13 ms·

Is Hyperloop the future of travel?

95 points by Elvie 10y ago

pieter1976 10y ago
Haven't really fast trains (sometimes maglev) inside evacuated tubes been proposed over and over again. Trying to work out what is new here. For example: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Vactrain https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Vactrain
- Inthenameofmine 10y ago
  The tube would not be evacuated. The train sucks the air in front of it and pushes it around and especially below, creating an air cushion just like an air hockey, further decreasing energy requirement for movement. That way you also get rid of the air evacuation cost.
  - jerf 10y ago
    "What is Hyperloop? "Hyperloop is a conceptual transport system in which passengers are loaded into pods and fired through vacuum tubes at more than 600mph (1,000km/h).... "Pumping the air out of the tubes reduces resistance, allowing high speeds to be achieved, potentially using less energy than a train."
    - shawabawa3 10y ago
      The journalist is wrong/simplifying See wikipedia [0]: "pressurized capsules ride on an air cushion driven by linear induction motors and air compressors" [0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hyperloop https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hyperloop
      - Someone1234 10y ago
        You cut off that quote: > incorporating reduced-pressure tubes in which pressurized capsules ride on an air cushion driven by linear induction motors and air compressors. So the tubes are low pressure. Perhaps not vacuum, but in reality so called vacuum tube delivery systems aren't actually a vacuum either, that's why a more accurate name for them is Pneumatic Tube Systems. I'm not sure what it is exactly you're trying to argue, above you made it sound like the system isn't low pressure at all.
      - wibr 10y ago
        Same source: "The Hyperloop resembles a vactrain system but operates at approximately one millibar (100 Pa) of pressure." That would be a "medium vacuum" according to Wikipedia.
      - usrusr 10y ago
        Both BBC quotes are in full agreement with the document at http://spacex.com/sites/spacex/files/hyperloop_alpha.pdf http://spacex.com/sites/spacex/files/hyperloop_alpha.pdf . Page 12, "100 Pascals", that's roughly 99.9% of the air removed. The distinction between "very low pressure" and "vacuum" that is implied by the "hyperloop is not a vactrain" camp is a fantasy.
        shkkmo 10y ago
        It is pretty relevant at the speeds being discussed.
        usrusr 10y ago
        For the design of the vehicle, yes, for the design of the infrastructure, not so much. Those 100 Pa are actually much lower than what previous vactrain proposals suggested. The only difference is that hyperloop is trying to do something useful with the unavoidable trace atmosphere instead of just overcoming it.
      - Animats 10y ago
        The MIT prototype, and some of the other proposals, are really a maglev system. The original Hyperloop proposal called for aerodynamic support, with very tight tolerances, but that turns out to be iffy. A maglev system needs a much more expensive track and/or a lot of energy from the vehicle to power the lift. This is the big problem with maglev - track cost. Maglev works fine; the Transrapid system in Shanghai has been running for 12 years now without serious problems. Top speed 300 MPH. The Hyperloop is only interesting if it's far cheaper than a maglev. The Transrapid maglev system has far more capacity, can corner better, and can climb steeper grades.
        ericd 10y ago
        Ah that explains all the maglev. I could have sworn that the original version rode on air and used its electric turbine for propulsion. Anything good you've read that explains why they've abandoned that route?
        Animats 10y ago
        The Berkeley team proposed aerodynamic suspension. There's an analysis with ANSYS which indicates that the design can be tweaked so that at no point does the air go supersonic.[1] But nobody seems to have published a stability analysis for the vehicle in the tube. The "flying height" in the original proposal was to be about 1mm, so this thing has to be really well behaved aerodynamically. And the tube has to be really smooth. (Expansion joints, emergency escape hatches, pressure doors, and switches would be problems.) The whole point of the Hyperloop is that it's cheap because the tube is simple and dumb. When you look at the MIT design [2] it's really a maglev monorail that operates in an evacuated tube. (Or outside of one, as they've demonstrated by sending down a rail). It doesn't have any of the fan propulsion or air cushion lift or tight tolerances from the original Hyperloop proposal. [1] http://www.ansys-blog.com/20130925hyperloop/ http://www.ansys-blog.com/20130925hyperloop/ [2] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=yiyPQU48Ef0 https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=yiyPQU48Ef0
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  - Retric 10y ago
    The tube would be evacuated on earth. Which is why they need a tube in the first place: Mars According to Musk, Hyperloop would be useful on Mars as no tubes would be needed. This is because Mars' atmosphere is about 1% the density of the Earth's.[10][45][46] For the hyperloop concept to work on Earth, low-pressure tubes are required to reduce air resistance. However, if they were to be built on Mars, the lower air resistance would allow a hyperloop to be created with no tube, only a track.[47] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hyperloop https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hyperloop The important point is 0.01 ATM is a long way from high vacuum. Pumps can get down to that pressure very easily and individual Pumps can cover wide sections of track.
    - steffan 10y ago
      > a hyperloop to be created with no tube, only a track Don't we call that a “train?”
      - dangerlibrary 10y ago
        yep
      - Retric 10y ago
        The original design did not have a 'track' along the full route. Cars would more or less hop between different sections. On Mars that represents clear reliability issues, but the ability to avoid building load barring bridges over gorges could be a major cost savings.
      - fzzzy 10y ago
        Sure, but I think it's fair to call a train that is powered with electromagnetic pulses from stationary coils something different than a train that is powered by an onboard engine.
        ino 10y ago
        You just described a Maglev
- Retric 10y ago
  Vacuums get much more costly as you get ever lower pressure. Hyperloop is an interesting cost / benefit between fast travel and lower construction and maintenance costs which is why the speeds are relatively low. The vehicle is also closer to an electric aircraft than an electric train. Note the big fan on the front: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hyperloop#/media/File:Hyperloop_no_tube.png https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hyperloop#/media/File:Hyperloo... Another consideration is the faster you travel the straighter your path needs to be. 4,000+MPH paths require incredibly strait designs.
  - kuschku 10y ago
    You realize that the fan concept, and the hovercraft concept both were cancelled? The new hyperloop concept is just a fan-less capsule hovering on a MagLev track. It’s just VacTrain over again, but more expensive and with lower capacities.
    - Retric 10y ago
      I don't think that qualifies as 'HyperLoop' even if they keep the name. It's like building an airplane except you use it underwater, sorry that's a sub. That said, it suggests that the HyperLoop concept is not viable which is not that surprising IMO. However, it might also just be a case of lower R&D costs.
      - kuschku 10y ago
        Well, obviously they want to keep the hype alive. So it’s understandable that they’d refuse to change the name. Sadly, this also means we have a lot of people think this is something revolutionary, although I guess that’s intentional. It’s really annoying when you consider how the US refused a proposal from japanese companies a few years ago to build a MagLev system between Boston, NY, Washington, with capacities around 10k people per hour.
    - nickparker 10y ago
