10 ms·

Hyperloop lays off half of its employees as it pivots away from passenger travel

80 points by onpedrof 5y ago

deleted 5y ago
[deleted]
lsllc 5y ago
Perhaps sending Burritos would be more profitable: https://idlewords.com/2007/04/the_alameda_weehawken_burrito_tunnel.htm https://idlewords.com/2007/04/the_alameda_weehawken_burrito_...
- deleted 5y ago
  [deleted]
otikik 5y ago
The letter “r” is also being laid off
ykevinator2 5y ago
This is a shame bc it's such a good idea and the government is pitching in real money. Sometimes I think we deserve the world we get.
ketzo 5y ago
Bummer. Musk-hyped moonshot or not, I thought Hyperloop presented an incredibly exciting vision for the future of mass transit. Even if it was always going to be a long shot, it’s disappointing to be right. Edit: replies saying "this never could have worked" are missing the point to a pretty hysterical degree. You don't know that. No one knows that! Unless you are from the future or are a genius-level mechanical engineer in the specific problem domain of vacuum trains (who for some reason was not already employed by Hyperloop), you cannot say that with 100% confidence. No matter how unlikely it might have seemed to you, it could have worked! And it's a bummer when extremely-cool-but-unlikely things don't work.
- tsimionescu 5y ago
  It's a vision out of the 1800s [0], and one that is obviously never going to work. It's simply not possible/useful to create the necessary vacuum, and the requirement for near straight-line tracks is extraordinarily expensive. [0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Vactrain https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Vactrain
- gjs278 5y ago
- ulimn 5y ago
  After watching the video of a traffic jam inside the 1-lane wide tunnel, I'm not sure I would dare to go into it. I immediately thought what would happen if a car crashed into the wall and it caught fire. Seemingly, it didn't have enough space to go around it.
- jeffbee 5y ago
  It wasn't a vision of mass anything, except maybe delusion. The nameplate capacity of hyperloop between SF and LA was 840 passengers per hour, which is basically zero. Whatever hyperloop was, it was never "mass transit".
lgrebe 5y ago
This is about VIRGIN Hyperloop by Richard Bransons Virgin Brand conglomerate. Not to be confused with Elon Musks Boring Company. FTA: > Virgin Hyperloop was founded as Hyperloop Technologies in 2014, stemming from Tesla CEO Elon Musk's idea of a high-speed passenger pod transport. It changed its name when Richard Branson joined the board of directors in 2017.
- tsimionescu 5y ago
  Boring company has abandoned any idea of a hyper loop a long time ago, right? Did they ever even associate with it (outside the branding of their Vegas mini tunnel)?
  - panick21_ 5y ago
    Boring company never had anything to do with Hyperloop. The Hyperloop concept was just a Bluepaper released by Musk. It was only years after that Musk started talking about tunnels and the Loop system. Probably at some point Boring company would like to be able to make tunnels long enough that it would make sense to with something more high speed then a normal EV can do. But that is not their focus.
  - kjksf 5y ago
    Yes and no. Yes, because they no longer plan to use the original design proposed by Musk (pods in vacuum in tubes installed on the ground). No because long term they still plan to do hyper loop but the latest iteration of the idea is electric cars driving really fast in under-pressurized underground tunnel. See https://www.boringcompany.com/hyperloop https://www.boringcompany.com/hyperloop That being said, Boring Company is still in very early stages. They made significant progress (built Las Vegas tunnel and are in building more of it; created prufrock-1 i.e. v1 of boring machine designed by Boring Company). The hyperloop is something they want to do and most likely can do. The limiting factor is more permitting and politics (for example: they had a deal to do a long tunnel in Chicago with one mayor and then the next mayor said it's stupid and scrapped it).
    - 5y ago
izzydata 5y ago
I find it quite surprising that they only fired half and not all of them. How can this conceptual vacuum tube pod system that has been shown to be incredibly inefficient and prohibitively expensive still have some kind of business model? To be honest I thought this whole idea got scrapped 5+ years ago.
- yread 5y ago
  You don't need business models when you have a reality distortion field and 450M investment
- kevin_thibedeau 5y ago
  It's a bootstrap for Mars construction. Hence the undersized tunnels. Mass transit is just a cover story.
  - anchpop 5y ago
    TFA has nothing to do with the boring company or underground tunnels
  - sslayer 5y ago
    Underground habitats
- bluGill 5y ago
  They have got congress interested. It works just well enough to get them interested and funded. That it will always be prohibitively expensive is something they can hide. Congress wants to fund the next big thing and make the US the best in the world. They don't want to hear that train technology is an almost completely solved problem and so we cannot get ahead of the rest of the world - the only thing left is buy and build the same thing as everyone else. Congress hates that idea.
  - microtherion 5y ago
    Musk's involvement appeared to have had some undercurrent of sabotaging investment in mass transit by generating a constant stream of overhyped futuristic schemes. Promise 'em monorails in the future so you can keep selling 'em Teslas now.
protomyth 5y ago
There are a lot of reasons standard rail in the US is cargo centric. Profit and a much easier customer service case are big ones. Also, sending cargo in a new transportation system is much easier and less lawsuit prone than people. An old story in the US since the post office basically made airplane travel viable via postal contracts.
- daniel-cussen 5y ago
  Radio too, Marconi suggested to the Italian Post they use radio for mail.
  - protomyth 5y ago
    Didn't hear that one, good to know. China Clipper: The Age of the Great Flying Boats by Robert Gandt talks a lot about the Postmaster General and those postal contracts in the US. I came away from the book with a distaste for Pan Am given some of the stunts they pulled. It basically details that having the postal contract was the only way to make regular flights profitable in the early aviation years. To the point, many routes started as postal only.
