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When Musk first said that an LA<->SF Hyperloop could be built for 1/8th the cost of the equivalent HSR, I chuckled and then waited for the punchline, which stil

When Musk first said that an LA<->SF Hyperloop could be built for 1/8th the cost of the equivalent HSR, I chuckled and then waited for the punchline, which still hasn’t arrived. It’s a cool idea and I do want to see more prototypes and feasibility studies, but people need to get off the hype train (no pun intended) and be realistic about the cost.

Chathamization 9y ago
> When Musk first said that an LA<->SF Hyperloop could be built for 1/8th the cost of the equivalent HSR, I chuckled and then waited for the punchline, which still hasn’t arrived. Yeah, and that proposal was for something with much lower throughput, that didn't have stops along the way, and didn't even reach the same areas (they saved money by stopping outside both cities, which the rail line wouldn't do). It also assumed that the tubes could just be placed along the highway meridians (a lot of the money it was supposed to save was from this).
warent 9y ago
To be fair, if Elon worked in the project for 40 - 80 hours a week, he probably could get a team to accomplish it at 1/8th the cost or lower. Consider he did this with rockets, getting them to under 1/10th the cost
- ballooney 9y ago
  He hasn’t done that with rockets. He wants to eventually, but he hasn’t yet. Let’s not let hype cloud facts.
  - nkoren 9y ago
    He's getting very close, if one is considering domestic rockets. The standard-bearers were the Delta IV and Atlas V, which price out at around $17,000/kg - $20,000/kg to LEO, respectively. The Falcon 9 comes in at about $2,800/kg to LEO. Comparisons with non-domestic rockets are complicated by state subsidies and differentials in labor costs. But the Falcon 9 is approaching the 10X mark even before reusability has been priced in. Both the Falcon Heavy (in a few months) and the (eventual) reusable pricing should overshoot the 10X mark substantially.
    - Rebelgecko 9y ago
      Where are you pulling those numbers from? On ULA's website [1] they say you can launch an Atlas V for less than half the $/kg you listed [1] I went to rocketbuilder.com and both LEO configurations I tried were around $8,000/kg (and I didn't count the 20% deduction for "ULA added value" since the numbers there are debatable)
      - nkoren 9y ago
        ULA has abruptly gotten way more competitive in their pricing. A few years ago they were not. Their "Best deal" for the Atlas V was a 36-rocket "bulk buy" priced the lowest-tier Atlas V 401 at $164M/launch[1]. That does 9,797kg to LEO[2], or $16,740/kg. The GAO cites $164M/launch as the price for the cheapest Delta V[3] (is there some kind of threshold at $165M?), which when the Falcon 9 was introduced could put 8,500kg to LEO[4], or $19,294/kg. (It has since been uprated and gotten slightly cheaper). Must've screwed up my calculations earlier, because those aren't tallying. Anyhow, as you can see, SpaceX is already around 7x cheaper compared to where ULA was, and should cross the 10x threshold shortly. Nice to see ULA responding to competitive pressure, however! 1: https://web.archive.org/web/20160324172526/http://www.ulalaunch.com/faqs-launch-costs.aspx https://web.archive.org/web/20160324172526/http://www.ulalau... 2: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Atlas_V https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Atlas_V 3: http://www.gao.gov/products/GAO-17-609 http://www.gao.gov/products/GAO-17-609 4: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Delta_IV#Delta_IV_Small https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Delta_IV#Delta_IV_Small
        greglindahl 9y ago
        For the "block buy", that price includes building the rocket but not the launch.
- jandrese 9y ago
  With rockets he was competing with fat and lazy government contractors for the most part. The hyperloop will be competing with already cutthroat airlines, the goddamn personal automobile, and, ...well, a fat and lazy passenger train company. IMHO he'll be well over 1/10 the cost before he finishes the thousands of land deals he would need for this, even if he somehow got permission to build it over the highway.
