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A skeptical response to Musk's hyperloop

scotty79 13y ago
> Elon Musk, an entrepreneur who hopes to make a living some day building cars. Didn't he already make all the living he needs and now just does whatever he likes?
- axefrog 13y ago
  You can almost completely write the article off considering he's characterizing Musk's achievements with such dismissive condescension.
  - simonh 13y ago
    No, you really can't. How he characterizes Musk is irrelevant to whether his criticisms of the proposal are valid or not. Just because he deploys dismissive condescension is no excuse for also resorting to it. This is Hacker News, not Slashdot.
    - vidarh 13y ago
      In an ideal world where we have infinite time to consider all comments, you are right. However if one has to choose what to spend time on, it is prudent to filter, and for blatant subjectivity to be used as one such filter, as it is reasonable to consider it likely that arguments made by someone who is so obviously biased against someone in the first place is more likely to be careless about the arguments he makes against their ideas. So a a time saving exercise, it is absolutely relevant to consider other factors than the argument itself. And yes, it is imperfect and will result in a lot of people discounting valid concerns.
  - scotty79 13y ago
    What I got from article: Author is: - unfriendly towards Elon Musk - unfriendly towards people who voice ideas of what the author thinks is not their area of expertise in general. - fond of high speed trains. - thinking that Elon Musk wants to kill trains to sell more cars. ... oh yeah, and he has some concerns about Hyperloop estimates. Mainly that cost and disadvantages are underestimated. Also somehow author managed to overlooked the fact that Elon Musk delivered some stuff to International Space Station, most likely at fraction of NASA cost which consist of very experienced people. If experienced specialist tells that something in his area of expertise can be done. He's most likely right. If he says something can't be done, there's a fair chance he's wrong.
- cdash 13y ago
  Well technically he is worth something like 6-7 billion dollars right now but I believe almost all of that is made up of stock in the companies he owns so if the companies were to end up failing then he would lose most of it and I don't think he plans on selling any of his stock any time soon.
Osmium 13y ago
We are no where near the stage where we can judge if Hyperloop is a good or a bad idea yet. At the moment, it is just that: an idea. It needs to be refined, torn apart, put back together, and examined thoroughly and I look forward to that happening. I'm glad this article exists and is asking tough and valid questions, but I feel like the article is wrong in trying to persuade people that the Hyperloop is intrinsically a bad idea when a much better response (at this stage) is to try and improve the design. In particular, some parts of this article are just way way off base, e.g.: > Tesla’s train energy consumption numbers do not pass a sanity check, which suggests either reckless disregard for the research or fraud. I wouldn’t put either past Musk: the lack of references is consistent with the former, and the fact that Musk’s current primary endeavor is a car company is consistent with the latter and > I write this to point out that, in the US, people will treat any crank seriously if he has enough money or enough prowess in another field. The article would have been much stronger if it'd left ego and silly ad hominem out of it and reported on facts alone. I also have concerns about the costings: the Hyperloop report didn't give sufficient justifications for any of them. Yet I assume they didn't just pluck them out of thin air either. We really need to know how they were calculated before we can do a more critical analysis of them or someone should try and come up with their own rigorous cost projections. We can go back and forth all day saying it seems too low until someone actually definitely proves it. In particular, comparing Musk's projected costs for, e.g., viaducts to how much the government says they cost is almost definitely a poor metric since, after all, exactly the same could have been said for Musk's cost projections for rocket-powered spaceflight.
- rkangel 13y ago
  Exactly. I enjoyed the fairly well supported counter-arguments to the ideas. Inevitably it isn't going to be quite as good as it appears initially, and open debate is how consensus is reached, but he devalues the whole argument by laying into the person who brought it all up. Whether or not the idea is valid is irrelevant - the fact that Elon Musk is proposing it does lend it some additional weight - with Space X and to a lesser extent Tesla, he has gone into an existing market, taken a step back, rethought things from the ground up, and re-written the book on how much it costs to do things. I don't know if Hyperloop is as technically feasible and cost effective as it looks, I don't know if any government would have the courage to go in that direction, but I do know that it isn't going to get anywhere with good balanced debate on the technical merits of the proposed solution and ad hominem rubbish just gets in the way of that.
pmarca 13y ago
It's almost like it's easier to criticize new ideas than come up with them or implement them. Oh, wait...
- mjn 13y ago
  It's not hard at all to come up with speculative transit ideas with some high-level engineering guesstimates. It's sort of a hobby of a lot of people. People have even sketched out plans for this particular idea (partially evacuated tube transport). Implementing them: yes, that's harder, and most transit ideas fall down at that stage. Implementing them in a way that comes anywhere near the original optimistic projections is even harder (see: maglev).
madaxe 13y ago
'What is love? What is creation? What is longing? What is a star?' thus asks the last man, and blinks. The earth has become small, and on it hops the last man, who makes everything small. His race is as ineradicable as the flea; the last man lives longest. 'We have invented happiness,'say the last men, and they blink. They have left the regions where it was hard to live, for one needs warmth. One still loves one's neighbor and rubs against him, for one needs warmth... I see Musk as something akin to Nietzsche's superman - and this chap, the detractor, the denigrator, the naysayer, is his last man.
- philwelch 13y ago
  I can't believe you got downvoted. You've made explicit the sycophantic, uncritical Elon Musk worship that permeates this thread.
INTPenis 13y ago
I for one can't get the mono rail song from the Simpsons out of my head. But people have already pointed out that this is merely an idea and should be treated as such. Though a town with money is sort of like a mule with a spinning wheel...
tinco 13y ago
Geez the author of this article is a dick. It makes it very hard to read, it looks as though he makes some valid points, but it's interspersed with so much personal pettyness that it's hard to take him seriously. Why does this guy hate Elon so much?
- sz4kerto 13y ago
  Whether or not he's a dick does not matter. Personal antipathy or sympathy should not matter that much. That's exactly what he says btw: most people haven't even read the Hyperloop PDF but they're already fans - just because it's Musk, and he seems to be a nice guy. Jobs-effect again and again.
  - tinco 13y ago
    I just explained why it does matter. His dickishness made his otherwise interesting article agonizing to read. I did not think the author was a dick _before_ I read the article. Anyway, I have read the Hyperloop pdf end to end and I think it's great. I don't agree with this author at all that Elon Musk's endeavours distract from improving existing technology. Nor do I think that improving existing technology is as important as inventing new potentially disruptive technology in general. People are fans of Musk because he succeeds and delivers in the face of spineless critics like this one. Just as people were fans of Jobs as he reintroduced quality into consumer electronics succesfully.
    - Someone 13y ago
      "I don't agree with this author at all that Elon Musk's endeavours distract from improving existing technology." Did we read the same article? I read a rant, sprinkled with lots of verifiable facts that gave strong arguments why this Hyperloop idea won't fly. For a rebuttal, I would expect claims that his sources are incorrect, that his calculations are incorrect, or that the conclusions he draws from those calculations are incorrect. Arguing that the author ranted too much is not sufficient for me. For example, what's wrong with his claim that people would get seasick in this thing? If there's nothing wrong with that claim, what's wrong with his claim that that is a show stopper? Similarly, wants wrong with his arguments about the low capacity of this design? Feel free to add some rantiness, but keep the fraction of content as least as high as this article, please. And, by the way, I do not think this article says Elon Musk does nothing good; it just claims this idea of Elon Musk is not a good one because it is highly unlikely that it is possible to fix all of its problems. For example, one can straighten the trajectory, but then, costs would balloon to be at least on par with the existing high speed rail system.
jacquesm 13y ago
