5 ms·

I loved the hyperloop concept, but it felt like the company was too early. The real problem that needs to be solved first before this is viable is "cost effecti

I loved the hyperloop concept, but it felt like the company was too early. The real problem that needs to be solved first before this is viable is "cost effective tunnels". Only once you have those, does adding a vacuum and accelerating make sense. I think Musk believed this as well, which is why he floated the idea of Hyperloop (pun intended) but bankrolled the Boring Company. I think another 10 years of tunneling improvements, and the hyperloop part may make sense to try.

alangibson 3y ago
The real problem is math. You will always be able to get more throughput with a slowish, long train than a fast, short Hyperloop car. It's latency vs bandwidth.
- timwaagh 3y ago
  Is there a reason these vacuum tubes aren't able to do large vehicles?
  - powderpig 3y ago
    Maintaining a pressure boundary becomes ever more difficult with increase in size, and therefore cost and engineering complexity.
stephen_g 3y ago
The problem is that there isn't much more we can do to bring down the cost in tunnelling - there has been incentive for many, many decades to get the cost down to the minimum possible, and that's basically what happened. New materials and things might make small improvements going forward, but it's an extremely mature industry. That's why the Boring Company hasn't made any progress on this grand vision - they seemed to set out by assuming there were easy wins to be had (seemingly not consulting any actual experts in the field), and then there just... weren't... Basically the only thing they have been able to do is to make smaller tunnels that lack any kind of emergency egress - which is kind of important in real mass transit systems where people would rather be able to get out if there was a fire.