  - imron 9y ago
    > even if he somehow got permission to build it over the highway. Hence the boring company.
    - alphaalpha101 9y ago
      Which won't do anything, because you can't magically make tunnelling cheap
      - imron 9y ago
        You can't do it magically, but you can do it by improving the technology - see for example SpaceX.
        _Codemonkeyism 9y ago
        SpaceX is cheap due to reuse and commercial of the shelf development compared to mostly military-government development. Tunneling gets cheaper due to <...>? I would be interested. I guess the Swiss would be interested too.
        imron 9y ago
        Musk talked about it here: https://medium.com/@giftedproducts/elon-musks-ted-talk-2017-d160683921ab https://medium.com/@giftedproducts/elon-musks-ted-talk-2017-... Salient points: "If you just do two things you can get to approximately an order of magnitude improvement, and then go beyond that. The first thing to do is cut the tunnel diameter by 2 times or more. A single road tunnel has to be 26 to 28 feet in diameter to allow for crashes and emergency vehicles and sufficient ventilation for combustion engine cars. But if you shrunk it to 12 feet, what we're attempting, which is plenty for a skate to get through, you drop the diameter by a factor of two and the cross-sectional area by a factor of 4. The tunnel costs scales with the cross-sectional area. That's roughly half an order of magnitude improvement right there. Then, tunneling machines tunnel half time and then stop and the rest of the time is reinforcements for the tunnel walls. If you design the machine to do continuous tunneling and reinforcing, that will give you a factor of two improvement. Combine that, and it's a factor of 8. Also these machines are far from being at their power or thermal limit. I think you can get a factor of two, maybe even four or five on top of that. There’s a fairly straightforward series of steps to get somewhere in excess of an order of magnitude improvement in cost per mile. Our target actually is that we have pet snail named Gary from....Sponge Bob Square Pants. Gary is capable of going 14 times faster than a tunnel boring machine. We want to beat Gary."
martinald 9y ago
Is this not an attempt to just derail CAHSR, or HSR in general? Nearly every anti-HSR comment is now 'we should build hyperloop instead!'.
- Pxtl 9y ago
  That's impressively cynical, but Musk obviously stands to gain a lot if people keep California using roads. California wants to go green and he sells the best technology for green road-based transportation.
  - imron 9y ago
    To be fair, he also stands a lot to gain if Hyperloop becomes a reality.
    - zardo 9y ago
      How does that work? He had an idea and promoted it. No one's going to be paying him royalties for it.
      - imron 9y ago
        He's also building one, so he has a vested interest in the technology being successful: https://techcrunch.com/2017/08/04/elon-musk-reportedly-planning-to-build-his-own-hyperloop-for-tunnel-system/ https://techcrunch.com/2017/08/04/elon-musk-reportedly-plann...
  - yahna 9y ago
    heh. Reminds me of when an actual AI expert pointed out that by making dire predictions about smart AI, that we are nowhere near having, keeps eyes off the autopilot system and the issues with that.
  - kbenson 9y ago
    I'm not sure it really affects his electronic car business one way or the other. Firstly, he isn't necessarily selling Tesla's to people for commuting between SF and LA, that's well outside his range, and as fast as the supercharging is, it loses out to regular gasoline refilling. Secondly, I'm not sure the amount of people potentially served by the hyperloop is more than a blip in the sales charts for even a regular car company (as deciding factors for car purchasing decisions, it seems relatively low to me).
hbosch 9y ago
Okay, we'll bookmark this for the future. Amtrak estimated a HSR/"bullet train" from D.C. to Boston would cost ~$151 billion. Since LA to SF will only be two stops, and we can assume Amtrak estimated at least 4 (Philly and NYC) let's bring the number down closer to $100 billion to make it even. Do we think the Hyperloop costs are more or less than that? 1/8 of a theoretical $100b is $12.5b -- is $12.5billion for Hyperloop unreasonable? I have no opinion on cost personally, and I don't know economics, but this $151 billion from D.C. to Boston was floated by the established US player in rail infrastructure. Anything less than that number is fantastic, right?
