The Las Vegas Convention and Visitors Authority unanimously agreed Tuesday to spend $25 million over five years to Elon Musk’s The Boring Company to maintain the convention center’s underground transit system known as the Vegas Loop.
The board first contracted with Boring in January 2021 on a 17-month deal that had a series of extension periods.
The highly rated system — conventioneers consistently rank it at 4.9 on a 5-point scale — features three stops connected by tunnels beneath the convention center moving visitors in Tesla vehicles with rides that last about a minute between stops.
Boring owns, operates and maintains the vehicles and has drivers that maneuver the narrow tunnels.
The convention center transit system became somewhat of a test facility and Boring is now drilling tunnels throughout the valley to eventually operate an underground transportation network.
As a commercial operation, Boring will collect fares from passengers, but the convention center system is complementary to convention delegates and since opening, it has transported 3.5 million passengers within the campus.
The new five-year term will run July 1 through June 30, 2031.
LVCVA President and CEO Steve Hill said he believes the Vegas Loop system eventually will operate with autonomous Teslas and that the per-person cost of transporting people will decline.
“There’s a management fee that they get each month as a part of (the contract) and then they get paid per car per day, which includes drivers and all the costs of ownership of the car,” he said.
Hill said there’s no timeline for when Vegas Loop vehicles will become autonomous.
“As that develops, then we will integrate that here,” he said, “both on campus and in the destination over some period of time. When that happens, the cost of operating that system will drop and we will be the beneficiary of that.”
Hill said he believes employment of the drivers represents about 40 percent of the cost of the system, so when it goes autonomous, there should be considerable savings.
This is a developing story. Check back for updates.
Contact Richard N. Velotta at rvelotta@reviewjournal.com or 702-477-3893. Follow @RickVelotta on X.