      "Cancelled" by who? Hyperloop One is by far the most credible project, with HTT somewhere behind them in second. They haven't revealed anything about their compression systems or lack thereof. HTT has backed off air levitation, but they're still using Inductrack which is radically cheaper than conventional MagLev and hasn't been applied commercially yet. Several of the competition teams (like the one in this article) have built MagLev sleds with nice brakes, but they're just trying to win a speed record competition. That has no bearing on the real Hyperloop. Other teams are focusing more on scalable tech and doing some pretty innovative work. The lower per-vehicle capacities also aren't a negative if launch cadences can be kept high enough to maintain throughput. Smaller vehicles let the network operate in a more point-to-point manner instead of the stop-and-go crap that trains have done since day one.
- sigmar 10y ago
  >Trying to work out what is new here. As with most very large scale projects, PR is the game changer. Elon Musk's backing of the concept and investment into competitive solutions for a hyperloop has created publicity and driven interest. The hyperloop doesn't need to be an innovative technological advancement to benefit society. It just needs to be safe, fast, and cost effective.
  - xiphias 10y ago
    The whitepaper was more than just usual PR: he got lots of input of top engineers in the travel space and made the design free. I don't remember the CEO of Boing or BMW or any other transportation company doing anything similar.
wimagguc 10y ago
Fun fact, New York City's subway started out with a similar system (between 1870 and 1873, called the Beach Pneumatic Transit): https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Beach_Pneumatic_Transit https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Beach_Pneumatic_Transit
- grosun 10y ago
  & London's Crystal palace pneumatic railway predated that by 6 years https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Crystal_Palace_pneumatic_railway https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Crystal_Palace_pneumatic_railw... Not a roaring success though!
shawabawa3 10y ago
> Except it is really, really expensive. > Mr Musk says the cost of building the route would be in the region of $6bn (£4.1bn), an estimate most agree is extremely conservative. I'm pretty sure that should say "extremely optimistic". Musk's estimate of $6bn is over 10x cheaper than the high speed train line cost for the same route
- puranjay 10y ago
  Last I checked, wasn't the project over budget and hitting close to $100Bn in costs? Honestly, even $50Bn sounds like chump change for a project as ambitious as the Hyperloop. Nearly all large scale public infrastructure projects end up costing billions of dollars over estimated costs anyway.
  - tptacek 10y ago
    If you're saying that the HSR project is over budget, you're right, but you're not helping the Hyperloop argument. The point is that if the HSR people can't get something done for $X, it's unlikely that Musk can do something even more ambitious for $X/10.
    - elchief 10y ago
      Like how he's lowering the price of rocketry by 90%? His last bid was 40% less than United Launch
      - ubernostrum 10y ago
        SpaceX received uncounted billions' of dollars worth of R&D for free thanks to the existence of government-funded space programs, which already solved many of the difficult fundamental problems in the field of rocketry so SpaceX wouldn't have to. And while it's neat to watch the stuff they do, there's very little SpaceX is doing that's revolutionary as opposed to evolutionary. So of course now SpaceX can come in and reduce the costs by building on the existing base of work in the field. Hyperloop doesn't have anywhere near that amount of free R&D or established, easy-to-increment-to-get-there technologies to draw on.
amelius 10y ago
Also, will it render autonomous trucks obsolete? [1] [1] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=11711657 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=11711657
- gambiting 10y ago
  How will the goods get from the source to the hyperloop stations? There's your answer.
mtgx 10y ago
Why not create hyperloops for ultra-fast (yet relatively cheap in volume) trans-Atlantic merchandise shipping? Surely that would be a highly profitable project from the start?
- m-i-l 10y ago
  Hyperloop Technologies is focussing on using it for cargo, at least at first until "the infrastructure is built and the kinks are worked out": https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=11668414 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=11668414
- Alupis 10y ago
  > Why not create hyperloops for ultra-fast (yet relatively cheap in volume) trans-Atlantic merchandise shipping 1) There's very little merchandise that needs to be shipped trans-Atlantic that quickly. 2) Shipping containers are huge and heavy. Transporting a cargo-ship's worth requires a lot of energy, which translates into high expenses. 3) If shipping a cargo-ship's worth of containers, this will become an impossibly long train, nearing 70 miles long (around 18,000 containers per ship, and each container is about 20ft long)[1] This has been the crux of the hyperloop since inception. The numbers really don't add up to making it more economical than any already existing alternative (even for transporting people). Shipping things via slow boat in a container is surprisingly not very expensive (given you've filled a container with goods, the goods value will greatly exceed your transport costs). [1] http://www.bbc.com/news/magazine-21432226 http://www.bbc.com/news/magazine-21432226
  - gutnor 10y ago
    The original plan was to reuse existing infrastructure and have very few stops outside city center. For that scenario the number were holding up. Now the question is what problem is this solving: you have cheap novel transport system for passenger between 2 points nobody is really interested in. And that's the wall all the project around hyperloop are hitting. Either you need the government to step in to make it competitive for endpoint that people are currently interested in. Or you keep the original design, but you need the government to step in to ensure those uninteresting endpoints become interesting.
betteridge 10y ago
No.
- Freak_NL 10y ago
  I suspect HN will be seeing more of this particular user/comment combination in the future… Betteridge's Law of Headlines: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Betteridge's_law_of_headlines https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Betteridge's_law_of_headlines
  - dimino 10y ago
    I think dang will take care of this comment (and the account?) in short order, novelty accounts are verboten on HN (as they provide no value).
- dang 10y ago
  While it's mildly interesting that that account name hadn't already been taken for this very purpose, HN doesn't allow novelty accounts, so we've banned this one. If there were an easy way to ban mechanical invocations of Betteridge we'd have done that too, about ten thousand of them ago.
  - deleted 10y ago
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betteridge 10y ago
No.
Intermernet 10y ago
Sydney is just about to roll out a new (mostly) sub-terrainian train system [1] which would be an interesting demo for hyperloop tech, except for the large numbers of stops being incorporated into the trip. Despite this problem, the costings should be an example of how much it would cost to build new, tunnel based, infrastructure through similar areas (admittedly, Sydney is mostly soft sandstone). [1]: http://sydneymetro.info/ http://sydneymetro.info/
- shawabawa3 10y ago
  Hyperloop is designed to be above-ground, which is significantly cheaper. Also, musk's original route plan has it stopping outside city-centers (presumably to keep the cost-estimate down)
manigandham 10y ago
This technology has been around for over a century. Remove wheel friction and air pressure as the primary barriers to speed with the pinnacle being maglev in a full vacuum (something that was proposed for 5000mph trains crossing the ocean on the seabed at one point). The Hyperloop concept has relaxed these constraints by allowing for some atmosphere, which also greatly reduces the top speed, but fundamentally it's the same thing. And it's all perfectly possible given enough engineering. The only real problem is the financial viability of such a project. Air travel is already very streamlined and inexpensive for crossing big distances and has the advantage of not requiring the infrastructure and real estate that a train needs. Just the land rights alone will quickly balloon the cost into 100s of billions for any sizable project between two major cities that people want to travel between - and until that gets figured out, this will never happen. The recent news around a startup raising 80M is meaningless because they will waste all that money chasing tech without realizing that they will never be able to successfully lay track anywhere.