- chucksta 5y ago
  Glossing over the fact that almost all the railways in the US are privately owned by cargo companies which prioritize their cargo over transport. Huge reason Amtrak struggles so much
  - 7735835835 5y ago
    There is presumably a reason they are cargo companies and not passager transport companies. Unless Amtrak has a government enforced monopoly?
    - bluGill 5y ago
      Most cargo is going long distances that passengers should fly for. The needs of freight and passengers is different enough that they should almost never be on the same track. When humans are on a train speed counts and they are willing to pay extra for it. When freight is on a train they can save money by going slower.
fredley 5y ago
I still don't understand why there is any interest in this concept, either for freight or passenger transport, over a regular train.
- IshKebab 5y ago
  Elon Musk
- sneak 5y ago
  Vastly higher speeds is the reason it would be valuable if it can be made economically feasible.
  - TillE 5y ago
    It's a fine research project, but in terms of offering actual transportation services to people, there are a thousand more effective things to do to make high-speed rail services available, convenient, and economical. High-speed rail is slower than a plane, sure, but it's way faster than a car.
  - tsimionescu 5y ago
    It can't be made feasible from an engineering POV, not just economically. It's virtually impossible to maintain a relevant vacuum in hundreds of kilometers of tunnel. The temperature stresses alone would cause leaks unless using some very special materials (if any exist).
    - bluGill 5y ago
      We can do it in the ISS. Not an easy problem, but it is a solvable problem. The problem is all the solutions will cost a ton of money.
      - avianlyric 5y ago
        The ISS isn’t kept at a vacuum and isn’t hundreds of kilometres long, and space needs no assistance from us to maintain a vacuum, gravity’s got that covered.
softwarebeware 5y ago
Now it sounds like a doomed idea, basically just pneumatic tubes at a larger scale, but I remember how fresh it sounded a few years back.
- rsynnott 5y ago
  It's been showing up perennially as a concept since the late 18th century; periodically people get excited about it and then realise it's not very practical.
lurchpop 5y ago
Basically returning to Pneumatic tubes but probably way less elegant and over-engineered
shantara 5y ago
Hyperloop’s lack of scalability makes it even less suitable for transporting cargo than passenger travel.
- kjksf 5y ago
  Define the scalability that you speak of. Obviously there is no hyperloop system yet so we can't speak about real life stats but the idea of hyperloop is a pod that goes really fast because of the vacuum. Change "pod" to "shipping container". So if you can send one shipping container after another at, say, 400 mph, what exactly would be scalability problem. It would clearly be faster that rail and therefore having a higher throughput.
  - shantara 5y ago
    Most consumer goods and the containers themselves are not designed to withstand vacuum, so you cannot have the containers themselves take the role of the pods. They would have to be loaded/unloaded inside the pods. The airlocks at the terminals would also need to be cycled adding to the processing time and making the system less scalable. The entire system is designed for sending containers one by one in pods, so its throughput is not at all impressive compared to the trains with several tens of railcars. Not to mention the technical difficulties of reliably maintaining vacuum in hundreds of kilometers of the tunnel. And don’t forget that a single broken seal anywhere on the whole track would bring the whole system to a halt, and would require significant safety intervals between the poss. As for the speed - the hyperloop’s main advantage - there is relatively little cargo in the world for which shipping time makes a critical difference between 100 km/h train and 2000 km/h hypothetical hyperloop. Reliability, throughout and an established network are much more important, hence why the bulk of world’s shipping is done slowly and reliably by sea.
    - me_me_me 5y ago
      I have a friend who studied and works in big logistics. You dont need to shave off 4 hours of 8hrs journey, what most logistics channels need is predictability and at as low cost as possible. If you can save 1/2 shipping costs of you TVs at cost of 1-2 extra days of transportation, you will pick that option (with exception of perishables). Thats how the logistics channels work. High predictability ensures you can schedule work, space, and send-off without fuss. That's why rail is the best for the task. So company saves money because solution is cheap and because there are no (or minimal) backlogs due to some failure in transport. Its the definition of KISS. It works, predictable and cheap. As Musk said 'Its that simple'. It boggles my mind anyone would be crazy enough to pick hyper-loop as cargo solution - a what 10 years old vaporware with no working anything but CGI.
colinplamondon 5y ago
Boring Company seems clearly focused on hyperloops as the long-term goal. They determined that construction of tunnels would be orders of magnitude faster on approvals than above-ground construction. With that approach, tunneling construction is the key technological block. With SpaceX and Tesla's know-how, the actual construction of a hyperloop is rather de-risked. By keeping laser-focused on tunneling tech, they build the muscle around the regulatory process, get cities and states to trust them, and show operational competence in operations. Once they do a intra-state system in a friendly regulatory environment (FL/TX, ala Austin -> San Antonio or Tampa -> Orlando), they'll built a corporate machine that's tunneling dozens of underground highways across the country. At that point, building new tunnels as a hyperloop will be a reasonable mid-term goal. Loop 2020's -> Hyperloop 2030's
caycep 5y ago
Kind of OT, or maybe not. But why didn't Musk (or anyone else) go with Maglev tech? The efficiency seems ok, and it probably doesn't matter if you do it above vs below ground, and it's deployed around the world now.
- anchpop 5y ago
  Virgin Hyperloop uses maglev. The main difference between what they're doing and everyone else, is that they put their whole track in a giant airtight pipe, and pump air out of the pipe so the train can travel with less air resistance.