- dx034 9y ago
  You cannot compare D.C to Boston with SF to LAX. The east coast has much denser population so that you need more tunnels. LAX to SF HSR would not cost $151bn. Start and end are expensive but the part in the middle is "relatively" cheap.
  - hbosch 9y ago
    Right, for comparison's sake I chopped off $51 billion bucks from the Northeast Corridor projection in the interest of balancing out the two. Just because I felt like doing some more Google-fu, I found an article in the LA Times[0] that says a California HSR/bullet-train project is going to overshoot it's original budget (and deadline) of $68 billion. There's a lot of info out there about this project, and it's potential overruns, but let's forget all that and just stick to the original planned cost: $68 billion, so, about half of the cost of Amtrak's northeastern bullet. Let's use that number for our comparison. If we are going to hold Elon to his "we can do it for 1/8th the cost" blurb, then we are giving him like $8.5 billion to use for his SF/LA Hyperloop. Still, that doesn't sound unreasonable, right? He'll get a good deal on tunnel boring with his other company, and fuselage manufacturing can be handled by SpaceX. When it comes to financing, I don't think it's a major issue compared to other infrastructure works out there. Like I said, though, I'm just going off the top of my head. I don't know finance or economics or vacuums or magnets. There's a new LIRR train being dug in NYC called East Side Access. This is a commuter rail line, and is going to cost ~$10 billion or so[1]. Logistically these aren't the same, obviously, but if adding to the LIRR is worth ~$10b then surely the Hyperloop experiment is as well, right? EDIT: Also, just for disclosure, I don't live in California and I'd probably never end up using the Hyperloop myself so I'm neither for nor against it versus any HSR. I just want to entertain the idea that cost shouldn't be the main focus of discussion IMO. ___ 0. http://www.latimes.com/local/california/la-me-bullet-train-cost-final-20151025-story.html http://www.latimes.com/local/california/la-me-bullet-train-c... 1. http://web.mta.info/capital/esa_alt.html http://web.mta.info/capital/esa_alt.html
Pxtl 9y ago
I'm not saying the hyperloop is a good or bad idea, but any suggestion that it would be cheaper than the equivalent HSR seems utterly insane. How could it possibly be cheaper? You have the same ROW requirements, exponentially more expensive track, and the overhead of the fact that it's brand new technology. The fact that the vehicle itself might be cheaper than an HSR train after the tech scales up is almost an afterthought next to those costs.
- reacweb 9y ago
  The track should be cheaper because hyperloop has (almost) no impact on existing infrastructures. Expropriation costs for train are huge.
  - Pxtl 9y ago
    How could the Hyperloop not require the same expropriations? A giant tube isn't any smaller than a train track. Is it the fact that it's elevated? Rail can be elevated. Yes, rail is heavy, but so are giant evacuated steel tubes.
    - zip1234 9y ago
      Run it down the center of the freeway? Having stations for trains in the middle of freeways isn't great for pedestrians, but might be fine for long distance transport such as hyperloop.
      - Pxtl 9y ago
        HSR is supposed to be log distance transport. It's I meant to solve the exact same problems as Hyperloop, but by powerful engines and streamlined railcars instead of evacuated tubes. Again, why not put HSR tracks in the same place you'd put a Hyperloop track? Put the station in the same place. The tubes aren't smaller or lighter.
    - pstuart 9y ago
      I think he's planning on making lots of tunnels. https://www.wired.com/story/elon-musk-test-tunnel/ https://www.wired.com/story/elon-musk-test-tunnel/
pavs 9y ago