- mentos 10y ago
  I think the difference maker here could be Elon Musk. He has the force of will to make believers out of all of the obstacles (technological and political) in the way.
- kbenson 10y ago
  > Air travel is already very streamlined and inexpensive for crossing big distances and has the advantage of not requiring the infrastructure and real estate that a train needs. Hyperloop is very specifically aimed at medium distance routes. SF to LA, for example, where the plane has relatively little time cruising at altitude, where it can fly efficiently. If a plane is spending most it's time flying through denser aid, then it's not flying efficiently, and burns a lot of fuel on a per-mile basis relative to a longer flight. Hyperloop is specced to be more efficient than air travel at the distance it's proposed.
  - manigandham 10y ago
    Efficient != cheaper. The only thing that matters is what people are willing to pay, and that's not much for medium distance. And for the billions it costs to install the track in the first place, you can buy several airlines and operate them for years.
dimino 10y ago
I think you know you've got a winning idea when the esteemed commenters on HN all dismiss it out of hand. I hope I can Hyperloop from NY to LA some day, and if we can leverage the current high investment traffic to get that to happen, I'm all for it.
- dang 10y ago
  > I think you know you've got a winning idea when the esteemed commenters on HN all dismiss it out of hand. Please don't diss the community as a rhetorical device. There's no substance in that, and since you're also an esteemed commenter on HN, it's false.
  - dimino 10y ago
    I understand what you're getting at, and you make a fair point, but you really don't think there's a trend on HN where pretty much every idea is called obvious or terrible by some of the most popular comments on a given submission? I was hoping to put some red ink on the trend and maybe curtail it slightly, for what that's worth.
    - dang 10y ago
      > you really don't think there's a trend on HN It's really hard to assess that objectively because the cognitive biases affecting such perceptions are so strong. Certainly we don't want HN to be that way and try to nudge it in more fruitful directions. But the way to fight an undesirable pattern on HN is not with another undesirable pattern.
      - dimino 10y ago
        I'll defer to you on identifying undesirable patterns from now on, sorry.
pnut 10y ago
My answer to the question, is 'NO'. I love trains, and use them whenever possible. However, with static start and endpoints, and existing low-cost air infrastructure that is dynamically reroutable and equivalently fast, why spend the hundreds of billions of dollars to recreate something so fragile and limited? Municipalities are wisely, generally in a 'wait and see' phase for the next decade, as autonomous personal transport guarantees to spur the redesign and redevelopment of entire cities and transportation infrastructure.
- jerf 10y ago
  The autonomous transport you mention in the end is also an issue for Hyperloop directly. Highways are "easy mode" for autonomous cars, so automated services to move you between cities may be available substantially before they can necessarily move you within the city. Sure, they'll be a lot slower than the hyperloop, but they'll probably be a lot cheaper. Perhaps the hyperloop could win the deploy-to-production race with fully autonomous cars, but at this point, I bet it can't win the race with autonomous cross-city quasi-personal transport.
  - stcredzero 10y ago
    I wonder how the economics would work out for something the size of a bus, but with much better aerodynamics? (Perhaps with laminar flow boundary devices?)
ck2 10y ago
Just imagine the TSA line for the hyperloop. You'll have to arrive days ahead of time.
- shawabawa3 10y ago
  Why? Wouldn't it be more like a train than a plane? A terrorist would only be able to kill ~28 people at a time (1 pod), compared to >200 for a plane
  - avelis 10y ago
    I agree. A domestic train/pod based travel network doesn't have the same security implications as an airport.
  - bluthru 10y ago
    Blowing up inside a tube would be a lot more expensive than blowing up a train on the tracks. But then again, someone could just plant a bomb on the outside of the tube so I guess it's moot.
    - setpatchaddress 10y ago
      More to the point, you can't weaponize any fixed-track conveyance like a train/monorail/HL system like you can a plane.
  - lijason 10y ago
    Hasn't the TSA wanted to move into train stations as well? The TSA has shown that they aren't bounded by either what's sensible (ineffective rules) nor the will of the people (buying the backscatter machines without Congressional approval).
    - ck2 10y ago
      TSA has already tested forcing people to screen getting on/off trains and even the highway - seriously. I wonder if people will start throwing tantrums once they are getting yanked from their cars just going down the highway to work or the store.
JDDunn9 10y ago
Related: http://quora.com/Will-Hyperloop-One’s-Hyperloop-product-work-—-at-scale-cost-effectively-safely http://quora.com/Will-Hyperloop-One’s-Hyperloop-product-work... I think the deal breaker is the high speeds, which require a much straighter track and much larger turn radius (410ft for a train, ~4.6 mi. for HL). That means a lot of tunneling through mountains and bulldozing expensive buildings. Land is the biggest expense in these projects. I'm more hopeful of NASA's current work trying to reduce the sonic boom on airplanes. Flying high solves the air resistance problem, and going in a straight line isn't a problem up there.
- iamcreasy 10y ago
  I remember Elon Musk saying, at Hyperloop POD design weekend, Hyperloop is for short distance travel, because in short flights planes spends most of it's time in ascend or descend. And for air travel, I think suborbital flights are definitely the future.
  - CapitalistCartr 10y ago
    Exactly. HL is for 200-1000 km. distances. Suborbital is for intercontinental. By the way, getting to orbit takes an amount of fuel similar to flying USA to Australia. Once we stop throwing the planes away . . In between those distances is flying.
- sunstone 10y ago
  The problem with flights is the time and trouble spent getting to and getting through airports so the flight time has to be long enough to justify the wasted time.
  - jacobolus 10y ago
    The other problem with flights is that it’s incredibly carbon polluting, compared to trains.
  - ianburrell 10y ago
    Hyperloop has same problem as flying with terminals being located away from the city. With Hyperloop, the issue is that would require expensive right-of-way or tunnels to bring it into the center of the city. Which is why the initial proposal had end in San Fernando Valley, an hour from LA. High speed rail has the big advantage that it can use existing tracks, at slower speed, to reach the center city train stations.
philwelch 10y ago
I know Elon Musk has a lot of goodwill around here, but is no one else cynical about the notion of a smart, ambitious automobile CEO coming up with some plausible-seeming science-fictional FUD to torpedo a high speed rail project that may very well compete with his interests?
- api 10y ago
  In his case I sort of doubt it since he doesn't seem to operate that way. In any case Tesla sales are not going to be impacted much by rail.
  - drzaiusapelord 10y ago
    >In any case Tesla sales are not going to be impacted much by rail. Says who? I have light rail/uber/bus/cabs in my city and if I had HSR to neighboring regions I could just give up my car entirely with no anxiety.
- ericd 10y ago
  Not many people are buying Teslas to primarily commute between SF and LA. Also, the HSR project is a disaster - it's incredibly expensive and it's slow.
- craftkiller 10y ago
  I'd argue the two synergize. Electric cars have a limited range and while there's going to be plenty of charging stations that's still time and effort. Seems much more likely to me that his end-game is hyperloop for longer travel and then a self driving fleet of teslas in an on-demand service at each station.
- dragonwriter 10y ago
  The HL paper wasn't FUD to torpedo the HSR project, as I see it, it was leveraging existing skepticism (and also quite a bit of irrational opposition) with HSR to draw attention to HL. I don't think Musk cares one way or another about HSR, I think he cares about getting people to work on realizing HL so its ready for his Mars colonies, which is the real point of the technology.