Alon Levy thinks that anybody that is not a 'transportation engineer' should stick to minding their own business. His agenda is shining through pretty strong here and his dislike for Elon Musk (who apparently succeeds in areas where he's not qualified to succeed in the first place) is as strong as it ever was. The more successful Elon Musk is in his endeavors the more vehement this kind of attack seems to become. It's quite possible that there are valid criticisms embedded in between the vitriol but I wished he'd stick to the factual stuff and leave his bias out of it. Calling Elon Musk a crank is an insult given what the man has already achieved and reflects poorly on the writer. I personally think that the best way forward with the hyperloop is to create a scale model, the tube and carriage could be (virtually?) wind tunnel tested and valuable information would be gathered that way offering a path to verify the design one step at the time starting with the hardest part, the aerodynamics.
- crusso 13y ago
  Vitriol is right. Starting your piece with: Thus we get Hyperloop, a loopy intercity rail transit idea proposed by Tesla Motors’ Elon Musk, an entrepreneur who hopes to make a living some day building cars. ... was just an immature and catty way to begin a (what he hoped would be) substantive attack on the Hyperloop. The article finds some questionable issues in the initial proposal, but its unfortunate that Levy writes as though Musk is a jackass for even putting the idea out there.
  - lmg643 13y ago
    catty is a big understatement for this article - there is some pretty radical thinking in there, particularly the part about entrepreneurs not deserving the spoils of their companies, because someone else would have done it if they hadn't. (key quote: "People get extremely rich for doing something first, even if in their absence their competitors would’ve done the same six months later.") not sure what that has to do with elon musk, other than to try and put together a "nuclear" attack on his character, going after the moral foundation of his wealth in addition to the hyperloop idea. it's like the article is a communist critique wrapped in a technical evaluation. away from the radical and bitter aspects of this critique, i appreciate the technical comments in here. i think it is vital to have a proper, public technical evaluation of the hyperloop, and he undermines his argument with the personal and philosophical. i would love to see a response to this critique from the hyperloop side. i would agree that musk, having lobbed this hand grenade into public discourse, should follow-through on his idea to some extent - build a test bed and prove it can be done on a small scale. in my limited experience, if something is a really good idea, you try and pursue it for yourself, rather than hoping someone else will steal it from you.
bowlofpetunias 13y ago
Okay, so this is over the top and not very constructive. However, there is an underlying pattern that annoys me too. There are literally thousands of people working in innovative transportation ideas, why is the barely researched idea of a relative amateur like Musk receiving so much attention? The same applies to the Soylent story: people who have been working on the problem for decades are being ignored in favor of self-promoting entrepreneurs who's ideas lack depth. The great irony is that the cheerleaders for these entrepreneurs are the same people that bitch about the lack of scientific knowledge in politicians and the lack of attention for science in general. I can perfectly understand that this pisses people of who have been diligently working on these problems for decades.
- jamesdelaneyie 13y ago
  Sounds like a marketing problem for these diligent hard workers? But would more attention aid them in their decade long hikes or hinder them by opening them up to more public scrutiny and the possible need to appease that can follow? Certainly don't know myself.
  - batemanesque 13y ago
    it's not a marketing problem. people outside a given field will, by virtue of their inexperience, be prone to more hubristic ideas they don't understand the impossibility of. combined w/ the tech scene's natural credulity - as demonstrated by the Soylent debacle - & there you go. the problem w/ casually describing it as a "marketing problem" is it completely excuses both entrepreneurial excess & the whole Valley hype thing. sure, there should be an onus on people to present/market their ideas well, but also on the public to be a little more skeptical of wild & unfounded claims.
    - user24 13y ago
      I missed the soylent 'debacle', what went wrong?
      - 13y ago
zeteo 13y ago
The article is full of cant in more ways than one, and more about social norms when entering a new field than the proposal itself. This is obvious from the kind of nitpicking that goes on (no references! 4.37 m/s^2 is the maximum motion sickness possible because an accredited expert proposed it; I've never seen 4.9 m/s^2, but it's surely a barf comet!). Despite the author's high opinion of his own knowledge, the criticism amounts almost entirely to basic arithmetic and comparisons to existing systems that are built on rather different principles. The really interesting, constructive questions: does this low-pressure air cushion thing really work? what are some factors that we need to explore to determine its true efficiency? etc. are of no interest to this kind of expert, who is more interested in tribally defending his own turf (see the unnecessary name calling) than in figuring out new ground. In all fairness, I would give much more slack to an engineer talking about his field. But, as the author himself points out, almost all civil engineering technology is from the 19th and early 20th century. He seems to think that, in between, his colleagues have been perfecting the fine forms of the art and polishing its many facets. Except feats that were once fairly common, such as building the Hoover Dam under budget and two years ahead of schedule [1], are in the realm of the mythical these days. [1] http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hoover_dam http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hoover_dam
- Retric 13y ago
  I would add he completely ignores the fact he runs a SpaceX which has significantly under cut a long established industry. If you look at his numbers there Basicly estimates for actual costs before padding where large contractors pad construction costs as much as possible because that's how they maximize proffits.
  - mjn 13y ago
    SpaceX is based on a fairly different principle, of taking proven designs from the past, updating them, and building them for less. For example SpaceX's Grasshopper VTVL is following in the footsteps of the 1990s McDonnell Douglas DC-X, not some kind of completely untested idea. He isn't taking a previously speculative technology idea, like a space elevator or something, and trying to build it. An analog here would be if Musk had a proposal to take an existing, working mode of transit (at least working in prototype) and build it for less. But the current proposal is more like hard sci-fi: goes into enough depth to be back-of-the-envelope plausible, but no detailed engineering or working demonstration, and very hand-wavy cost estimates.
misnome 13y ago
An interesting article, and seems to be nicely referenced. Most of the detraction of the article seems to be attacking his dismissal of Musk; that shouldn't matter, given it seems to actually quote sources for details. I found especially interesting this quote: > If a famous question could be solved in ten pages, it probably wouldn’t still be open. Which of course isn't saying that it's impossible, but that claiming it to be so requires overwhelming proof. Hyperloop seems like an interesting idea, and certainly worth some investigation and research (as is, any proposal and idea). But large scale hand waving and dismissals of the problems as ad hominem attacks don't help lend an air of legitimacy. My personal view? I find it interesting that he proposed this, but initially didn't want to do any of the development or payment himself. That doesn't sound like someone who truly believes in their "vision".
Symmetry 13y ago
I'm really unsure about the author's assertions regarding the maximum accelerations that people can take. Those might be the normal regulatory limits for passenger rail, but I'm pretty sure that the accelerations I've experienced on planes have also gone up into territories the author would consider utterly unacceptable. On the other hand, I think he has some good points regarding the cost numbers. If pylons have all the advantages that Musk claims then why aren't we all getting around city on monorails?
cousin_it 13y ago
Is it possible to build viaducts for $5mil/km?
- Retric 13y ago
  Yes, however the cost of a viaduct is largely dependent on the height required. The Alasca pipeline came in around 1.2 million per mile dispite vary harsh conditions but it was also rather low to the ground.
  - cousin_it 13y ago
    Maybe I'm confused about the meaning of the word "viaduct", does a pipeline count as one?
    - throwaway_yy2Di 13y ago
      A pipeline doesn't need viaducts because it doesn't have severe restrictions on curves. It can follow terrain: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/File:Trans-Alaska_Pipeline_System_Luca_Galuzzi_2005.jpg https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/File:Trans-Alaska_Pipeline_Sys... A high-speed railway needs to be flat, so it needs tall pylons to support it above uneven terrain: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/File:SNCF_TGV_Duplex_Viaduc_de_Cize_-_Bolozon.jpg https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/File:SNCF_TGV_Duplex_Viaduc_de... https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/File:Millau_Viaduct_construction_south.jpg https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/File:Millau_Viaduct_constructi...