I don't think Musk want hyperloop to be built above the ground. This is just my own personal opinion, not sure if that's how it's going to work, but in one of his interview (TED? I think), he mentioned one of the reasons for his Boring company, was it would be relatively cheaper to build hyperloop - because the atmospheric pressure will be lower underground - and since you don't have to worry about building large infrastructure for only one purpose (hyperloop) - the cost will be much much cheaper. Because under ground tunnels can be build for both hyperloop and roads for cars and it scale better than above ground. I don't think above ground is economically and technically feasible, there are just too many unanswered issue that almost no one has answer to. Not to mention it will be very very expensive and time consuming.
- grw_ 9y ago
  Why would atmospheric pressure be lower underground?
- opencl 9y ago
  Tunnel boring is orders of magnitude more expensive than railway construction, at typically ~a few hundred million dollars per mile vs ~a few million dollars per mile. I know Musk has plans to magically make tunnel boring significantly cheaper but you need two orders of magnitude cost reduction to make the tunnel digging not cost more than an entire above ground railway. Cost references: https://tunneltalk.com/TunnelTECH-Apr2015-Arup-large-diameter-soft-ground-bored-tunnel-review.php https://tunneltalk.com/TunnelTECH-Apr2015-Arup-large-diamete... https://www.compassinternational.net/railroad-engineering-construction-cost-benchmarks/ https://www.compassinternational.net/railroad-engineering-co...
kbenson 9y ago
Maybe you're looking in the wrong place for the punchline. Perhaps it will be delivered in the final bill for the HSR...
colordrops 9y ago
Everyone has been chuckling about electric cars and private rockets until recently, and that was by experts in the respective fields. Chuckle all you want.
- mikekchar 9y ago
  Go here and scroll down to "Select historical production vehicles" - https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/History_of_the_electric_vehicle https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/History_of_the_electric_vehicl... I grew up in the 70s and saw production electric vehicles that are not on this list. People have been chuckling for a long time and for good reason. It's not that electric vehicles won't eventually be successful -- they must. It's that the time from, "Hey, an electric vehicle would be a good idea" to "Hey, we've figured out all the engineering challenges to make this viable" is longer than the lifetime of most of the companies that entered the fray. Look at the list of vehicles from before 1990. That's the "getting to the market first" list. All gone. Then look at the list from 1990 to 2010. How many of those will be major players in the electric vehicle market? My point is that I'm relatively old for someone on HN and there have been production electric vehicles since well before I was born. They only started to be viable in the last few years -- and even then, we probably need a few more breakthroughs in battery technology before the market settles out. Long distance, super fast trains in tunnels? https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ch%C5%AB%C5%8D_Shinkansen https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ch%C5%AB%C5%8D_Shinkansen I saw the tunnel the other day. I was surprised that practically the whole damn length of the maglev tracks will be in a tunnel, but it makes total sense. That's been under construction for 10 years. They are optimistically expecting to make a profit in 2026 when "costs stabilise". Will long distance, high speed trains in low pressure tunnels be successful? I have no doubt. Will Hyperloop One be successful? Umm... frozen balls of ice remaining intact in a very hot place probably have a better chance, but I won't say they will definitely fail. If they can secure something like a trillion dollars and invest it wisely over the next 30-40 years, then their chances will improve significantly.
  - colordrops 9y ago
    Let me be clear. I was talking about criticism of Musk specifically. Pretty much EVERYONE in the aerospace industry thought he was nuts, and yet SpaceX made it to orbit. Even a couple months before their first stage landing others were saying it was impossible.