pi-err 10y ago
There's a palpable excitement around Hyperloop and I can't wait to know if this will reshape our world or not. One of the largest problem I can see is not technical. The consensus is that a "standard" Hyperloop track (between 2 cities, 300 to 800km apart) would have a ~1,500 passengers/hour max capacity. High speed rail, such as Eurostar, would be around 10,000 passengers/hour. Even if Hyperloop managed to get built at half the price of HSR (which would already be a feat, there's zero chance they'll do it at 10% of HSR price), this makes a very thin passenger flux to deliver reasonable amounts of operational cash. Where HSR can deliver $7M to $14M daily with $150 ticket price at peak time, Hyperloop would max out at $2M daily with $300 tickets during peak hour. And those prices would probably kill their market anyway. And that's with an entirely new transport platform to fund with many unknowns such as metal fatigue for pods in near-vacuum at those speeds, passenger tolerance for accelerations and lateral movements etc. Maybe the business plan for passenger planes and trains was also that hazy back then?
- jordank 10y ago
  These are good points — many have tended to look at just the consumer applications. It may be that the economics lend themselves more to industrial transport or logistics than they do to moving bodies.
- S4M 10y ago
  > High speed rail, such as Eurostar, would be around 10,000 passengers/hour. How is that remotely true? There is one Eurostar approximately every 30 minutes (looking at the departures from London [0], it seems that there are 32 Eurostar leaving London every day), and I seriously doubt one train can carry 5000 passengers (I would say about 500 passengers), so your approximation is completely off (even taking into account the fact that Eurostar can go from London, Paris and Brussels) and 1500 passengers/hour is comparable to the number of passengers the Eurostar carries in an hour. [0] http://www.eurostar.com/uk-en/travel-information/service-information/rtti#/dep/7015400/7015400 http://www.eurostar.com/uk-en/travel-information/service-inf...
  - kuschku 10y ago
    Simply, because you don’t have to run them every 30 minutes. In Germany and Japan on select few HSR lines trains are operating with a frequency of 2 minutes, and 800 passengers per train. That’s 24'000 per hour.
tehabe 10y ago
I'm still wondering how a neighbourhood will react if you want to build two massive tubes through it. I can't imagine people will like those tubes. Yes, you could put them underground but this will increase your costs.
- david927 10y ago
  Wasn't one of the ideas to put them through the existing highway infrastructure, elevated in the meridian?
  - deleted 10y ago
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  - dredmorbius 10y ago
    Hyperlink turning radius (at top speed) is on the order of 100s of km, due to g-forces. You don't have much routing flexibility. Following the kinks of a 100 kph expressway is likely not feasible. Alternatives are to slow down massively as you approach / traverse urban areas, but this further increases trip time, changes acceleration and energy needs, and reduces the already abysmally low net passenger throughput.
    - tehabe 10y ago
      Yeah, I'm still wondering for how long the Hyperloop can keep its high speed before it has to break again. This is already a big issue with high speed trains in Germany, so that some people say, why do we waste money on 300 kph trains which have to break after six minutes anyway. The energy needed to reach this speed is way too high and you don't save a lot of time either. And with Hyperloop it will the same thing. It might work to go from LA to San Francisco without too many stops but Think about Boston to Washington DC.
      - david927 10y ago
        Ah, but the Hyperloop will allow for small, individual cars of maybe 8 people (I'm guessing). This means that you get in the car based on destination and it uses switches so that there are no in-transit stops. Following the kinks of a 100 kph expressway is likely not feasible. Again, my understanding was that this was part of the original TDD (SF to LA) and they found that it was, indeed, feasible.
nhangen 10y ago
I know it's a cynical point of view, but IMO these companies working on Hyperloop is akin to Hooli building inside out compression. I don't think it's going to work.
educar 10y ago
Bay area's problems are best solved with having some kick ass public transport which afaik nobody is working on. IMO, that is a real game changer as opposed to hyperloop, electric cars :/ Most european countries have this already and they are such great places to visit and live.
dredmorbius 10y ago
No, it's not. There's also the Vactrain concept. Several variants were pursued from 1914 on, with Robert Salter of RAND writing a couple of proposals in the 1970s. The idea's not new, has been seriously explored previously, and has been rejected or failed on technical, cost, political, practical, and economic grounds. Some forms of local or highly-dedicated application, possibly. But for general use, no. https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Vactrain https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Vactrain Salter, Robert M. (August 1972), The Very High Speed Transit System, RAND Corporation https://www.rand.org/pubs/papers/P4874.html https://www.rand.org/pubs/papers/P4874.html Salter, Robert M. (February 1978), Trans-Planetary Subway Systems: A Burgeoning Capability, RAND Corporation https://www.rand.org/pubs/papers/P6092.html https://www.rand.org/pubs/papers/P6092.html And, despite Musk's ability to prove me wrong, I'll stick with this projection for now.
- deleted 10y ago
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- _Codemonkeyism 10y ago
  Musk plan: 1. Announce Hyperloop to the world 2. Let someone else build it with tubes 3. Go to Mars 4. Use everything people have built - and went bankrupt - in the thin atmosphere on Mars with success without expensive tubes. Now the SpaceX plans, the Mars plans and Hyperloop come together.
  - deftnerd 10y ago
    I wouldn't be surprised if his involvement in Solar City comes into the picture somehow either.
    - _Codemonkeyism 10y ago
      +100
  - nickparker 10y ago
    You still need tubes on Mars for a vanilla air-levitation based Hyperloop. Martian fines would wreak havoc on your compression system. The mag-lev systems could perhaps run on exposed pistes though.
grillvogel 10y ago
why can't they just use existing shinkansen technology instead of reinventing the wheel with this pie in the sky nonsense?
Animats 10y ago
For a more advanced concept with a working prototype, see [1]. The Applied Superconductivity Laboratory of Southwest Jiaotong University has a maglev train in a glass tube about two meters in diameter. Their goal is 3000 KPH. Here's a technical paper on the maglev system used.[2] They discovered a problem with bumps in the magnetic field at rail joints, and figured out a way to fix that. Maybe that's the future. If you're going to have a maglev system, you may as well go all the way and ditch the air turbine propulsion. [1] http://english.swjtu.edu.cn/public/viewNews.aspx?ID=154 http://english.swjtu.edu.cn/public/viewNews.aspx?ID=154 [2] http://link.springer.com/article/10.1186/s40064-016-1965-3 http://link.springer.com/article/10.1186/s40064-016-1965-3
tiatia 10y ago
The German Transrapid gave very little advantage over regular trains and was bound to fail from the beginning. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Transrapid https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Transrapid The Hyperloop has the same problems (technology still developing, requires new, incompatible infrastructure) but it has one big advantage: In contrast to the Transrapid, it can compete with planes regarding to speed. What both technologies share: They require electricity, which is good. Electricity can be generated easily, possibly with thorium reactors in the future. It is hard (but possible, e.g. reduction of CO2 to methanol) to create combustible fuels for plane engines from electricity. Electric transport will likely overtake all kind of combustion engines.
btcboss 10y ago
I just think it is scary going that speed in a tube. To be a terrorist all you would have to do is like stick a beer bottle in the tube and when a train comes a 700mph shit going to start happening