      - Retric 13y ago
        Trains often need viaducts due to those restrictions but a multi span footbridge over a swamp is a viaduct as is the Disney monorail. My point is simply elevating a span is not that expencive. However, as you say high speed rail needs a vary flat track so cost estimates need to look at the actual path vs just saying 5m/km is rediculus without any justification.
msandford 13y ago
This guy's main real criticism is "train viaducts cost X and Musk's proposal is 0.1X therefore it must be wrong" is total bullshit. It MIGHT be valid under the following assumptions: 1. The weight of the train and the hyperloop capsules are the same 2. The construction methods employed are identical. But they're not! Average train car weight (if they have to comply with FRA regulations) should be in the 60 ton range. https://www.ebbc.org/rail/fra.html https://www.ebbc.org/rail/fra.html and http://uk.answers.yahoo.com/question/index?qid=20060828075317AACG9vx http://uk.answers.yahoo.com/question/index?qid=2006082807531... Average train car length is betwen 60 and 80 feet so we'll go with 80. 60 tons / 80 feet = 1500lbs/foot. In the case that a non-FRA compliant car can be used, that number SHOULD drop to about 750lbs/foot. The hyperloop cars are speculated to be 16.5 tons and 28.5 tons each. No hard numbers on length but if you assume 3ft per passenger and 28 total (14 per side) and add a bit of room for the other stuff, you can come up with 14 * 3+15=57 feet or for three cars, 3 * 20+15=75 feet. 33,000lbs / 57 feet = 578lbs/ft. 57,000lbs / 75 feet = 760lbs/ft So it looks like the big-case hyperloop will weigh about the same as the best-case high speed rail. Now let's analyze the support mechanism. Trains run on rails (two of them) and they weigh ~100 lbs per foot and are around 3" wide and 6" tall. These rails need to be very precisely supported both side-to-side and up-and-down especially if the trains are going to run at 200+ MPH. For viaduct you've got to build the bridge, then put down the ties, then put rail on top of those, fasten it down, etc. Ties are in the range of 6-8" thick and then there's the ballast (rocks) which aren't light either and which are generally required to keep the ties from moving. On bridges (viaduct) you might do something newer and fancier but I wouldn't count on it here in the US. Overall you've got at least 200lbs/foot for the rails and I might guess another 500-1500lbs/foot for the ties and ballast and such. Rock weighs ~150lbs/cuft and so does concrete so if your ties + ballast are a foot thick and 8 feet wide (rails are 4'8" plus 20" extra on the sides) that's 1200lbs/foot. Hyperloop runs in a 7.5 foot diameter tube with a 0.8in thick wall. 7.5 * 12 * pi * 0.8=226 square inches cross section. Or a foot of it has 2712 cubic inches of steel. At 0.283lbs/cu-in that comes out to be 767lbs/foot. Because it's pipe (which has excellent structural geometry) it is self-supporting and thus all you really have to do is get the pipe properly supported on top of the pylons, weld two sections together and you're done. Here's the last part. Hyperloop cars will be at least a mile apart. That means the system can be designed to support just one of them per pylon. Train cars will be 3 feet apart, and thus the viaducts have to support 1500lbs/foot * 80 feet per car * 10 cars = 600 tons. Versus the hyperloop car weights of 16.5 tons or 28.5 tons. So these two systems are mildly different in terms of their car weights but dramatically different in terms of the overall structural requirements and design to meet those structural requirements. Train track is heavy and train cars are heavy and trains are fairly dense (due to their length). Hyperloop cars are about half as heavy and hyperloop track is half as heavy and hyperloop support densities are only about half versus rail. 0.5 * 0.5 * 0.5 = 0.125 or 12.5% which isn't terribly far off from the 10% number that the Hyperloop is quoted to cost versus the high speed rail system. TL;DR: Cut track weight by half, car weight by half, and total support weight by half and you get 0.125 which is suspiciously close to 0.10, the number that the article author had such a problem with. EDIT1: formatting EDIT2: tl;dr
enoch_r 13y ago
While the author is annoyingly dismissive of Musk, the tribal responses here are unusually defensive and uninformative. It seems like our identities have expanded to encompass Elon Musk as well as Bitcoin (pro and con) and the NSA. http://www.paulgraham.com/identity.html http://www.paulgraham.com/identity.html
the_watcher 13y ago
Musk has pretty regularly stressed that this is an alpha design, and that he welcomes feedback and improvements. It may be true that he trashes HSR and that it competes with Tesla. HSR is also stupidly expensive and arguably too slow. Regardless of your feelings on HSR, it's also impossible to argue that the CA government is likely not to screw it up somehow. It's possible that he could both benefit from HSR failing and also be benevolently proposing that we actually try something new. Don't forget, he's pledged his own money to this, and now seems to be leaning towards developing a prototype. I wonder if putting up the cash for a prototype will quiet the critics down. I, for one, am a big fan of rich people spending their money on cool things that they like, from Mark Cuban pushing the limits of analytics in basketball to Musk with Tesla/SpaceX/Hyperloop to Bill Gates' humanitarian efforts.
jcox92 13y ago
'skeptical' doesn't seem like the right word. I think 'loathsome' would be more fitting. While the author makes some good points, it was hard to consider them legitimate given that he sandwiched the article with opinionated rants that seemed to abhor the idea of successful people having good ideas.
leot 13y ago
If there's enough public will to make something great happen, and that something-great is within the realm of engineering feasibility, then it will happen. I love HSR. But I also think we as a species are capable of much, much, much more than we're currently accomplishing. And much of the reason we're stuck using slow, uninspiring, and polluting technology from yester-year is a lack of public will. So to the naysayers: if you want to harp on some bold proposal to do something great, pretend it's 1961 and someone told you about sending men to the moon and back. Pretend it was 1948 and someone proposed making trains that went 90 mph. Pretend it was 1850 and someone proposed linking Paddington and Farringdon using a massive tunnel buried deep underground. Real things change all the time. Technology can make problems go away. Bold proposals such as Musk's -- proposals that are the good-faith effort of someone who is ultra-competent and with a lot of social and financial capital -- are proposals that need to be celebrated and encouraged. Doing new things well is orders of magnitude more difficult than doing that which has been done before. If you've never followed-through on a crazy and bold idea, please temper your critique of those who have.
jdietrich 13y ago
Frankly, I'm sickened at the hubris involved in this kind of analysis. Musk owns a space exploration company that is flying regular commercial missions, yet OP thinks that Musk has made elementary mistakes in his physics calculations. SpaceX are currently building a passenger spacecraft, but OP thinks that nobody has factored the effect of G forces on passengers into the design. They have reduced the cost of putting mass into orbit by an order of magnitude, but OP deigns to assess the validity of Musk's cost estimates. Frankly, who the fuck is he to tell Elon Musk what is possible? Musk has degrees in both economics and applied physics. He has done the "impossible" in three industries and is an epoch-defining figure in electronic payments, space exploration and the motor industry. Musk isn't some crackpot with a big bank balance, he's a genius with an astonishing track record of revolutionising established industries from the outside, by ignoring old assumptions about what is possible. Hyperloop might succeed or fail, but I genuinely can't think of a single person who has ever lived who might be better qualified to make that judgement than Elon Musk.
jpatokal 13y ago
The LA end is really Sylmar, at the edge of the LA Basin; with additional access time and security checks, this is no faster than conventional HSR doing the trip in 2:40. "Security checks"? Why would Hyperloop require any more security checks than the HSR? If anything, you'd expect security to be faster for a constant stream of departures, vs 1000+ passengers bunched together for a train. (Or you could be sensible like the French, Japanese, Germans and Chinese and dispense with any train-related security theatre entirely, but that would probably be too much to ask in the land of the free and the home of the scared.)
- mehwoot 13y ago
  Security checks is not the main cost of time there. The hyperloop is suggested to end up in Sylmar, which according to google, is about a 30 minute drive from Union Station in the center of Los Angeles, where the HSR will stop at. I don't live in LA so I'm not sure whether that 30 minutes is optimistic or pessimistic.