Chathamization 9y ago

> When Musk first said that an LA<->SF Hyperloop could be built for 1/8th the cost of the equivalent HSR, I chuckled and then waited for the punchline, which still hasn’t arrived. Yeah, and that proposal was for something with much lower throughput, that didn't have stops along the way, and didn't even reach the same areas (they saved money by stopping outside both cities, which the rail line wouldn't do). It also assumed that the tubes could just be placed along the highway meridians (a lot of the money it was supposed to save was from this).

warent 9y ago

To be fair, if Elon worked in the project for 40 - 80 hours a week, he probably could get a team to accomplish it at 1/8th the cost or lower. Consider he did this with rockets, getting them to under 1/10th the cost

ballooney 9y ago
He hasn’t done that with rockets. He wants to eventually, but he hasn’t yet. Let’s not let hype cloud facts.
- nkoren 9y ago
  He's getting very close, if one is considering domestic rockets. The standard-bearers were the Delta IV and Atlas V, which price out at around $17,000/kg - $20,000/kg to LEO, respectively. The Falcon 9 comes in at about $2,800/kg to LEO. Comparisons with non-domestic rockets are complicated by state subsidies and differentials in labor costs. But the Falcon 9 is approaching the 10X mark even before reusability has been priced in. Both the Falcon Heavy (in a few months) and the (eventual) reusable pricing should overshoot the 10X mark substantially.
  - Rebelgecko 9y ago
    Where are you pulling those numbers from? On ULA's website [1] they say you can launch an Atlas V for less than half the $/kg you listed [1] I went to rocketbuilder.com and both LEO configurations I tried were around $8,000/kg (and I didn't count the 20% deduction for "ULA added value" since the numbers there are debatable)
    - nkoren 9y ago
      ULA has abruptly gotten way more competitive in their pricing. A few years ago they were not. Their "Best deal" for the Atlas V was a 36-rocket "bulk buy" priced the lowest-tier Atlas V 401 at $164M/launch[1]. That does 9,797kg to LEO[2], or $16,740/kg. The GAO cites $164M/launch as the price for the cheapest Delta V[3] (is there some kind of threshold at $165M?), which when the Falcon 9 was introduced could put 8,500kg to LEO[4], or $19,294/kg. (It has since been uprated and gotten slightly cheaper). Must've screwed up my calculations earlier, because those aren't tallying. Anyhow, as you can see, SpaceX is already around 7x cheaper compared to where ULA was, and should cross the 10x threshold shortly. Nice to see ULA responding to competitive pressure, however! 1: https://web.archive.org/web/20160324172526/http://www.ulalaunch.com/faqs-launch-costs.aspx https://web.archive.org/web/20160324172526/http://www.ulalau... 2: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Atlas_V https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Atlas_V 3: http://www.gao.gov/products/GAO-17-609 http://www.gao.gov/products/GAO-17-609 4: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Delta_IV#Delta_IV_Small https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Delta_IV#Delta_IV_Small
      - greglindahl 9y ago
        For the "block buy", that price includes building the rocket but not the launch.
jandrese 9y ago
With rockets he was competing with fat and lazy government contractors for the most part. The hyperloop will be competing with already cutthroat airlines, the goddamn personal automobile, and, ...well, a fat and lazy passenger train company. IMHO he'll be well over 1/10 the cost before he finishes the thousands of land deals he would need for this, even if he somehow got permission to build it over the highway.
- imron 9y ago
  > even if he somehow got permission to build it over the highway. Hence the boring company.
  - alphaalpha101 9y ago
    Which won't do anything, because you can't magically make tunnelling cheap
    - imron 9y ago
      You can't do it magically, but you can do it by improving the technology - see for example SpaceX.
      - _Codemonkeyism 9y ago
        SpaceX is cheap due to reuse and commercial of the shelf development compared to mostly military-government development. Tunneling gets cheaper due to <...>? I would be interested. I guess the Swiss would be interested too.
        imron 9y ago
        Musk talked about it here: https://medium.com/@giftedproducts/elon-musks-ted-talk-2017-d160683921ab https://medium.com/@giftedproducts/elon-musks-ted-talk-2017-... Salient points: "If you just do two things you can get to approximately an order of magnitude improvement, and then go beyond that. The first thing to do is cut the tunnel diameter by 2 times or more. A single road tunnel has to be 26 to 28 feet in diameter to allow for crashes and emergency vehicles and sufficient ventilation for combustion engine cars. But if you shrunk it to 12 feet, what we're attempting, which is plenty for a skate to get through, you drop the diameter by a factor of two and the cross-sectional area by a factor of 4. The tunnel costs scales with the cross-sectional area. That's roughly half an order of magnitude improvement right there. Then, tunneling machines tunnel half time and then stop and the rest of the time is reinforcements for the tunnel walls. If you design the machine to do continuous tunneling and reinforcing, that will give you a factor of two improvement. Combine that, and it's a factor of 8. Also these machines are far from being at their power or thermal limit. I think you can get a factor of two, maybe even four or five on top of that. There’s a fairly straightforward series of steps to get somewhere in excess of an order of magnitude improvement in cost per mile. Our target actually is that we have pet snail named Gary from....Sponge Bob Square Pants. Gary is capable of going 14 times faster than a tunnel boring machine. We want to beat Gary."

martinald 9y ago

Is this not an attempt to just derail CAHSR, or HSR in general? Nearly every anti-HSR comment is now 'we should build hyperloop instead!'.