95 points by Elvie 10y ago

pieter1976 10y ago

Haven't really fast trains (sometimes maglev) inside evacuated tubes been proposed over and over again. Trying to work out what is new here. For example: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Vactrain https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Vactrain

Inthenameofmine 10y ago
The tube would not be evacuated. The train sucks the air in front of it and pushes it around and especially below, creating an air cushion just like an air hockey, further decreasing energy requirement for movement. That way you also get rid of the air evacuation cost.
- jerf 10y ago
  "What is Hyperloop? "Hyperloop is a conceptual transport system in which passengers are loaded into pods and fired through vacuum tubes at more than 600mph (1,000km/h).... "Pumping the air out of the tubes reduces resistance, allowing high speeds to be achieved, potentially using less energy than a train."
  - shawabawa3 10y ago
    The journalist is wrong/simplifying See wikipedia [0]: "pressurized capsules ride on an air cushion driven by linear induction motors and air compressors" [0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hyperloop https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hyperloop
    - Someone1234 10y ago
      You cut off that quote: > incorporating reduced-pressure tubes in which pressurized capsules ride on an air cushion driven by linear induction motors and air compressors. So the tubes are low pressure. Perhaps not vacuum, but in reality so called vacuum tube delivery systems aren't actually a vacuum either, that's why a more accurate name for them is Pneumatic Tube Systems. I'm not sure what it is exactly you're trying to argue, above you made it sound like the system isn't low pressure at all.
    - wibr 10y ago
      Same source: "The Hyperloop resembles a vactrain system but operates at approximately one millibar (100 Pa) of pressure." That would be a "medium vacuum" according to Wikipedia.
    - usrusr 10y ago
      Both BBC quotes are in full agreement with the document at http://spacex.com/sites/spacex/files/hyperloop_alpha.pdf http://spacex.com/sites/spacex/files/hyperloop_alpha.pdf . Page 12, "100 Pascals", that's roughly 99.9% of the air removed. The distinction between "very low pressure" and "vacuum" that is implied by the "hyperloop is not a vactrain" camp is a fantasy.
      - shkkmo 10y ago
        It is pretty relevant at the speeds being discussed.
        usrusr 10y ago
        For the design of the vehicle, yes, for the design of the infrastructure, not so much. Those 100 Pa are actually much lower than what previous vactrain proposals suggested. The only difference is that hyperloop is trying to do something useful with the unavoidable trace atmosphere instead of just overcoming it.
    - Animats 10y ago
      The MIT prototype, and some of the other proposals, are really a maglev system. The original Hyperloop proposal called for aerodynamic support, with very tight tolerances, but that turns out to be iffy. A maglev system needs a much more expensive track and/or a lot of energy from the vehicle to power the lift. This is the big problem with maglev - track cost. Maglev works fine; the Transrapid system in Shanghai has been running for 12 years now without serious problems. Top speed 300 MPH. The Hyperloop is only interesting if it's far cheaper than a maglev. The Transrapid maglev system has far more capacity, can corner better, and can climb steeper grades.
      - ericd 10y ago
        Ah that explains all the maglev. I could have sworn that the original version rode on air and used its electric turbine for propulsion. Anything good you've read that explains why they've abandoned that route?
        Animats 10y ago
        The Berkeley team proposed aerodynamic suspension. There's an analysis with ANSYS which indicates that the design can be tweaked so that at no point does the air go supersonic.[1] But nobody seems to have published a stability analysis for the vehicle in the tube. The "flying height" in the original proposal was to be about 1mm, so this thing has to be really well behaved aerodynamically. And the tube has to be really smooth. (Expansion joints, emergency escape hatches, pressure doors, and switches would be problems.) The whole point of the Hyperloop is that it's cheap because the tube is simple and dumb. When you look at the MIT design [2] it's really a maglev monorail that operates in an evacuated tube. (Or outside of one, as they've demonstrated by sending down a rail). It doesn't have any of the fan propulsion or air cushion lift or tight tolerances from the original Hyperloop proposal. [1] http://www.ansys-blog.com/20130925hyperloop/ http://www.ansys-blog.com/20130925hyperloop/ [2] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=yiyPQU48Ef0 https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=yiyPQU48Ef0
  - deleted 10y ago
    [deleted]
- Retric 10y ago
  The tube would be evacuated on earth. Which is why they need a tube in the first place: Mars According to Musk, Hyperloop would be useful on Mars as no tubes would be needed. This is because Mars' atmosphere is about 1% the density of the Earth's.[10][45][46] For the hyperloop concept to work on Earth, low-pressure tubes are required to reduce air resistance. However, if they were to be built on Mars, the lower air resistance would allow a hyperloop to be created with no tube, only a track.[47] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hyperloop https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hyperloop The important point is 0.01 ATM is a long way from high vacuum. Pumps can get down to that pressure very easily and individual Pumps can cover wide sections of track.
  - steffan 10y ago
    > a hyperloop to be created with no tube, only a track Don't we call that a “train?”
    - dangerlibrary 10y ago
      yep
    - Retric 10y ago
      The original design did not have a 'track' along the full route. Cars would more or less hop between different sections. On Mars that represents clear reliability issues, but the ability to avoid building load barring bridges over gorges could be a major cost savings.
    - fzzzy 10y ago
      Sure, but I think it's fair to call a train that is powered with electromagnetic pulses from stationary coils something different than a train that is powered by an onboard engine.
      - ino 10y ago
        You just described a Maglev
Retric 10y ago
Vacuums get much more costly as you get ever lower pressure. Hyperloop is an interesting cost / benefit between fast travel and lower construction and maintenance costs which is why the speeds are relatively low. The vehicle is also closer to an electric aircraft than an electric train. Note the big fan on the front: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hyperloop#/media/File:Hyperloop_no_tube.png https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hyperloop#/media/File:Hyperloo... Another consideration is the faster you travel the straighter your path needs to be. 4,000+MPH paths require incredibly strait designs.
- kuschku 10y ago
  You realize that the fan concept, and the hovercraft concept both were cancelled? The new hyperloop concept is just a fan-less capsule hovering on a MagLev track. It’s just VacTrain over again, but more expensive and with lower capacities.
  - Retric 10y ago
    I don't think that qualifies as 'HyperLoop' even if they keep the name. It's like building an airplane except you use it underwater, sorry that's a sub. That said, it suggests that the HyperLoop concept is not viable which is not that surprising IMO. However, it might also just be a case of lower R&D costs.
    - kuschku 10y ago
      Well, obviously they want to keep the hype alive. So it’s understandable that they’d refuse to change the name. Sadly, this also means we have a lot of people think this is something revolutionary, although I guess that’s intentional. It’s really annoying when you consider how the US refused a proposal from japanese companies a few years ago to build a MagLev system between Boston, NY, Washington, with capacities around 10k people per hour.
  - nickparker 10y ago
    "Cancelled" by who? Hyperloop One is by far the most credible project, with HTT somewhere behind them in second. They haven't revealed anything about their compression systems or lack thereof. HTT has backed off air levitation, but they're still using Inductrack which is radically cheaper than conventional MagLev and hasn't been applied commercially yet. Several of the competition teams (like the one in this article) have built MagLev sleds with nice brakes, but they're just trying to win a speed record competition. That has no bearing on the real Hyperloop. Other teams are focusing more on scalable tech and doing some pretty innovative work. The lower per-vehicle capacities also aren't a negative if launch cadences can be kept high enough to maintain throughput. Smaller vehicles let the network operate in a more point-to-point manner instead of the stop-and-go crap that trains have done since day one.
sigmar 10y ago
>Trying to work out what is new here. As with most very large scale projects, PR is the game changer. Elon Musk's backing of the concept and investment into competitive solutions for a hyperloop has created publicity and driven interest. The hyperloop doesn't need to be an innovative technological advancement to benefit society. It just needs to be safe, fast, and cost effective.
- xiphias 10y ago
  The whitepaper was more than just usual PR: he got lots of input of top engineers in the travel space and made the design free. I don't remember the CEO of Boing or BMW or any other transportation company doing anything similar.