> Elon Musk, an entrepreneur who hopes to make a living some day building cars. Didn't he already make all the living he needs and now just does whatever he likes?

axefrog 13y ago
You can almost completely write the article off considering he's characterizing Musk's achievements with such dismissive condescension.
- simonh 13y ago
  No, you really can't. How he characterizes Musk is irrelevant to whether his criticisms of the proposal are valid or not. Just because he deploys dismissive condescension is no excuse for also resorting to it. This is Hacker News, not Slashdot.
  - vidarh 13y ago
    In an ideal world where we have infinite time to consider all comments, you are right. However if one has to choose what to spend time on, it is prudent to filter, and for blatant subjectivity to be used as one such filter, as it is reasonable to consider it likely that arguments made by someone who is so obviously biased against someone in the first place is more likely to be careless about the arguments he makes against their ideas. So a a time saving exercise, it is absolutely relevant to consider other factors than the argument itself. And yes, it is imperfect and will result in a lot of people discounting valid concerns.
- scotty79 13y ago
  What I got from article: Author is: - unfriendly towards Elon Musk - unfriendly towards people who voice ideas of what the author thinks is not their area of expertise in general. - fond of high speed trains. - thinking that Elon Musk wants to kill trains to sell more cars. ... oh yeah, and he has some concerns about Hyperloop estimates. Mainly that cost and disadvantages are underestimated. Also somehow author managed to overlooked the fact that Elon Musk delivered some stuff to International Space Station, most likely at fraction of NASA cost which consist of very experienced people. If experienced specialist tells that something in his area of expertise can be done. He's most likely right. If he says something can't be done, there's a fair chance he's wrong.
cdash 13y ago
Well technically he is worth something like 6-7 billion dollars right now but I believe almost all of that is made up of stock in the companies he owns so if the companies were to end up failing then he would lose most of it and I don't think he plans on selling any of his stock any time soon.

