Hyperloop lays off half of its employees as it pivots away from passenger travel
businessinsider.comChina: Builds 40,000 miles of high speed rail in 12 years https://twitter.com/xiaoyewen/status/1494588071483875333
United States: Thinks about vacuum tubes for awhile, gives up entirely.
Also somehow its easier to build self-driving cars than it is to invest in public transportation.
that is actually a competition between AI and collective public intelligence, where the first being a pure engineering problem with no limits for growth has been improving exponentially over mere decades while the second has been improving really slow over the observable millennia. So, i'd bet on AI :)
One is cool and the other brings people to their destinations.
You meant to say self-crashing?
Look, we’ve tried nothing and we’re all out of ideas
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.
The USA is more in debt than China, it's just been badly spent.
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.
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.
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)?
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
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).
Well, the Vegas loop is just a short, expensive, small tunnel that took a very very long time to build (more than 1 year per mile) in a straight line with all permitting sorted out, so I'm not sure what it proves except incompetence.
Look at some Swiss alpine tunnels or the underwater Channel tunnel if you want to see advanced tunnel boring technology.
Edit: to give exact numbers: boring for LVCC Loop started on November 15 2019, and the tunnels opened to the public in April 2021, 1.5 years later for 1.7 miles (2.7km) of tunnel. In contrast, boring for the Channel tunnel started in June 1988, and the tunnels were opened to freight trains in June 1994 - 6 years for 50 km (31 miles) of much larger undersea tunnels, which allow transport up to 160km/h in real use (200 km/h being the highest designed speed). That's 5.2 miles per year, versus TBC's 1.1 miles per year, comparing like with like.
That's an absurd comparison. The actual tunnel was build far faster. The eventual opening had a lot to do with other factors including covid. Convention centers were not exactly in high demand. Doing everything around the actual tunnel took longer. Its also the literally first project ever done by a start up company so of course its not perfect.
And if its so amazingly expensive as you claim, why was the only commercial competitor 2x as expensive?
The investment for the kind of things like the Channel tunnel or the Base tunnel in Switzerland are 100x that of a Boring company tunnel. Those are incredibly expensive dedicated machines, years of planning beforehand.
Boring company is trying to innovate on small tunnel machines and make them more operationally efficient. Moving to electric powered drills, vertical launch and other practical improvements. Those kinds of things you could actually operate and launch in a lot a lot of places.
The amount of hate that get thrown because a company wants to improve a technology is just incredible. So we shouldn't try to improve some machine because potentially in another country they already some technology? Apparently the commercial machines that TBC bought to start with clearly didn't have many of those features they wanted on a machine of the size they wanted. So clearly the technology didn't actually exist.
So I guess that means the US will also never do Li-Ion battery as Koreans already have better technology. So why try to innovate. SpaceX doing Falcon 1, why Arianespace already has Vega. What's the point?
As long as the company is not somehow using massive government funds and they have paying costumers, what is the problem?
> That's an absurd comparison. The actual tunnel was build far faster.
So was the Channel tunnel. It takes quite a bit of time after physically digging the tunnel until you can actually open it to the public.
> And if its so amazingly expensive as you claim, why was the only commercial competitor 2x as expensive?
Perhaps because other tunnels left space for potentially saving someone from the tunnel in case of an emergency?
Hopefully this never comes to pass, but it seems very hard to believe there is any chance to escape in case of a tunnel fire.
> The amount of hate that get thrown because a company wants to improve a technology is just incredible.
It's the other way around. They're just a tunnel boring company, but are constantly being hailed as some futuristic transportation solution. They're particularly a company that seems to bet on reducing costs (all the way down to European levels as far as I understand, American tunnel boring prices are apparently hugely inflated) beyond anything else, such as comfort, speed and most importantly safety.
> So was the Channel tunnel. It takes quite a bit of time after physically digging the tunnel until you can actually open it to the public.
Then you are not comparing tunnel boring machines anymore. And even so, its a totally different type of project on a totally different type of scale with totally different classes of machines.
> Perhaps because other tunnels left space for potentially saving someone from the tunnel in case of an emergency?
A tunnel of that length simply doesn't need a emergency escape. The route is small enough that it is far below the required length for emergency escape.Emergency escapes are not magic.
Do you also want emergency escapes in a 20m tunnel? How about 100m? How many emergency escapes do you as a tunnel safety specialist recommend. And why is the official regulation about that so wrong? Can you show me the research paper that you are basing those conclusion on?
> Hopefully this never comes to pass, but it seems very hard to believe there is any chance to escape in case of a tunnel fire.
Nonsense. Each pod has its own power, propulsion and air filtration system. Its not like a subway that if it stands still everything stands still. If for some unknown reasons there is a pod with a fire. Then all the other pods on either side of the fire will just drive away from the fire.
Even if you are stuck in a pod, its unlikely the fire would jump from one to the next car and the pod air filtration system would mean you could be fine for hours even if for some reason you couldn't simply drive away.
> It's the other way around. They're just a tunnel boring company, but are constantly being hailed as some futuristic transportation solution.
They literally are doing an end-to-end integrated system. They want to build their own boring machines and offer full transportation solutions. Its LITERALLY both. No matter if you like it or not.
> They're particularly a company that seems to bet on reducing costs (all the way down to European levels as far as I understand, American tunnel boring prices are apparently hugely inflated)
If European companies have such magical power in tunnel boring, why don't they bid on contracts in the US?
> beyond anything else, such as comfort, speed and most importantly safety.
So an EV motor on a pod can not possible be fast more comfortable then a rail based system? That is just nonsense assertion. Its never the engine that limit the speed on any such systems.