wimagguc 10y ago

Fun fact, New York City's subway started out with a similar system (between 1870 and 1873, called the Beach Pneumatic Transit): https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Beach_Pneumatic_Transit https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Beach_Pneumatic_Transit

grosun 10y ago
& London's Crystal palace pneumatic railway predated that by 6 years https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Crystal_Palace_pneumatic_railway https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Crystal_Palace_pneumatic_railw... Not a roaring success though!

shawabawa3 10y ago

> Except it is really, really expensive. > Mr Musk says the cost of building the route would be in the region of $6bn (£4.1bn), an estimate most agree is extremely conservative. I'm pretty sure that should say "extremely optimistic". Musk's estimate of $6bn is over 10x cheaper than the high speed train line cost for the same route

puranjay 10y ago
Last I checked, wasn't the project over budget and hitting close to $100Bn in costs? Honestly, even $50Bn sounds like chump change for a project as ambitious as the Hyperloop. Nearly all large scale public infrastructure projects end up costing billions of dollars over estimated costs anyway.
- tptacek 10y ago
  If you're saying that the HSR project is over budget, you're right, but you're not helping the Hyperloop argument. The point is that if the HSR people can't get something done for $X, it's unlikely that Musk can do something even more ambitious for $X/10.
  - elchief 10y ago
    Like how he's lowering the price of rocketry by 90%? His last bid was 40% less than United Launch
    - ubernostrum 10y ago
      SpaceX received uncounted billions' of dollars worth of R&D for free thanks to the existence of government-funded space programs, which already solved many of the difficult fundamental problems in the field of rocketry so SpaceX wouldn't have to. And while it's neat to watch the stuff they do, there's very little SpaceX is doing that's revolutionary as opposed to evolutionary. So of course now SpaceX can come in and reduce the costs by building on the existing base of work in the field. Hyperloop doesn't have anywhere near that amount of free R&D or established, easy-to-increment-to-get-there technologies to draw on.

amelius 10y ago

Also, will it render autonomous trucks obsolete? [1] [1] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=11711657 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=11711657

gambiting 10y ago
How will the goods get from the source to the hyperloop stations? There's your answer.

mtgx 10y ago

Why not create hyperloops for ultra-fast (yet relatively cheap in volume) trans-Atlantic merchandise shipping? Surely that would be a highly profitable project from the start?

m-i-l 10y ago
Hyperloop Technologies is focussing on using it for cargo, at least at first until "the infrastructure is built and the kinks are worked out": https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=11668414 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=11668414
Alupis 10y ago
> Why not create hyperloops for ultra-fast (yet relatively cheap in volume) trans-Atlantic merchandise shipping 1) There's very little merchandise that needs to be shipped trans-Atlantic that quickly. 2) Shipping containers are huge and heavy. Transporting a cargo-ship's worth requires a lot of energy, which translates into high expenses. 3) If shipping a cargo-ship's worth of containers, this will become an impossibly long train, nearing 70 miles long (around 18,000 containers per ship, and each container is about 20ft long)[1] This has been the crux of the hyperloop since inception. The numbers really don't add up to making it more economical than any already existing alternative (even for transporting people). Shipping things via slow boat in a container is surprisingly not very expensive (given you've filled a container with goods, the goods value will greatly exceed your transport costs). [1] http://www.bbc.com/news/magazine-21432226 http://www.bbc.com/news/magazine-21432226
- gutnor 10y ago
  The original plan was to reuse existing infrastructure and have very few stops outside city center. For that scenario the number were holding up. Now the question is what problem is this solving: you have cheap novel transport system for passenger between 2 points nobody is really interested in. And that's the wall all the project around hyperloop are hitting. Either you need the government to step in to make it competitive for endpoint that people are currently interested in. Or you keep the original design, but you need the government to step in to ensure those uninteresting endpoints become interesting.

betteridge 10y ago

No.

Freak_NL 10y ago
I suspect HN will be seeing more of this particular user/comment combination in the future… Betteridge's Law of Headlines: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Betteridge's_law_of_headlines https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Betteridge's_law_of_headlines
- dimino 10y ago
  I think dang will take care of this comment (and the account?) in short order, novelty accounts are verboten on HN (as they provide no value).
dang 10y ago
While it's mildly interesting that that account name hadn't already been taken for this very purpose, HN doesn't allow novelty accounts, so we've banned this one. If there were an easy way to ban mechanical invocations of Betteridge we'd have done that too, about ten thousand of them ago.
- deleted 10y ago
  [deleted]

betteridge 10y ago

No.

Intermernet 10y ago

Sydney is just about to roll out a new (mostly) sub-terrainian train system [1] which would be an interesting demo for hyperloop tech, except for the large numbers of stops being incorporated into the trip. Despite this problem, the costings should be an example of how much it would cost to build new, tunnel based, infrastructure through similar areas (admittedly, Sydney is mostly soft sandstone). [1]: http://sydneymetro.info/ http://sydneymetro.info/

shawabawa3 10y ago
Hyperloop is designed to be above-ground, which is significantly cheaper. Also, musk's original route plan has it stopping outside city-centers (presumably to keep the cost-estimate down)

manigandham 10y ago

This technology has been around for over a century. Remove wheel friction and air pressure as the primary barriers to speed with the pinnacle being maglev in a full vacuum (something that was proposed for 5000mph trains crossing the ocean on the seabed at one point). The Hyperloop concept has relaxed these constraints by allowing for some atmosphere, which also greatly reduces the top speed, but fundamentally it's the same thing. And it's all perfectly possible given enough engineering. The only real problem is the financial viability of such a project. Air travel is already very streamlined and inexpensive for crossing big distances and has the advantage of not requiring the infrastructure and real estate that a train needs. Just the land rights alone will quickly balloon the cost into 100s of billions for any sizable project between two major cities that people want to travel between - and until that gets figured out, this will never happen. The recent news around a startup raising 80M is meaningless because they will waste all that money chasing tech without realizing that they will never be able to successfully lay track anywhere.