Osmium 13y ago

We are no where near the stage where we can judge if Hyperloop is a good or a bad idea yet. At the moment, it is just that: an idea. It needs to be refined, torn apart, put back together, and examined thoroughly and I look forward to that happening. I'm glad this article exists and is asking tough and valid questions, but I feel like the article is wrong in trying to persuade people that the Hyperloop is intrinsically a bad idea when a much better response (at this stage) is to try and improve the design. In particular, some parts of this article are just way way off base, e.g.: > Tesla’s train energy consumption numbers do not pass a sanity check, which suggests either reckless disregard for the research or fraud. I wouldn’t put either past Musk: the lack of references is consistent with the former, and the fact that Musk’s current primary endeavor is a car company is consistent with the latter and > I write this to point out that, in the US, people will treat any crank seriously if he has enough money or enough prowess in another field. The article would have been much stronger if it'd left ego and silly ad hominem out of it and reported on facts alone. I also have concerns about the costings: the Hyperloop report didn't give sufficient justifications for any of them. Yet I assume they didn't just pluck them out of thin air either. We really need to know how they were calculated before we can do a more critical analysis of them or someone should try and come up with their own rigorous cost projections. We can go back and forth all day saying it seems too low until someone actually definitely proves it. In particular, comparing Musk's projected costs for, e.g., viaducts to how much the government says they cost is almost definitely a poor metric since, after all, exactly the same could have been said for Musk's cost projections for rocket-powered spaceflight.

rkangel 13y ago
Exactly. I enjoyed the fairly well supported counter-arguments to the ideas. Inevitably it isn't going to be quite as good as it appears initially, and open debate is how consensus is reached, but he devalues the whole argument by laying into the person who brought it all up. Whether or not the idea is valid is irrelevant - the fact that Elon Musk is proposing it does lend it some additional weight - with Space X and to a lesser extent Tesla, he has gone into an existing market, taken a step back, rethought things from the ground up, and re-written the book on how much it costs to do things. I don't know if Hyperloop is as technically feasible and cost effective as it looks, I don't know if any government would have the courage to go in that direction, but I do know that it isn't going to get anywhere with good balanced debate on the technical merits of the proposed solution and ad hominem rubbish just gets in the way of that.

pmarca 13y ago

It's almost like it's easier to criticize new ideas than come up with them or implement them. Oh, wait...

mjn 13y ago
It's not hard at all to come up with speculative transit ideas with some high-level engineering guesstimates. It's sort of a hobby of a lot of people. People have even sketched out plans for this particular idea (partially evacuated tube transport). Implementing them: yes, that's harder, and most transit ideas fall down at that stage. Implementing them in a way that comes anywhere near the original optimistic projections is even harder (see: maglev).

madaxe 13y ago

'What is love? What is creation? What is longing? What is a star?' thus asks the last man, and blinks. The earth has become small, and on it hops the last man, who makes everything small. His race is as ineradicable as the flea; the last man lives longest. 'We have invented happiness,'say the last men, and they blink. They have left the regions where it was hard to live, for one needs warmth. One still loves one's neighbor and rubs against him, for one needs warmth... I see Musk as something akin to Nietzsche's superman - and this chap, the detractor, the denigrator, the naysayer, is his last man.

philwelch 13y ago
I can't believe you got downvoted. You've made explicit the sycophantic, uncritical Elon Musk worship that permeates this thread.