  - moffkalast 5y ago
    You don't really need to remove air resistance to beat Amtrak though.
    - deleted 5y ago
      [deleted]
    - anchpop 5y ago
      Any new form of passenger transit isn't just competing with Amtrack, it's also competing with airplanes which fly at around 440-550 mph. Let's say you want to go from SF to Seattle, a distance of about 800 miles. If you had a typical high-speed maglev train (250 mph), the trip would take about 3 hours. On an airplane, the actual transit would take a little under 2 hours, so if you get to the airport an hour early that's 3 hours total. (Personally I never show up to the airport more than 20 minutes early for domestic flights.) So for any trip longer than that, airplanes beat even high-speed maglev trains on speed. Of course there are factors besides raw speed to consider, like comfort and cost, but speed is an important one. The bigger your country is, the more the fixed-cost of airline security is amortized over the distance traveled. If you don't have to travel very far, trains make sense. In Japan the population density is 10x higher than in the US, so trips tend to be much shorter. In the US, which is very spread out comparatively speaking, planes are much more compelling. So US trains need to either be really fast, or really cheap and comfortable, to be worth it. The fastest maglev trains can go quite a bit faster than 250mph, by the way. For example Japan is constructing its "L0 series" which will have a top speed of around 375mph, and at this point you do compete with planes. Building one of these seems a lot more realistic than anything Hyperloop, but it's not like these superfast maglevs are anything conventional either, so I don't see the harm in experimenting with fun tech like vacuum-sealing the train.
shadowgovt 5y ago
I wonder if they decided that the risk model of rocketing human beings through an evacuated tube was just too high?
jmyeet 5y ago
Vacuum travel in a a tube does actually make sense. It may not be viable (yet?) but the idea is sound. A big problem is a breach in your vacuum. Keeping the atmosphere out is expensive. But what if where you’re building it has no atmosphere and is geologically stable or dead? Then a lot of problems go away. You don’t even need a tunnel necessarily. Yet another reason why colonizing the Moon makes 1000x more sense than the romantic pipe dream of the red planet.
- mstipetic 5y ago
  Colonizing the moon makes sense because you can easily build hyperloop on it?
  - moffkalast 5y ago
    If you have a helium 3 reactor, yes.
- parasense 5y ago
  > Vacuum travel in a a tube does actually make sense. It may not be viable (yet?) but the idea is sound. I'm not sure the idea will be viable, ever. Too many problems, not enough rewards. For example, the problem of a vacuum tube developing a leak. The leak would start an implosion, which then propagates down both directions of the tube at mach-1 speed of sound. The implosion would resemble the continuous crushing of a soda can down the entire length of tube. The outside pressure at sea level compared to the inside (lack of) pressure is too great to be safe for passengers or cargo. The above problem could in theory be solved using air locks spaced apart to have a chance to mitigate the destruction to a few kilometres where the leak happened. But the idea is not very feasible, the air-locked segments would be several kilometres long, enough to slow a transport capsule to a safe halt, yet long enough to get ahead of the mach-1 speed of implosion. High speed sensor networks would have to cover the the hyper-loop ad infinium. And don't get me started on material science, in particular thermal expansion of steel. The only way to deal with thermal expansion is by using expansion joins. The problem with expansion joints, see the above part about leaks. The entire track of (above ground) tubing would have to deal with significant expansion/contraction. Like for Dallas <--> Austin the expansion would be well in excess of ~100's of ft. Then comes the energy requirements to pull and maintain a hard vacuum in very long & wide tubes. The closest thing that comes to mind is the Large Hadron Collider, but that pulls a vacuum by cooling the narrow tube down to cryogenic temps... it's not the same. Hyper-loop would require HUGE amounts of energy to maintain the vacuum. It would be more energy put in than profit that comes out, unless of course the hyperloop is transporting some kind of high value merchandise like kilos of cocaine or whatever. The economics simply isn't there, the engineering isn't there, it's pretty much a terrible idea. The only good argument for the Hyperloop is a logical fallacy, called "argument from authority". Put another way, the argument goes: since Elon Musk is so amazing, we can suspend our disbelief and trust the idea on the sole basis of whatever perceived accolades (the authority) Elon Musk has gained by being a billionaire entrepreneur. Sure, Elon's a cool dude, very smart, tenacious, etc... but that doesn't stop hyperloop from being a terrible idea.
Tempest1981 5y ago
> The company is now "changing direction" due to ... and "all the changes due to Covid" It is true that train ridership is still way down... maybe 25% of pre-Covid levels. Although they'll probably return before HyperLoop is ready.
formvoltron 5y ago
pivot to.. crypto get rich quick schemes: hyperdupe? faster chicken egg laying tech: hyperkoop silly putty: hypergoop squatty potties: hyperpoop?
panick21_ 5y ago
Whenever Richard Branson invest in something you know its basically a terrible idea. This company adopted the Hyperloop because it allowed the to get funding based Musk name but then instantly went away from everything that Musk suggested would be needed to make the concept viable. What Musk actually published can still be read here: https://www.tesla.com/sites/default/files/blog_images/hyperloop-alpha.pdf https://www.tesla.com/sites/default/files/blog_images/hyperl... Musk really only thought Hyperloop made sense between two really very high density urban centers such as SF and LA. For the majority of transportation between cities super-sonic electric powered flight was his preferred solution.
tengbretson 5y ago
Is there another justification for the continued existence of the Boring company then?
- x3n0ph3n3 5y ago
  They are also interested in drilling tunnels on the moon and Mars for habitation.
- panick21_ 5y ago