mentos 10y ago
I think the difference maker here could be Elon Musk. He has the force of will to make believers out of all of the obstacles (technological and political) in the way.
kbenson 10y ago
> Air travel is already very streamlined and inexpensive for crossing big distances and has the advantage of not requiring the infrastructure and real estate that a train needs. Hyperloop is very specifically aimed at medium distance routes. SF to LA, for example, where the plane has relatively little time cruising at altitude, where it can fly efficiently. If a plane is spending most it's time flying through denser aid, then it's not flying efficiently, and burns a lot of fuel on a per-mile basis relative to a longer flight. Hyperloop is specced to be more efficient than air travel at the distance it's proposed.
- manigandham 10y ago
  Efficient != cheaper. The only thing that matters is what people are willing to pay, and that's not much for medium distance. And for the billions it costs to install the track in the first place, you can buy several airlines and operate them for years.

dimino 10y ago

I think you know you've got a winning idea when the esteemed commenters on HN all dismiss it out of hand. I hope I can Hyperloop from NY to LA some day, and if we can leverage the current high investment traffic to get that to happen, I'm all for it.

dang 10y ago
> I think you know you've got a winning idea when the esteemed commenters on HN all dismiss it out of hand. Please don't diss the community as a rhetorical device. There's no substance in that, and since you're also an esteemed commenter on HN, it's false.
- dimino 10y ago
  I understand what you're getting at, and you make a fair point, but you really don't think there's a trend on HN where pretty much every idea is called obvious or terrible by some of the most popular comments on a given submission? I was hoping to put some red ink on the trend and maybe curtail it slightly, for what that's worth.
  - dang 10y ago
    > you really don't think there's a trend on HN It's really hard to assess that objectively because the cognitive biases affecting such perceptions are so strong. Certainly we don't want HN to be that way and try to nudge it in more fruitful directions. But the way to fight an undesirable pattern on HN is not with another undesirable pattern.
    - dimino 10y ago
      I'll defer to you on identifying undesirable patterns from now on, sorry.

pnut 10y ago

My answer to the question, is 'NO'. I love trains, and use them whenever possible. However, with static start and endpoints, and existing low-cost air infrastructure that is dynamically reroutable and equivalently fast, why spend the hundreds of billions of dollars to recreate something so fragile and limited? Municipalities are wisely, generally in a 'wait and see' phase for the next decade, as autonomous personal transport guarantees to spur the redesign and redevelopment of entire cities and transportation infrastructure.

jerf 10y ago
The autonomous transport you mention in the end is also an issue for Hyperloop directly. Highways are "easy mode" for autonomous cars, so automated services to move you between cities may be available substantially before they can necessarily move you within the city. Sure, they'll be a lot slower than the hyperloop, but they'll probably be a lot cheaper. Perhaps the hyperloop could win the deploy-to-production race with fully autonomous cars, but at this point, I bet it can't win the race with autonomous cross-city quasi-personal transport.
- stcredzero 10y ago
  I wonder how the economics would work out for something the size of a bus, but with much better aerodynamics? (Perhaps with laminar flow boundary devices?)

ck2 10y ago

Just imagine the TSA line for the hyperloop. You'll have to arrive days ahead of time.

shawabawa3 10y ago
Why? Wouldn't it be more like a train than a plane? A terrorist would only be able to kill ~28 people at a time (1 pod), compared to >200 for a plane
- avelis 10y ago
  I agree. A domestic train/pod based travel network doesn't have the same security implications as an airport.
- bluthru 10y ago
  Blowing up inside a tube would be a lot more expensive than blowing up a train on the tracks. But then again, someone could just plant a bomb on the outside of the tube so I guess it's moot.
  - setpatchaddress 10y ago
    More to the point, you can't weaponize any fixed-track conveyance like a train/monorail/HL system like you can a plane.
- lijason 10y ago
  Hasn't the TSA wanted to move into train stations as well? The TSA has shown that they aren't bounded by either what's sensible (ineffective rules) nor the will of the people (buying the backscatter machines without Congressional approval).
  - ck2 10y ago
    TSA has already tested forcing people to screen getting on/off trains and even the highway - seriously. I wonder if people will start throwing tantrums once they are getting yanked from their cars just going down the highway to work or the store.

JDDunn9 10y ago

Related: http://quora.com/Will-Hyperloop-One’s-Hyperloop-product-work-—-at-scale-cost-effectively-safely http://quora.com/Will-Hyperloop-One’s-Hyperloop-product-work... I think the deal breaker is the high speeds, which require a much straighter track and much larger turn radius (410ft for a train, ~4.6 mi. for HL). That means a lot of tunneling through mountains and bulldozing expensive buildings. Land is the biggest expense in these projects. I'm more hopeful of NASA's current work trying to reduce the sonic boom on airplanes. Flying high solves the air resistance problem, and going in a straight line isn't a problem up there.

iamcreasy 10y ago
I remember Elon Musk saying, at Hyperloop POD design weekend, Hyperloop is for short distance travel, because in short flights planes spends most of it's time in ascend or descend. And for air travel, I think suborbital flights are definitely the future.
- CapitalistCartr 10y ago
  Exactly. HL is for 200-1000 km. distances. Suborbital is for intercontinental. By the way, getting to orbit takes an amount of fuel similar to flying USA to Australia. Once we stop throwing the planes away . . In between those distances is flying.
sunstone 10y ago
The problem with flights is the time and trouble spent getting to and getting through airports so the flight time has to be long enough to justify the wasted time.
- jacobolus 10y ago
  The other problem with flights is that it’s incredibly carbon polluting, compared to trains.
- ianburrell 10y ago
  Hyperloop has same problem as flying with terminals being located away from the city. With Hyperloop, the issue is that would require expensive right-of-way or tunnels to bring it into the center of the city. Which is why the initial proposal had end in San Fernando Valley, an hour from LA. High speed rail has the big advantage that it can use existing tracks, at slower speed, to reach the center city train stations.

philwelch 10y ago

I know Elon Musk has a lot of goodwill around here, but is no one else cynical about the notion of a smart, ambitious automobile CEO coming up with some plausible-seeming science-fictional FUD to torpedo a high speed rail project that may very well compete with his interests?

api 10y ago
In his case I sort of doubt it since he doesn't seem to operate that way. In any case Tesla sales are not going to be impacted much by rail.
- drzaiusapelord 10y ago
  >In any case Tesla sales are not going to be impacted much by rail. Says who? I have light rail/uber/bus/cabs in my city and if I had HSR to neighboring regions I could just give up my car entirely with no anxiety.
ericd 10y ago
Not many people are buying Teslas to primarily commute between SF and LA. Also, the HSR project is a disaster - it's incredibly expensive and it's slow.
craftkiller 10y ago
I'd argue the two synergize. Electric cars have a limited range and while there's going to be plenty of charging stations that's still time and effort. Seems much more likely to me that his end-game is hyperloop for longer travel and then a self driving fleet of teslas in an on-demand service at each station.
dragonwriter 10y ago
The HL paper wasn't FUD to torpedo the HSR project, as I see it, it was leveraging existing skepticism (and also quite a bit of irrational opposition) with HSR to draw attention to HL. I don't think Musk cares one way or another about HSR, I think he cares about getting people to work on realizing HL so its ready for his Mars colonies, which is the real point of the technology.