INTPenis 13y ago

I for one can't get the mono rail song from the Simpsons out of my head. But people have already pointed out that this is merely an idea and should be treated as such. Though a town with money is sort of like a mule with a spinning wheel...

tinco 13y ago

Geez the author of this article is a dick. It makes it very hard to read, it looks as though he makes some valid points, but it's interspersed with so much personal pettyness that it's hard to take him seriously. Why does this guy hate Elon so much?

sz4kerto 13y ago
Whether or not he's a dick does not matter. Personal antipathy or sympathy should not matter that much. That's exactly what he says btw: most people haven't even read the Hyperloop PDF but they're already fans - just because it's Musk, and he seems to be a nice guy. Jobs-effect again and again.
- tinco 13y ago
  I just explained why it does matter. His dickishness made his otherwise interesting article agonizing to read. I did not think the author was a dick _before_ I read the article. Anyway, I have read the Hyperloop pdf end to end and I think it's great. I don't agree with this author at all that Elon Musk's endeavours distract from improving existing technology. Nor do I think that improving existing technology is as important as inventing new potentially disruptive technology in general. People are fans of Musk because he succeeds and delivers in the face of spineless critics like this one. Just as people were fans of Jobs as he reintroduced quality into consumer electronics succesfully.
  - Someone 13y ago
    "I don't agree with this author at all that Elon Musk's endeavours distract from improving existing technology." Did we read the same article? I read a rant, sprinkled with lots of verifiable facts that gave strong arguments why this Hyperloop idea won't fly. For a rebuttal, I would expect claims that his sources are incorrect, that his calculations are incorrect, or that the conclusions he draws from those calculations are incorrect. Arguing that the author ranted too much is not sufficient for me. For example, what's wrong with his claim that people would get seasick in this thing? If there's nothing wrong with that claim, what's wrong with his claim that that is a show stopper? Similarly, wants wrong with his arguments about the low capacity of this design? Feel free to add some rantiness, but keep the fraction of content as least as high as this article, please. And, by the way, I do not think this article says Elon Musk does nothing good; it just claims this idea of Elon Musk is not a good one because it is highly unlikely that it is possible to fix all of its problems. For example, one can straighten the trajectory, but then, costs would balloon to be at least on par with the existing high speed rail system.

jacquesm 13y ago

Alon Levy thinks that anybody that is not a 'transportation engineer' should stick to minding their own business. His agenda is shining through pretty strong here and his dislike for Elon Musk (who apparently succeeds in areas where he's not qualified to succeed in the first place) is as strong as it ever was. The more successful Elon Musk is in his endeavors the more vehement this kind of attack seems to become. It's quite possible that there are valid criticisms embedded in between the vitriol but I wished he'd stick to the factual stuff and leave his bias out of it. Calling Elon Musk a crank is an insult given what the man has already achieved and reflects poorly on the writer. I personally think that the best way forward with the hyperloop is to create a scale model, the tube and carriage could be (virtually?) wind tunnel tested and valuable information would be gathered that way offering a path to verify the design one step at the time starting with the hardest part, the aerodynamics.

crusso 13y ago
Vitriol is right. Starting your piece with: Thus we get Hyperloop, a loopy intercity rail transit idea proposed by Tesla Motors’ Elon Musk, an entrepreneur who hopes to make a living some day building cars. ... was just an immature and catty way to begin a (what he hoped would be) substantive attack on the Hyperloop. The article finds some questionable issues in the initial proposal, but its unfortunate that Levy writes as though Musk is a jackass for even putting the idea out there.
- lmg643 13y ago
  catty is a big understatement for this article - there is some pretty radical thinking in there, particularly the part about entrepreneurs not deserving the spoils of their companies, because someone else would have done it if they hadn't. (key quote: "People get extremely rich for doing something first, even if in their absence their competitors would’ve done the same six months later.") not sure what that has to do with elon musk, other than to try and put together a "nuclear" attack on his character, going after the moral foundation of his wealth in addition to the hyperloop idea. it's like the article is a communist critique wrapped in a technical evaluation. away from the radical and bitter aspects of this critique, i appreciate the technical comments in here. i think it is vital to have a proper, public technical evaluation of the hyperloop, and he undermines his argument with the personal and philosophical. i would love to see a response to this critique from the hyperloop side. i would agree that musk, having lobbed this hand grenade into public discourse, should follow-through on his idea to some extent - build a test bed and prove it can be done on a small scale. in my limited experience, if something is a really good idea, you try and pursue it for yourself, rather than hoping someone else will steal it from you.

bowlofpetunias 13y ago

Okay, so this is over the top and not very constructive. However, there is an underlying pattern that annoys me too. There are literally thousands of people working in innovative transportation ideas, why is the barely researched idea of a relative amateur like Musk receiving so much attention? The same applies to the Soylent story: people who have been working on the problem for decades are being ignored in favor of self-promoting entrepreneurs who's ideas lack depth. The great irony is that the cheerleaders for these entrepreneurs are the same people that bitch about the lack of scientific knowledge in politicians and the lack of attention for science in general. I can perfectly understand that this pisses people of who have been diligently working on these problems for decades.

jamesdelaneyie 13y ago
Sounds like a marketing problem for these diligent hard workers? But would more attention aid them in their decade long hikes or hinder them by opening them up to more public scrutiny and the possible need to appease that can follow? Certainly don't know myself.
- batemanesque 13y ago
  it's not a marketing problem. people outside a given field will, by virtue of their inexperience, be prone to more hubristic ideas they don't understand the impossibility of. combined w/ the tech scene's natural credulity - as demonstrated by the Soylent debacle - & there you go. the problem w/ casually describing it as a "marketing problem" is it completely excuses both entrepreneurial excess & the whole Valley hype thing. sure, there should be an onus on people to present/market their ideas well, but also on the public to be a little more skeptical of wild & unfounded claims.
  - user24 13y ago
    I missed the soylent 'debacle', what went wrong?
    - 13y ago

zeteo 13y ago

The article is full of cant in more ways than one, and more about social norms when entering a new field than the proposal itself. This is obvious from the kind of nitpicking that goes on (no references! 4.37 m/s^2 is the maximum motion sickness possible because an accredited expert proposed it; I've never seen 4.9 m/s^2, but it's surely a barf comet!). Despite the author's high opinion of his own knowledge, the criticism amounts almost entirely to basic arithmetic and comparisons to existing systems that are built on rather different principles. The really interesting, constructive questions: does this low-pressure air cushion thing really work? what are some factors that we need to explore to determine its true efficiency? etc. are of no interest to this kind of expert, who is more interested in tribally defending his own turf (see the unnecessary name calling) than in figuring out new ground. In all fairness, I would give much more slack to an engineer talking about his field. But, as the author himself points out, almost all civil engineering technology is from the 19th and early 20th century. He seems to think that, in between, his colleagues have been perfecting the fine forms of the art and polishing its many facets. Except feats that were once fairly common, such as building the Hoover Dam under budget and two years ahead of schedule [1], are in the realm of the mythical these days. [1] http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hoover_dam http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hoover_dam