Pxtl 9y ago
That's impressively cynical, but Musk obviously stands to gain a lot if people keep California using roads. California wants to go green and he sells the best technology for green road-based transportation.
- imron 9y ago
  To be fair, he also stands a lot to gain if Hyperloop becomes a reality.
  - zardo 9y ago
    How does that work? He had an idea and promoted it. No one's going to be paying him royalties for it.
    - imron 9y ago
      He's also building one, so he has a vested interest in the technology being successful: https://techcrunch.com/2017/08/04/elon-musk-reportedly-planning-to-build-his-own-hyperloop-for-tunnel-system/ https://techcrunch.com/2017/08/04/elon-musk-reportedly-plann...
- yahna 9y ago
  heh. Reminds me of when an actual AI expert pointed out that by making dire predictions about smart AI, that we are nowhere near having, keeps eyes off the autopilot system and the issues with that.
- kbenson 9y ago
  I'm not sure it really affects his electronic car business one way or the other. Firstly, he isn't necessarily selling Tesla's to people for commuting between SF and LA, that's well outside his range, and as fast as the supercharging is, it loses out to regular gasoline refilling. Secondly, I'm not sure the amount of people potentially served by the hyperloop is more than a blip in the sales charts for even a regular car company (as deciding factors for car purchasing decisions, it seems relatively low to me).

hbosch 9y ago

Okay, we'll bookmark this for the future. Amtrak estimated a HSR/"bullet train" from D.C. to Boston would cost ~$151 billion. Since LA to SF will only be two stops, and we can assume Amtrak estimated at least 4 (Philly and NYC) let's bring the number down closer to $100 billion to make it even. Do we think the Hyperloop costs are more or less than that? 1/8 of a theoretical $100b is $12.5b -- is $12.5billion for Hyperloop unreasonable? I have no opinion on cost personally, and I don't know economics, but this $151 billion from D.C. to Boston was floated by the established US player in rail infrastructure. Anything less than that number is fantastic, right?

dx034 9y ago
You cannot compare D.C to Boston with SF to LAX. The east coast has much denser population so that you need more tunnels. LAX to SF HSR would not cost $151bn. Start and end are expensive but the part in the middle is "relatively" cheap.
- hbosch 9y ago
  Right, for comparison's sake I chopped off $51 billion bucks from the Northeast Corridor projection in the interest of balancing out the two. Just because I felt like doing some more Google-fu, I found an article in the LA Times[0] that says a California HSR/bullet-train project is going to overshoot it's original budget (and deadline) of $68 billion. There's a lot of info out there about this project, and it's potential overruns, but let's forget all that and just stick to the original planned cost: $68 billion, so, about half of the cost of Amtrak's northeastern bullet. Let's use that number for our comparison. If we are going to hold Elon to his "we can do it for 1/8th the cost" blurb, then we are giving him like $8.5 billion to use for his SF/LA Hyperloop. Still, that doesn't sound unreasonable, right? He'll get a good deal on tunnel boring with his other company, and fuselage manufacturing can be handled by SpaceX. When it comes to financing, I don't think it's a major issue compared to other infrastructure works out there. Like I said, though, I'm just going off the top of my head. I don't know finance or economics or vacuums or magnets. There's a new LIRR train being dug in NYC called East Side Access. This is a commuter rail line, and is going to cost ~$10 billion or so[1]. Logistically these aren't the same, obviously, but if adding to the LIRR is worth ~$10b then surely the Hyperloop experiment is as well, right? EDIT: Also, just for disclosure, I don't live in California and I'd probably never end up using the Hyperloop myself so I'm neither for nor against it versus any HSR. I just want to entertain the idea that cost shouldn't be the main focus of discussion IMO. ___ 0. http://www.latimes.com/local/california/la-me-bullet-train-cost-final-20151025-story.html http://www.latimes.com/local/california/la-me-bullet-train-c... 1. http://web.mta.info/capital/esa_alt.html http://web.mta.info/capital/esa_alt.html

Pxtl 9y ago

I'm not saying the hyperloop is a good or bad idea, but any suggestion that it would be cheaper than the equivalent HSR seems utterly insane. How could it possibly be cheaper? You have the same ROW requirements, exponentially more expensive track, and the overhead of the fact that it's brand new technology. The fact that the vehicle itself might be cheaper than an HSR train after the tech scales up is almost an afterthought next to those costs.