  People get this confused. The Boring company has nothing to do with this company called Virgin Hyperloop. The Boring company is working on what they call a 'Loop', not a 'Hyperloop'. A Loop is just a tunnel with some form of battery electric pod inside of it. Its not a vacuum. I'm sure at some point in the future when they have improved tunneling they would consider trying to do a vacuum tunnel but this is not what they are working on now.
alfiedotwtf 5y ago
Anyone else hear The Jetsons theme song in their head when they read Hyperloop?
eco 5y ago
A lot of people seem to be confused. Elon does not have any companies working on a hyperloop. He kicked off the idea and released a white paper with some very early engineering work seemingly put together by a group of engineers working at SpaceX and Tesla[1]. He never had any plans to commercialize it himself and was releasing it as "open source" for anyone else to take up. Several companies sprang up to pursue the concept[2]. This article is about Richard Branson's Virgin Hyperloop which itself has a very checkered past[3] and has felt pretty scamming since the beginning, long before Branson acquired the company. Not sure if the acquisition by Branson has caused them to clean up their act or what. The only Hyperloop thing that Elon or his companies seem to do is hold a design competition for students where they compete on a short hyperloop test track at SpaceX's Hawthorn facility. If I had to guess I'd say that this is most likely a recruiting tool for SpaceX. 1. https://www.tesla.com/sites/default/files/blog_images/hyperloop-alpha.pdf https://www.tesla.com/sites/default/files/blog_images/hyperl... 2. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hyperloop#Hyperloop_companies https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hyperloop#Hyperloop_companies 3. https://arstechnica.com/tech-policy/2016/07/former-hyperloop-one-cto-describes-mismanagement-and-harassment-in-new-lawsuit/ https://arstechnica.com/tech-policy/2016/07/former-hyperloop...
- atdrummond 5y ago
  What about TBC and the Las Vegas plans? It's not a Hyperloop as originally explained but uses the name - and seems to be par for the course in terms of Elon proposing products that aren't exactly delivered the way they were marketed.
  - anchpop 5y ago
    They have very little in common besides the name and the fact that they both are transit systems involving tubes. Hyperloop's main goal was to provide fast intercity transit, TBC's goal is to provide convenient intracity transit
    - atdrummond 5y ago
      By that distinction, I'm not sure why VHL is called "Hyperloop" either - it is using maglev AFAIK.
qgin 5y ago
China: Builds 40,000 miles of high speed rail in 12 years https://twitter.com/xiaoyewen/status/1494588071483875333 https://twitter.com/xiaoyewen/status/1494588071483875333 United States: Thinks about vacuum tubes for awhile, gives up entirely.
- seanmcdirmid 5y ago
  China took on lots of debt to do that, and it will take a while to pay it off if ever (we can argue whether SOE debt is government debt or not). It might make for some interesting development opportunities in the future, but only an authoritarian government could divert so many resources. I’m much more excited by Japan’s new maglev that will go from Tokyo to Nagoya by 2026 or 2028. Hyper loop had a lot of potential to avoid the problem facing most rail projects in the states (lack of land for straight shots needed for HSR, and the government’s unwilling to use eminent domain to get that, also, I think Americans are more adverse to viaducts everywhere than the Chinese). A vaccine tube underneath would solve a lot of that.
  - akvadrako 5y ago
    The USA is more in debt than China, it's just been badly spent.
    - seanmcdirmid 5y ago
      Only if you don’t count SOE debt as government debt. It gets weird when so many companies are owned by the state. That SOE debt also includes all the debt used to build china’s HSR system.
- disambiguation 5y ago
  Also somehow its easier to build self-driving cars than it is to invest in public transportation.
  - LargoLasskhyfv 5y ago
    You meant to say self-crashing?
Animats 5y ago
Large-diameter tube freight has, a history.[1] The USSR built a few sizable TRANSPROGRESS tube systems with diameters in the 1.5 to 2 meter range in the 1970s. Mostly for garbage disposal. There have been proposals on and off for over a century. Pneumatic garbage disposal is in use in a very few places. Roosevelt Island in New York has had a working system since the 1980s. It works well and is well-liked. Roosevelt Island was supposed to be car-free, and lacks much of a road system, so this was a good fit. The anti-car crowd should be pushing for this. [1] https://highways.dot.gov/public-roads/autumn-1994/tube-freight-transportation https://highways.dot.gov/public-roads/autumn-1994/tube-freig...
- numtel 5y ago
  There's a British startup founded by a hyperloop engineer trying to do this. https://www.magway.com/ https://www.magway.com/
ComradePhil 5y ago
I have a theory: I think it was a hedge against politicians potentially investing in public transport. If some brave politician comes along, doesn't need money from car manufacturers and decides to build public transport infrastructure, it will be a big financial drag on the US car market. A second Trump term could have gone that way: https://time.com/4247162/donald-trump-trains-infrastructure/ https://time.com/4247162/donald-trump-trains-infrastructure/. If you were also one of the leading railway makers, it would protect you from such a thing because you could make money from government contracts to make trains instead. In the coming elections, it is very unlikely that Trump is coming back nor is the Democratic party going to win any elections at least in the next 6 years so railway isn't happening... hence this move.
- panick21_ 5y ago
  Richard Branson doesn't have a car company ... This makes literally 0 sense.
ykevinator2 5y ago
The crazy thing is the idea of small pod electric trains is still possible. Look at americas 99% idle railroad tracks.
- rsynnott 5y ago
  These are a thing (though rarely electrical; if a stretch of railway's lightly used, that won't be where you prioritise putting up overhead lines), though they've largely died out in favour of more versatile DMUs: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Railbus https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Railbus

