The company described it as the longest single Vegas Loop tunnel completed to date.

• Soil removed: about 68,000 cubic yards (roughly 52,000 cubic metres).
• Conveyor: a single continuous belt of 4.8 miles, driven by six motors with a combined 825 horsepower, carried the dirt out of the tunnel.

Long single drives matter because every restart costs time. The fewer times a machine has to surface and relaunch, the closer the company gets to its goal of cheap, fast tunnels.

More stations, more destinations

The trade show also tested new parts of the network. A station at Fontainebleau, on level V-1 of the resort's south valet area, opened in January, and for now offers free rides to the convention center stations, Encore and Westgate. Since late December, the Loop has also offered limited trips to Harry Reid International Airport for about $12, combining tunnels with a short stretch on surface streets because the airport tunnels are not finished yet. The company claims its fares are 50% to 80% below average Uber prices.

The Tesla link

Every one of those 82,000 rides was in a Tesla. That makes the Vegas Loop one of the most visible places where the public rides in Teslas without owning one. Since last autumn, some Loop routes have also used Tesla's self-driving software, with a safety driver still on board in every car. Busy events like CONEXPO show the scale at which driverless operation would start to pay off: drivers are a large part of the cost of every trip.

Why it matters

The Loop is often described as a niche product. Moving tens of thousands of people a day during a major event is a stronger argument for the concept, even if the system still depends on human drivers and covers only a small part of the city.

What to watch next

• The opening of the airport tunnels, so airport trips can run fully underground.
• New stations on the Strip and towards downtown.
• Any step towards removing safety drivers from the Loop's Teslas.