Retric 13y ago
I would add he completely ignores the fact he runs a SpaceX which has significantly under cut a long established industry. If you look at his numbers there Basicly estimates for actual costs before padding where large contractors pad construction costs as much as possible because that's how they maximize proffits.
- mjn 13y ago
  SpaceX is based on a fairly different principle, of taking proven designs from the past, updating them, and building them for less. For example SpaceX's Grasshopper VTVL is following in the footsteps of the 1990s McDonnell Douglas DC-X, not some kind of completely untested idea. He isn't taking a previously speculative technology idea, like a space elevator or something, and trying to build it. An analog here would be if Musk had a proposal to take an existing, working mode of transit (at least working in prototype) and build it for less. But the current proposal is more like hard sci-fi: goes into enough depth to be back-of-the-envelope plausible, but no detailed engineering or working demonstration, and very hand-wavy cost estimates.

misnome 13y ago

An interesting article, and seems to be nicely referenced. Most of the detraction of the article seems to be attacking his dismissal of Musk; that shouldn't matter, given it seems to actually quote sources for details. I found especially interesting this quote: > If a famous question could be solved in ten pages, it probably wouldn’t still be open. Which of course isn't saying that it's impossible, but that claiming it to be so requires overwhelming proof. Hyperloop seems like an interesting idea, and certainly worth some investigation and research (as is, any proposal and idea). But large scale hand waving and dismissals of the problems as ad hominem attacks don't help lend an air of legitimacy. My personal view? I find it interesting that he proposed this, but initially didn't want to do any of the development or payment himself. That doesn't sound like someone who truly believes in their "vision".

Symmetry 13y ago

I'm really unsure about the author's assertions regarding the maximum accelerations that people can take. Those might be the normal regulatory limits for passenger rail, but I'm pretty sure that the accelerations I've experienced on planes have also gone up into territories the author would consider utterly unacceptable. On the other hand, I think he has some good points regarding the cost numbers. If pylons have all the advantages that Musk claims then why aren't we all getting around city on monorails?

cousin_it 13y ago

Is it possible to build viaducts for $5mil/km?

Retric 13y ago
Yes, however the cost of a viaduct is largely dependent on the height required. The Alasca pipeline came in around 1.2 million per mile dispite vary harsh conditions but it was also rather low to the ground.
- cousin_it 13y ago
  Maybe I'm confused about the meaning of the word "viaduct", does a pipeline count as one?
  - throwaway_yy2Di 13y ago
    A pipeline doesn't need viaducts because it doesn't have severe restrictions on curves. It can follow terrain: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/File:Trans-Alaska_Pipeline_System_Luca_Galuzzi_2005.jpg https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/File:Trans-Alaska_Pipeline_Sys... A high-speed railway needs to be flat, so it needs tall pylons to support it above uneven terrain: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/File:SNCF_TGV_Duplex_Viaduc_de_Cize_-_Bolozon.jpg https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/File:SNCF_TGV_Duplex_Viaduc_de... https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/File:Millau_Viaduct_construction_south.jpg https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/File:Millau_Viaduct_constructi...
    - Retric 13y ago
      Trains often need viaducts due to those restrictions but a multi span footbridge over a swamp is a viaduct as is the Disney monorail. My point is simply elevating a span is not that expencive. However, as you say high speed rail needs a vary flat track so cost estimates need to look at the actual path vs just saying 5m/km is rediculus without any justification.

msandford 13y ago

This guy's main real criticism is "train viaducts cost X and Musk's proposal is 0.1X therefore it must be wrong" is total bullshit. It MIGHT be valid under the following assumptions: 1. The weight of the train and the hyperloop capsules are the same 2. The construction methods employed are identical. But they're not! Average train car weight (if they have to comply with FRA regulations) should be in the 60 ton range. https://www.ebbc.org/rail/fra.html https://www.ebbc.org/rail/fra.html and http://uk.answers.yahoo.com/question/index?qid=20060828075317AACG9vx http://uk.answers.yahoo.com/question/index?qid=2006082807531... Average train car length is betwen 60 and 80 feet so we'll go with 80. 60 tons / 80 feet = 1500lbs/foot. In the case that a non-FRA compliant car can be used, that number SHOULD drop to about 750lbs/foot. The hyperloop cars are speculated to be 16.5 tons and 28.5 tons each. No hard numbers on length but if you assume 3ft per passenger and 28 total (14 per side) and add a bit of room for the other stuff, you can come up with 14 * 3+15=57 feet or for three cars, 3 * 20+15=75 feet. 33,000lbs / 57 feet = 578lbs/ft. 57,000lbs / 75 feet = 760lbs/ft So it looks like the big-case hyperloop will weigh about the same as the best-case high speed rail. Now let's analyze the support mechanism. Trains run on rails (two of them) and they weigh ~100 lbs per foot and are around 3" wide and 6" tall. These rails need to be very precisely supported both side-to-side and up-and-down especially if the trains are going to run at 200+ MPH. For viaduct you've got to build the bridge, then put down the ties, then put rail on top of those, fasten it down, etc. Ties are in the range of 6-8" thick and then there's the ballast (rocks) which aren't light either and which are generally required to keep the ties from moving. On bridges (viaduct) you might do something newer and fancier but I wouldn't count on it here in the US. Overall you've got at least 200lbs/foot for the rails and I might guess another 500-1500lbs/foot for the ties and ballast and such. Rock weighs ~150lbs/cuft and so does concrete so if your ties + ballast are a foot thick and 8 feet wide (rails are 4'8" plus 20" extra on the sides) that's 1200lbs/foot. Hyperloop runs in a 7.5 foot diameter tube with a 0.8in thick wall. 7.5 * 12 * pi * 0.8=226 square inches cross section. Or a foot of it has 2712 cubic inches of steel. At 0.283lbs/cu-in that comes out to be 767lbs/foot. Because it's pipe (which has excellent structural geometry) it is self-supporting and thus all you really have to do is get the pipe properly supported on top of the pylons, weld two sections together and you're done. Here's the last part. Hyperloop cars will be at least a mile apart. That means the system can be designed to support just one of them per pylon. Train cars will be 3 feet apart, and thus the viaducts have to support 1500lbs/foot * 80 feet per car * 10 cars = 600 tons. Versus the hyperloop car weights of 16.5 tons or 28.5 tons. So these two systems are mildly different in terms of their car weights but dramatically different in terms of the overall structural requirements and design to meet those structural requirements. Train track is heavy and train cars are heavy and trains are fairly dense (due to their length). Hyperloop cars are about half as heavy and hyperloop track is half as heavy and hyperloop support densities are only about half versus rail. 0.5 * 0.5 * 0.5 = 0.125 or 12.5% which isn't terribly far off from the 10% number that the Hyperloop is quoted to cost versus the high speed rail system. TL;DR: Cut track weight by half, car weight by half, and total support weight by half and you get 0.125 which is suspiciously close to 0.10, the number that the article author had such a problem with. EDIT1: formatting EDIT2: tl;dr