80 points by onpedrof 5y ago

deleted 5y ago

[deleted]

Perhaps sending Burritos would be more profitable: https://idlewords.com/2007/04/the_alameda_weehawken_burrito_tunnel.htm https://idlewords.com/2007/04/the_alameda_weehawken_burrito_...

deleted 5y ago
[deleted]

otikik 5y ago

The letter “r” is also being laid off

ykevinator2 5y ago

This is a shame bc it's such a good idea and the government is pitching in real money. Sometimes I think we deserve the world we get.

ketzo 5y ago

Bummer. Musk-hyped moonshot or not, I thought Hyperloop presented an incredibly exciting vision for the future of mass transit. Even if it was always going to be a long shot, it’s disappointing to be right. Edit: replies saying "this never could have worked" are missing the point to a pretty hysterical degree. You don't know that. No one knows that! Unless you are from the future or are a genius-level mechanical engineer in the specific problem domain of vacuum trains (who for some reason was not already employed by Hyperloop), you cannot say that with 100% confidence. No matter how unlikely it might have seemed to you, it could have worked! And it's a bummer when extremely-cool-but-unlikely things don't work.

tsimionescu 5y ago
It's a vision out of the 1800s [0], and one that is obviously never going to work. It's simply not possible/useful to create the necessary vacuum, and the requirement for near straight-line tracks is extraordinarily expensive. [0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Vactrain https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Vactrain
gjs278 5y ago
ulimn 5y ago
After watching the video of a traffic jam inside the 1-lane wide tunnel, I'm not sure I would dare to go into it. I immediately thought what would happen if a car crashed into the wall and it caught fire. Seemingly, it didn't have enough space to go around it.
jeffbee 5y ago
It wasn't a vision of mass anything, except maybe delusion. The nameplate capacity of hyperloop between SF and LA was 840 passengers per hour, which is basically zero. Whatever hyperloop was, it was never "mass transit".

lgrebe 5y ago

This is about VIRGIN Hyperloop by Richard Bransons Virgin Brand conglomerate. Not to be confused with Elon Musks Boring Company. FTA: > Virgin Hyperloop was founded as Hyperloop Technologies in 2014, stemming from Tesla CEO Elon Musk's idea of a high-speed passenger pod transport. It changed its name when Richard Branson joined the board of directors in 2017.

tsimionescu 5y ago
Boring company has abandoned any idea of a hyper loop a long time ago, right? Did they ever even associate with it (outside the branding of their Vegas mini tunnel)?
- panick21_ 5y ago
  Boring company never had anything to do with Hyperloop. The Hyperloop concept was just a Bluepaper released by Musk. It was only years after that Musk started talking about tunnels and the Loop system. Probably at some point Boring company would like to be able to make tunnels long enough that it would make sense to with something more high speed then a normal EV can do. But that is not their focus.
- kjksf 5y ago
  Yes and no. Yes, because they no longer plan to use the original design proposed by Musk (pods in vacuum in tubes installed on the ground). No because long term they still plan to do hyper loop but the latest iteration of the idea is electric cars driving really fast in under-pressurized underground tunnel. See https://www.boringcompany.com/hyperloop https://www.boringcompany.com/hyperloop That being said, Boring Company is still in very early stages. They made significant progress (built Las Vegas tunnel and are in building more of it; created prufrock-1 i.e. v1 of boring machine designed by Boring Company). The hyperloop is something they want to do and most likely can do. The limiting factor is more permitting and politics (for example: they had a deal to do a long tunnel in Chicago with one mayor and then the next mayor said it's stupid and scrapped it).
  - 5y ago

izzydata 5y ago

I find it quite surprising that they only fired half and not all of them. How can this conceptual vacuum tube pod system that has been shown to be incredibly inefficient and prohibitively expensive still have some kind of business model? To be honest I thought this whole idea got scrapped 5+ years ago.

yread 5y ago
You don't need business models when you have a reality distortion field and 450M investment
kevin_thibedeau 5y ago
It's a bootstrap for Mars construction. Hence the undersized tunnels. Mass transit is just a cover story.
- anchpop 5y ago
  TFA has nothing to do with the boring company or underground tunnels
- sslayer 5y ago
  Underground habitats
bluGill 5y ago
They have got congress interested. It works just well enough to get them interested and funded. That it will always be prohibitively expensive is something they can hide. Congress wants to fund the next big thing and make the US the best in the world. They don't want to hear that train technology is an almost completely solved problem and so we cannot get ahead of the rest of the world - the only thing left is buy and build the same thing as everyone else. Congress hates that idea.
- microtherion 5y ago
  Musk's involvement appeared to have had some undercurrent of sabotaging investment in mass transit by generating a constant stream of overhyped futuristic schemes. Promise 'em monorails in the future so you can keep selling 'em Teslas now.

protomyth 5y ago

There are a lot of reasons standard rail in the US is cargo centric. Profit and a much easier customer service case are big ones. Also, sending cargo in a new transportation system is much easier and less lawsuit prone than people. An old story in the US since the post office basically made airplane travel viable via postal contracts.

daniel-cussen 5y ago
Radio too, Marconi suggested to the Italian Post they use radio for mail.
- protomyth 5y ago
  Didn't hear that one, good to know. China Clipper: The Age of the Great Flying Boats by Robert Gandt talks a lot about the Postmaster General and those postal contracts in the US. I came away from the book with a distaste for Pan Am given some of the stunts they pulled. It basically details that having the postal contract was the only way to make regular flights profitable in the early aviation years. To the point, many routes started as postal only.
chucksta 5y ago
Glossing over the fact that almost all the railways in the US are privately owned by cargo companies which prioritize their cargo over transport. Huge reason Amtrak struggles so much
- 7735835835 5y ago
  There is presumably a reason they are cargo companies and not passager transport companies. Unless Amtrak has a government enforced monopoly?
  - bluGill 5y ago
    Most cargo is going long distances that passengers should fly for. The needs of freight and passengers is different enough that they should almost never be on the same track. When humans are on a train speed counts and they are willing to pay extra for it. When freight is on a train they can save money by going slower.

fredley 5y ago

I still don't understand why there is any interest in this concept, either for freight or passenger transport, over a regular train.