pi-err 10y ago

There's a palpable excitement around Hyperloop and I can't wait to know if this will reshape our world or not. One of the largest problem I can see is not technical. The consensus is that a "standard" Hyperloop track (between 2 cities, 300 to 800km apart) would have a ~1,500 passengers/hour max capacity. High speed rail, such as Eurostar, would be around 10,000 passengers/hour. Even if Hyperloop managed to get built at half the price of HSR (which would already be a feat, there's zero chance they'll do it at 10% of HSR price), this makes a very thin passenger flux to deliver reasonable amounts of operational cash. Where HSR can deliver $7M to $14M daily with $150 ticket price at peak time, Hyperloop would max out at $2M daily with $300 tickets during peak hour. And those prices would probably kill their market anyway. And that's with an entirely new transport platform to fund with many unknowns such as metal fatigue for pods in near-vacuum at those speeds, passenger tolerance for accelerations and lateral movements etc. Maybe the business plan for passenger planes and trains was also that hazy back then?

jordank 10y ago
These are good points — many have tended to look at just the consumer applications. It may be that the economics lend themselves more to industrial transport or logistics than they do to moving bodies.
S4M 10y ago
> High speed rail, such as Eurostar, would be around 10,000 passengers/hour. How is that remotely true? There is one Eurostar approximately every 30 minutes (looking at the departures from London [0], it seems that there are 32 Eurostar leaving London every day), and I seriously doubt one train can carry 5000 passengers (I would say about 500 passengers), so your approximation is completely off (even taking into account the fact that Eurostar can go from London, Paris and Brussels) and 1500 passengers/hour is comparable to the number of passengers the Eurostar carries in an hour. [0] http://www.eurostar.com/uk-en/travel-information/service-information/rtti#/dep/7015400/7015400 http://www.eurostar.com/uk-en/travel-information/service-inf...
- kuschku 10y ago
  Simply, because you don’t have to run them every 30 minutes. In Germany and Japan on select few HSR lines trains are operating with a frequency of 2 minutes, and 800 passengers per train. That’s 24'000 per hour.

tehabe 10y ago

I'm still wondering how a neighbourhood will react if you want to build two massive tubes through it. I can't imagine people will like those tubes. Yes, you could put them underground but this will increase your costs.

david927 10y ago
Wasn't one of the ideas to put them through the existing highway infrastructure, elevated in the meridian?
- deleted 10y ago
  [deleted]
- dredmorbius 10y ago
  Hyperlink turning radius (at top speed) is on the order of 100s of km, due to g-forces. You don't have much routing flexibility. Following the kinks of a 100 kph expressway is likely not feasible. Alternatives are to slow down massively as you approach / traverse urban areas, but this further increases trip time, changes acceleration and energy needs, and reduces the already abysmally low net passenger throughput.
  - tehabe 10y ago
    Yeah, I'm still wondering for how long the Hyperloop can keep its high speed before it has to break again. This is already a big issue with high speed trains in Germany, so that some people say, why do we waste money on 300 kph trains which have to break after six minutes anyway. The energy needed to reach this speed is way too high and you don't save a lot of time either. And with Hyperloop it will the same thing. It might work to go from LA to San Francisco without too many stops but Think about Boston to Washington DC.
    - david927 10y ago
      Ah, but the Hyperloop will allow for small, individual cars of maybe 8 people (I'm guessing). This means that you get in the car based on destination and it uses switches so that there are no in-transit stops. Following the kinks of a 100 kph expressway is likely not feasible. Again, my understanding was that this was part of the original TDD (SF to LA) and they found that it was, indeed, feasible.

nhangen 10y ago

I know it's a cynical point of view, but IMO these companies working on Hyperloop is akin to Hooli building inside out compression. I don't think it's going to work.

educar 10y ago

Bay area's problems are best solved with having some kick ass public transport which afaik nobody is working on. IMO, that is a real game changer as opposed to hyperloop, electric cars :/ Most european countries have this already and they are such great places to visit and live.

dredmorbius 10y ago

No, it's not. There's also the Vactrain concept. Several variants were pursued from 1914 on, with Robert Salter of RAND writing a couple of proposals in the 1970s. The idea's not new, has been seriously explored previously, and has been rejected or failed on technical, cost, political, practical, and economic grounds. Some forms of local or highly-dedicated application, possibly. But for general use, no. https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Vactrain https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Vactrain Salter, Robert M. (August 1972), The Very High Speed Transit System, RAND Corporation https://www.rand.org/pubs/papers/P4874.html https://www.rand.org/pubs/papers/P4874.html Salter, Robert M. (February 1978), Trans-Planetary Subway Systems: A Burgeoning Capability, RAND Corporation https://www.rand.org/pubs/papers/P6092.html https://www.rand.org/pubs/papers/P6092.html And, despite Musk's ability to prove me wrong, I'll stick with this projection for now.

deleted 10y ago
[deleted]
_Codemonkeyism 10y ago
Musk plan: 1. Announce Hyperloop to the world 2. Let someone else build it with tubes 3. Go to Mars 4. Use everything people have built - and went bankrupt - in the thin atmosphere on Mars with success without expensive tubes. Now the SpaceX plans, the Mars plans and Hyperloop come together.
- deftnerd 10y ago
  I wouldn't be surprised if his involvement in Solar City comes into the picture somehow either.
  - _Codemonkeyism 10y ago
    +100
- nickparker 10y ago
  You still need tubes on Mars for a vanilla air-levitation based Hyperloop. Martian fines would wreak havoc on your compression system. The mag-lev systems could perhaps run on exposed pistes though.

grillvogel 10y ago

why can't they just use existing shinkansen technology instead of reinventing the wheel with this pie in the sky nonsense?

Animats 10y ago

For a more advanced concept with a working prototype, see [1]. The Applied Superconductivity Laboratory of Southwest Jiaotong University has a maglev train in a glass tube about two meters in diameter. Their goal is 3000 KPH. Here's a technical paper on the maglev system used.[2] They discovered a problem with bumps in the magnetic field at rail joints, and figured out a way to fix that. Maybe that's the future. If you're going to have a maglev system, you may as well go all the way and ditch the air turbine propulsion. [1] http://english.swjtu.edu.cn/public/viewNews.aspx?ID=154 http://english.swjtu.edu.cn/public/viewNews.aspx?ID=154 [2] http://link.springer.com/article/10.1186/s40064-016-1965-3 http://link.springer.com/article/10.1186/s40064-016-1965-3

tiatia 10y ago

The German Transrapid gave very little advantage over regular trains and was bound to fail from the beginning. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Transrapid https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Transrapid The Hyperloop has the same problems (technology still developing, requires new, incompatible infrastructure) but it has one big advantage: In contrast to the Transrapid, it can compete with planes regarding to speed. What both technologies share: They require electricity, which is good. Electricity can be generated easily, possibly with thorium reactors in the future. It is hard (but possible, e.g. reduction of CO2 to methanol) to create combustible fuels for plane engines from electricity. Electric transport will likely overtake all kind of combustion engines.

btcboss 10y ago

I just think it is scary going that speed in a tube. To be a terrorist all you would have to do is like stick a beer bottle in the tube and when a train comes a 700mph shit going to start happening