enoch_r 13y ago

While the author is annoyingly dismissive of Musk, the tribal responses here are unusually defensive and uninformative. It seems like our identities have expanded to encompass Elon Musk as well as Bitcoin (pro and con) and the NSA. http://www.paulgraham.com/identity.html http://www.paulgraham.com/identity.html

the_watcher 13y ago

Musk has pretty regularly stressed that this is an alpha design, and that he welcomes feedback and improvements. It may be true that he trashes HSR and that it competes with Tesla. HSR is also stupidly expensive and arguably too slow. Regardless of your feelings on HSR, it's also impossible to argue that the CA government is likely not to screw it up somehow. It's possible that he could both benefit from HSR failing and also be benevolently proposing that we actually try something new. Don't forget, he's pledged his own money to this, and now seems to be leaning towards developing a prototype. I wonder if putting up the cash for a prototype will quiet the critics down. I, for one, am a big fan of rich people spending their money on cool things that they like, from Mark Cuban pushing the limits of analytics in basketball to Musk with Tesla/SpaceX/Hyperloop to Bill Gates' humanitarian efforts.

jcox92 13y ago

'skeptical' doesn't seem like the right word. I think 'loathsome' would be more fitting. While the author makes some good points, it was hard to consider them legitimate given that he sandwiched the article with opinionated rants that seemed to abhor the idea of successful people having good ideas.

leot 13y ago

If there's enough public will to make something great happen, and that something-great is within the realm of engineering feasibility, then it will happen. I love HSR. But I also think we as a species are capable of much, much, much more than we're currently accomplishing. And much of the reason we're stuck using slow, uninspiring, and polluting technology from yester-year is a lack of public will. So to the naysayers: if you want to harp on some bold proposal to do something great, pretend it's 1961 and someone told you about sending men to the moon and back. Pretend it was 1948 and someone proposed making trains that went 90 mph. Pretend it was 1850 and someone proposed linking Paddington and Farringdon using a massive tunnel buried deep underground. Real things change all the time. Technology can make problems go away. Bold proposals such as Musk's -- proposals that are the good-faith effort of someone who is ultra-competent and with a lot of social and financial capital -- are proposals that need to be celebrated and encouraged. Doing new things well is orders of magnitude more difficult than doing that which has been done before. If you've never followed-through on a crazy and bold idea, please temper your critique of those who have.

jdietrich 13y ago

Frankly, I'm sickened at the hubris involved in this kind of analysis. Musk owns a space exploration company that is flying regular commercial missions, yet OP thinks that Musk has made elementary mistakes in his physics calculations. SpaceX are currently building a passenger spacecraft, but OP thinks that nobody has factored the effect of G forces on passengers into the design. They have reduced the cost of putting mass into orbit by an order of magnitude, but OP deigns to assess the validity of Musk's cost estimates. Frankly, who the fuck is he to tell Elon Musk what is possible? Musk has degrees in both economics and applied physics. He has done the "impossible" in three industries and is an epoch-defining figure in electronic payments, space exploration and the motor industry. Musk isn't some crackpot with a big bank balance, he's a genius with an astonishing track record of revolutionising established industries from the outside, by ignoring old assumptions about what is possible. Hyperloop might succeed or fail, but I genuinely can't think of a single person who has ever lived who might be better qualified to make that judgement than Elon Musk.

jpatokal 13y ago

The LA end is really Sylmar, at the edge of the LA Basin; with additional access time and security checks, this is no faster than conventional HSR doing the trip in 2:40. "Security checks"? Why would Hyperloop require any more security checks than the HSR? If anything, you'd expect security to be faster for a constant stream of departures, vs 1000+ passengers bunched together for a train. (Or you could be sensible like the French, Japanese, Germans and Chinese and dispense with any train-related security theatre entirely, but that would probably be too much to ask in the land of the free and the home of the scared.)

mehwoot 13y ago
Security checks is not the main cost of time there. The hyperloop is suggested to end up in Sylmar, which according to google, is about a 30 minute drive from Union Station in the center of Los Angeles, where the HSR will stop at. I don't live in LA so I'm not sure whether that 30 minutes is optimistic or pessimistic.