IshKebab 5y ago
Elon Musk
sneak 5y ago
Vastly higher speeds is the reason it would be valuable if it can be made economically feasible.
- TillE 5y ago
  It's a fine research project, but in terms of offering actual transportation services to people, there are a thousand more effective things to do to make high-speed rail services available, convenient, and economical. High-speed rail is slower than a plane, sure, but it's way faster than a car.
- tsimionescu 5y ago
  It can't be made feasible from an engineering POV, not just economically. It's virtually impossible to maintain a relevant vacuum in hundreds of kilometers of tunnel. The temperature stresses alone would cause leaks unless using some very special materials (if any exist).
  - bluGill 5y ago
    We can do it in the ISS. Not an easy problem, but it is a solvable problem. The problem is all the solutions will cost a ton of money.
    - avianlyric 5y ago
      The ISS isn’t kept at a vacuum and isn’t hundreds of kilometres long, and space needs no assistance from us to maintain a vacuum, gravity’s got that covered.

softwarebeware 5y ago

Now it sounds like a doomed idea, basically just pneumatic tubes at a larger scale, but I remember how fresh it sounded a few years back.

rsynnott 5y ago
It's been showing up perennially as a concept since the late 18th century; periodically people get excited about it and then realise it's not very practical.

lurchpop 5y ago

Basically returning to Pneumatic tubes but probably way less elegant and over-engineered

shantara 5y ago

Hyperloop’s lack of scalability makes it even less suitable for transporting cargo than passenger travel.

kjksf 5y ago
Define the scalability that you speak of. Obviously there is no hyperloop system yet so we can't speak about real life stats but the idea of hyperloop is a pod that goes really fast because of the vacuum. Change "pod" to "shipping container". So if you can send one shipping container after another at, say, 400 mph, what exactly would be scalability problem. It would clearly be faster that rail and therefore having a higher throughput.
- shantara 5y ago
  Most consumer goods and the containers themselves are not designed to withstand vacuum, so you cannot have the containers themselves take the role of the pods. They would have to be loaded/unloaded inside the pods. The airlocks at the terminals would also need to be cycled adding to the processing time and making the system less scalable. The entire system is designed for sending containers one by one in pods, so its throughput is not at all impressive compared to the trains with several tens of railcars. Not to mention the technical difficulties of reliably maintaining vacuum in hundreds of kilometers of the tunnel. And don’t forget that a single broken seal anywhere on the whole track would bring the whole system to a halt, and would require significant safety intervals between the poss. As for the speed - the hyperloop’s main advantage - there is relatively little cargo in the world for which shipping time makes a critical difference between 100 km/h train and 2000 km/h hypothetical hyperloop. Reliability, throughout and an established network are much more important, hence why the bulk of world’s shipping is done slowly and reliably by sea.
  - me_me_me 5y ago
    I have a friend who studied and works in big logistics. You dont need to shave off 4 hours of 8hrs journey, what most logistics channels need is predictability and at as low cost as possible. If you can save 1/2 shipping costs of you TVs at cost of 1-2 extra days of transportation, you will pick that option (with exception of perishables). Thats how the logistics channels work. High predictability ensures you can schedule work, space, and send-off without fuss. That's why rail is the best for the task. So company saves money because solution is cheap and because there are no (or minimal) backlogs due to some failure in transport. Its the definition of KISS. It works, predictable and cheap. As Musk said 'Its that simple'. It boggles my mind anyone would be crazy enough to pick hyper-loop as cargo solution - a what 10 years old vaporware with no working anything but CGI.

colinplamondon 5y ago

Boring Company seems clearly focused on hyperloops as the long-term goal. They determined that construction of tunnels would be orders of magnitude faster on approvals than above-ground construction. With that approach, tunneling construction is the key technological block. With SpaceX and Tesla's know-how, the actual construction of a hyperloop is rather de-risked. By keeping laser-focused on tunneling tech, they build the muscle around the regulatory process, get cities and states to trust them, and show operational competence in operations. Once they do a intra-state system in a friendly regulatory environment (FL/TX, ala Austin -> San Antonio or Tampa -> Orlando), they'll built a corporate machine that's tunneling dozens of underground highways across the country. At that point, building new tunnels as a hyperloop will be a reasonable mid-term goal. Loop 2020's -> Hyperloop 2030's

caycep 5y ago

Kind of OT, or maybe not. But why didn't Musk (or anyone else) go with Maglev tech? The efficiency seems ok, and it probably doesn't matter if you do it above vs below ground, and it's deployed around the world now.