reacweb 9y ago
The track should be cheaper because hyperloop has (almost) no impact on existing infrastructures. Expropriation costs for train are huge.
- Pxtl 9y ago
  How could the Hyperloop not require the same expropriations? A giant tube isn't any smaller than a train track. Is it the fact that it's elevated? Rail can be elevated. Yes, rail is heavy, but so are giant evacuated steel tubes.
  - zip1234 9y ago
    Run it down the center of the freeway? Having stations for trains in the middle of freeways isn't great for pedestrians, but might be fine for long distance transport such as hyperloop.
    - Pxtl 9y ago
      HSR is supposed to be log distance transport. It's I meant to solve the exact same problems as Hyperloop, but by powerful engines and streamlined railcars instead of evacuated tubes. Again, why not put HSR tracks in the same place you'd put a Hyperloop track? Put the station in the same place. The tubes aren't smaller or lighter.
  - pstuart 9y ago
    I think he's planning on making lots of tunnels. https://www.wired.com/story/elon-musk-test-tunnel/ https://www.wired.com/story/elon-musk-test-tunnel/

pavs 9y ago

I don't think Musk want hyperloop to be built above the ground. This is just my own personal opinion, not sure if that's how it's going to work, but in one of his interview (TED? I think), he mentioned one of the reasons for his Boring company, was it would be relatively cheaper to build hyperloop - because the atmospheric pressure will be lower underground - and since you don't have to worry about building large infrastructure for only one purpose (hyperloop) - the cost will be much much cheaper. Because under ground tunnels can be build for both hyperloop and roads for cars and it scale better than above ground. I don't think above ground is economically and technically feasible, there are just too many unanswered issue that almost no one has answer to. Not to mention it will be very very expensive and time consuming.

grw_ 9y ago
Why would atmospheric pressure be lower underground?
opencl 9y ago
Tunnel boring is orders of magnitude more expensive than railway construction, at typically ~a few hundred million dollars per mile vs ~a few million dollars per mile. I know Musk has plans to magically make tunnel boring significantly cheaper but you need two orders of magnitude cost reduction to make the tunnel digging not cost more than an entire above ground railway. Cost references: https://tunneltalk.com/TunnelTECH-Apr2015-Arup-large-diameter-soft-ground-bored-tunnel-review.php https://tunneltalk.com/TunnelTECH-Apr2015-Arup-large-diamete... https://www.compassinternational.net/railroad-engineering-construction-cost-benchmarks/ https://www.compassinternational.net/railroad-engineering-co...

kbenson 9y ago

Maybe you're looking in the wrong place for the punchline. Perhaps it will be delivered in the final bill for the HSR...

colordrops 9y ago

Everyone has been chuckling about electric cars and private rockets until recently, and that was by experts in the respective fields. Chuckle all you want.

mikekchar 9y ago
Go here and scroll down to "Select historical production vehicles" - https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/History_of_the_electric_vehicle https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/History_of_the_electric_vehicl... I grew up in the 70s and saw production electric vehicles that are not on this list. People have been chuckling for a long time and for good reason. It's not that electric vehicles won't eventually be successful -- they must. It's that the time from, "Hey, an electric vehicle would be a good idea" to "Hey, we've figured out all the engineering challenges to make this viable" is longer than the lifetime of most of the companies that entered the fray. Look at the list of vehicles from before 1990. That's the "getting to the market first" list. All gone. Then look at the list from 1990 to 2010. How many of those will be major players in the electric vehicle market? My point is that I'm relatively old for someone on HN and there have been production electric vehicles since well before I was born. They only started to be viable in the last few years -- and even then, we probably need a few more breakthroughs in battery technology before the market settles out. Long distance, super fast trains in tunnels? https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ch%C5%AB%C5%8D_Shinkansen https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ch%C5%AB%C5%8D_Shinkansen I saw the tunnel the other day. I was surprised that practically the whole damn length of the maglev tracks will be in a tunnel, but it makes total sense. That's been under construction for 10 years. They are optimistically expecting to make a profit in 2026 when "costs stabilise". Will long distance, high speed trains in low pressure tunnels be successful? I have no doubt. Will Hyperloop One be successful? Umm... frozen balls of ice remaining intact in a very hot place probably have a better chance, but I won't say they will definitely fail. If they can secure something like a trillion dollars and invest it wisely over the next 30-40 years, then their chances will improve significantly.
- colordrops 9y ago
  Let me be clear. I was talking about criticism of Musk specifically. Pretty much EVERYONE in the aerospace industry thought he was nuts, and yet SpaceX made it to orbit. Even a couple months before their first stage landing others were saying it was impossible.