anchpop 5y ago
Virgin Hyperloop uses maglev. The main difference between what they're doing and everyone else, is that they put their whole track in a giant airtight pipe, and pump air out of the pipe so the train can travel with less air resistance.
- moffkalast 5y ago
  You don't really need to remove air resistance to beat Amtrak though.
  - deleted 5y ago
    [deleted]
  - anchpop 5y ago
    Any new form of passenger transit isn't just competing with Amtrack, it's also competing with airplanes which fly at around 440-550 mph. Let's say you want to go from SF to Seattle, a distance of about 800 miles. If you had a typical high-speed maglev train (250 mph), the trip would take about 3 hours. On an airplane, the actual transit would take a little under 2 hours, so if you get to the airport an hour early that's 3 hours total. (Personally I never show up to the airport more than 20 minutes early for domestic flights.) So for any trip longer than that, airplanes beat even high-speed maglev trains on speed. Of course there are factors besides raw speed to consider, like comfort and cost, but speed is an important one. The bigger your country is, the more the fixed-cost of airline security is amortized over the distance traveled. If you don't have to travel very far, trains make sense. In Japan the population density is 10x higher than in the US, so trips tend to be much shorter. In the US, which is very spread out comparatively speaking, planes are much more compelling. So US trains need to either be really fast, or really cheap and comfortable, to be worth it. The fastest maglev trains can go quite a bit faster than 250mph, by the way. For example Japan is constructing its "L0 series" which will have a top speed of around 375mph, and at this point you do compete with planes. Building one of these seems a lot more realistic than anything Hyperloop, but it's not like these superfast maglevs are anything conventional either, so I don't see the harm in experimenting with fun tech like vacuum-sealing the train.

shadowgovt 5y ago

I wonder if they decided that the risk model of rocketing human beings through an evacuated tube was just too high?

jmyeet 5y ago

Vacuum travel in a a tube does actually make sense. It may not be viable (yet?) but the idea is sound. A big problem is a breach in your vacuum. Keeping the atmosphere out is expensive. But what if where you’re building it has no atmosphere and is geologically stable or dead? Then a lot of problems go away. You don’t even need a tunnel necessarily. Yet another reason why colonizing the Moon makes 1000x more sense than the romantic pipe dream of the red planet.

mstipetic 5y ago
Colonizing the moon makes sense because you can easily build hyperloop on it?
- moffkalast 5y ago
  If you have a helium 3 reactor, yes.
parasense 5y ago
> Vacuum travel in a a tube does actually make sense. It may not be viable (yet?) but the idea is sound. I'm not sure the idea will be viable, ever. Too many problems, not enough rewards. For example, the problem of a vacuum tube developing a leak. The leak would start an implosion, which then propagates down both directions of the tube at mach-1 speed of sound. The implosion would resemble the continuous crushing of a soda can down the entire length of tube. The outside pressure at sea level compared to the inside (lack of) pressure is too great to be safe for passengers or cargo. The above problem could in theory be solved using air locks spaced apart to have a chance to mitigate the destruction to a few kilometres where the leak happened. But the idea is not very feasible, the air-locked segments would be several kilometres long, enough to slow a transport capsule to a safe halt, yet long enough to get ahead of the mach-1 speed of implosion. High speed sensor networks would have to cover the the hyper-loop ad infinium. And don't get me started on material science, in particular thermal expansion of steel. The only way to deal with thermal expansion is by using expansion joins. The problem with expansion joints, see the above part about leaks. The entire track of (above ground) tubing would have to deal with significant expansion/contraction. Like for Dallas <--> Austin the expansion would be well in excess of ~100's of ft. Then comes the energy requirements to pull and maintain a hard vacuum in very long & wide tubes. The closest thing that comes to mind is the Large Hadron Collider, but that pulls a vacuum by cooling the narrow tube down to cryogenic temps... it's not the same. Hyper-loop would require HUGE amounts of energy to maintain the vacuum. It would be more energy put in than profit that comes out, unless of course the hyperloop is transporting some kind of high value merchandise like kilos of cocaine or whatever. The economics simply isn't there, the engineering isn't there, it's pretty much a terrible idea. The only good argument for the Hyperloop is a logical fallacy, called "argument from authority". Put another way, the argument goes: since Elon Musk is so amazing, we can suspend our disbelief and trust the idea on the sole basis of whatever perceived accolades (the authority) Elon Musk has gained by being a billionaire entrepreneur. Sure, Elon's a cool dude, very smart, tenacious, etc... but that doesn't stop hyperloop from being a terrible idea.

Tempest1981 5y ago

> The company is now "changing direction" due to ... and "all the changes due to Covid" It is true that train ridership is still way down... maybe 25% of pre-Covid levels. Although they'll probably return before HyperLoop is ready.

formvoltron 5y ago

pivot to.. crypto get rich quick schemes: hyperdupe? faster chicken egg laying tech: hyperkoop silly putty: hypergoop squatty potties: hyperpoop?

panick21_ 5y ago

Whenever Richard Branson invest in something you know its basically a terrible idea. This company adopted the Hyperloop because it allowed the to get funding based Musk name but then instantly went away from everything that Musk suggested would be needed to make the concept viable. What Musk actually published can still be read here: https://www.tesla.com/sites/default/files/blog_images/hyperloop-alpha.pdf https://www.tesla.com/sites/default/files/blog_images/hyperl... Musk really only thought Hyperloop made sense between two really very high density urban centers such as SF and LA. For the majority of transportation between cities super-sonic electric powered flight was his preferred solution.

tengbretson 5y ago

Is there another justification for the continued existence of the Boring company then?

x3n0ph3n3 5y ago
They are also interested in drilling tunnels on the moon and Mars for habitation.
panick21_ 5y ago
People get this confused. The Boring company has nothing to do with this company called Virgin Hyperloop. The Boring company is working on what they call a 'Loop', not a 'Hyperloop'. A Loop is just a tunnel with some form of battery electric pod inside of it. Its not a vacuum. I'm sure at some point in the future when they have improved tunneling they would consider trying to do a vacuum tunnel but this is not what they are working on now.

alfiedotwtf 5y ago

Anyone else hear The Jetsons theme song in their head when they read Hyperloop?

eco 5y ago

A lot of people seem to be confused. Elon does not have any companies working on a hyperloop. He kicked off the idea and released a white paper with some very early engineering work seemingly put together by a group of engineers working at SpaceX and Tesla[1]. He never had any plans to commercialize it himself and was releasing it as "open source" for anyone else to take up. Several companies sprang up to pursue the concept[2]. This article is about Richard Branson's Virgin Hyperloop which itself has a very checkered past[3] and has felt pretty scamming since the beginning, long before Branson acquired the company. Not sure if the acquisition by Branson has caused them to clean up their act or what. The only Hyperloop thing that Elon or his companies seem to do is hold a design competition for students where they compete on a short hyperloop test track at SpaceX's Hawthorn facility. If I had to guess I'd say that this is most likely a recruiting tool for SpaceX. 1. https://www.tesla.com/sites/default/files/blog_images/hyperloop-alpha.pdf https://www.tesla.com/sites/default/files/blog_images/hyperl... 2. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hyperloop#Hyperloop_companies https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hyperloop#Hyperloop_companies 3. https://arstechnica.com/tech-policy/2016/07/former-hyperloop-one-cto-describes-mismanagement-and-harassment-in-new-lawsuit/ https://arstechnica.com/tech-policy/2016/07/former-hyperloop...

atdrummond 5y ago
What about TBC and the Las Vegas plans? It's not a Hyperloop as originally explained but uses the name - and seems to be par for the course in terms of Elon proposing products that aren't exactly delivered the way they were marketed.
- anchpop 5y ago
  They have very little in common besides the name and the fact that they both are transit systems involving tubes. Hyperloop's main goal was to provide fast intercity transit, TBC's goal is to provide convenient intracity transit
  - atdrummond 5y ago
    By that distinction, I'm not sure why VHL is called "Hyperloop" either - it is using maglev AFAIK.

qgin 5y ago

China: Builds 40,000 miles of high speed rail in 12 years https://twitter.com/xiaoyewen/status/1494588071483875333 https://twitter.com/xiaoyewen/status/1494588071483875333 United States: Thinks about vacuum tubes for awhile, gives up entirely.

seanmcdirmid 5y ago
China took on lots of debt to do that, and it will take a while to pay it off if ever (we can argue whether SOE debt is government debt or not). It might make for some interesting development opportunities in the future, but only an authoritarian government could divert so many resources. I’m much more excited by Japan’s new maglev that will go from Tokyo to Nagoya by 2026 or 2028. Hyper loop had a lot of potential to avoid the problem facing most rail projects in the states (lack of land for straight shots needed for HSR, and the government’s unwilling to use eminent domain to get that, also, I think Americans are more adverse to viaducts everywhere than the Chinese). A vaccine tube underneath would solve a lot of that.
- akvadrako 5y ago
  The USA is more in debt than China, it's just been badly spent.
  - seanmcdirmid 5y ago
    Only if you don’t count SOE debt as government debt. It gets weird when so many companies are owned by the state. That SOE debt also includes all the debt used to build china’s HSR system.
disambiguation 5y ago
Also somehow its easier to build self-driving cars than it is to invest in public transportation.
- LargoLasskhyfv 5y ago
  You meant to say self-crashing?

Animats 5y ago

Large-diameter tube freight has, a history.[1] The USSR built a few sizable TRANSPROGRESS tube systems with diameters in the 1.5 to 2 meter range in the 1970s. Mostly for garbage disposal. There have been proposals on and off for over a century. Pneumatic garbage disposal is in use in a very few places. Roosevelt Island in New York has had a working system since the 1980s. It works well and is well-liked. Roosevelt Island was supposed to be car-free, and lacks much of a road system, so this was a good fit. The anti-car crowd should be pushing for this. [1] https://highways.dot.gov/public-roads/autumn-1994/tube-freight-transportation https://highways.dot.gov/public-roads/autumn-1994/tube-freig...

numtel 5y ago
There's a British startup founded by a hyperloop engineer trying to do this. https://www.magway.com/ https://www.magway.com/

ComradePhil 5y ago

I have a theory: I think it was a hedge against politicians potentially investing in public transport. If some brave politician comes along, doesn't need money from car manufacturers and decides to build public transport infrastructure, it will be a big financial drag on the US car market. A second Trump term could have gone that way: https://time.com/4247162/donald-trump-trains-infrastructure/ https://time.com/4247162/donald-trump-trains-infrastructure/. If you were also one of the leading railway makers, it would protect you from such a thing because you could make money from government contracts to make trains instead. In the coming elections, it is very unlikely that Trump is coming back nor is the Democratic party going to win any elections at least in the next 6 years so railway isn't happening... hence this move.

panick21_ 5y ago
Richard Branson doesn't have a car company ... This makes literally 0 sense.

ykevinator2 5y ago

The crazy thing is the idea of small pod electric trains is still possible. Look at americas 99% idle railroad tracks.

rsynnott 5y ago
These are a thing (though rarely electrical; if a stretch of railway's lightly used, that won't be where you prioritise putting up overhead lines), though they've largely died out in favour of more versatile DMUs: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Railbus https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Railbus