And you have provide literally no evidence other then your assertions about safety. Yes, in longer tunnels emergency exists will have to exists of course and they will follow those regulation when the build longer tunnels.
And the pod based systems has many advantages in terms of safety.
While EV can take fire, a battery fire really only happens at high speed collisions and even then mostly the fire is pretty slow to develop. Lots of high speed BEV crashes allow the occupant to leave the car before the fire actually starts to really go.
And such crashes are incredibly unlikely as tunnels are 1-direction only. Fire in BEV are far more likely from side impacts. If one pod breaks hard and another pod crashes into it, they will both have large crumble zones.
And even if you think further, next generation batteries and BEV architectures will be considerable safer. Switching to much safer LFP base pods is a certainty. And even then there is significant safety improvements in the form of next generation separators in the pipeline.
> The route is small enough that it is far below the required length for emergency escape.
https://eur-lex.europa.eu/legal-content/EN/TXT/PDF/?uri=CELE..., Annex I, 2.3.6:
In any event, in new tunnels, emergency exits shall be provided where the traffic volume is higher than 2,000 vehicles per lane.
1.3.1:
Where ‘traffic volume’ is mentioned in this Annex, it refers to the annual average daily traffic through a tunnel per lane. For the purpose of determining the traffic volume, each motor vehicle shall be counted as one unit.
https://www.teslarati.com/elon-musk-boring-co-lvcc-loop-capa...:
the LVCC Loop did meet its capacity goal of 4,400 conference attendees per hour during a demonstration event in May
2.3.8:
Where emergency exits are provided, the distance between two emergency exits shall not exceed 500 metres.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Boring_Company#Convention_...:
Boring of the first tunnel, 4,475 feet (1,364 m) long
⇒ if that tunnel had been built in the EU, I think it would have needed emergency exits.
(Searched for US regulations, too, without success. I expect them to be less stringent)
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.
Wait, is the Boring Company still pursuing commercial transport via hyperloop?
Yes and no.
Yes: https://www.boringcompany.com/hyperloop
No because it's a different system than what Musk originally proposed. Virgin Hyperloop was building Musk's original idea.
What Boring Company calls a hyperloop now is a long-distance tunnel, possibly under partial vacuum, with electric cars driving really fast (600+ miles per hour).
No, they do low occupancy cars in a tunnel... Combining all of the worst things...
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.
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
I'd prefer Amtrak over aircraft for lots and lots of my travel, if not for this. Hell, I'd probably travel more total, too. Even if the price were the same as flying for a given destination.
The huge trip-duration and arrival-time uncertainty due to the shared rail, and having to defer to cargo trains, is what sinks it, for me. They can vary by large double digit percentages of the nominal time, at which point they're usually much slower than just driving.
I love how relaxing and comfortable they are and not having the security circus and dealing with crowded, distant-from-the-city airports, but not at nearly-air-travel prices and a 25-75% time premium over driving.
Yeah it was amazing living in France where rail is often faster, and sometimes much faster than driving. And often quicker than air travel when going from city centre to city centre.
Sure, now try shipping freight in France...
They had that, for a while https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/SNCF_TGV_La_Poste
There is also this https://www.railfreight.com/railfreight/2021/01/05/new-claim... Supposedly, don't know if it's in regular operation, or has been a publicity stunt.
The companies that own the railways are in the business of making money, not in the business of screwing Amtrak.
I'm sure they would be more than happy to prioritize Amtrak trains over their cargo customers if they are suitably compensated for the trouble.
If Amtrak isn't willing or able to compensate them for it... Then clearly it's not that important.
Also, the whole scheduling of cargo trains has big dollar penalties for delays in loading, unloading, and not arriving on time. Its amazing how detailed folks get about trains showing up. Cargo rail has a lot of moving parts that need to coordinate to keep the goods flowing.
I'm not glossing over anything. If passenger travel was more profitable or even less profitable but easier, than all of the private companies would be in the passenger business.
Here we see a company that will end up building its own infrastructure deciding cargo is a better business opportunity than passenger. I think there was a certain amount of inevitability given the economics.
There is presumably a reason they are cargo companies and not passager transport companies. Unless Amtrak has a government enforced monopoly?
Amtrak was created to relieve the freight companies' of the legal requirement to offer passenger service.
> Railroad corporations operated under charters received from the states, [...] These charters usually vested the railroad with a public mission and some pub- lic responsibility. Railroads were chartered to carry passengers and freight, for which they were incidentally permitted to charge fares.
> AMTRAK has not, during its brief existence, attempted to operate its own trains with its own personnel, but has instead chosen to rely upon contracts with the railroads. The result has been the immediate freeing of railroads from the passenger deficit. AMTRAK has also created a type of cost-plus subsidy, with no incentive to the operating railroad to improve services or control costs. The results are generally what one would expect.
https://scholarship.kentlaw.iit.edu/cgi/viewcontent.cgi?arti...
I've heard it said Amtrak was designed to fail so that freight would have no competition. It seems to me this is the case, since anytime Amtrak tries to expand (or even re-establish service as in Mobile-New Orleans), the freight companies immediately go to court to prevent being forced to share their infrastructure.
Because all the US passenger rail companies went out of business. Amtrak was essentially created out of the wreckage to maintain some passenger rail service. (It's a very complicated history.)
Amtrak makes almost all of its money on the Northeast Corridor which it then basically throws away in the rest of the country.
Arguably Amtrak was intended to dismantle the remains of passenger rail, and its persistence 50 years later was not foreseen.
I don't know. Passenger service collapsed in the decade leading up to the formation of Amtrak. Other than bailing out and heavily subsidizing a bunch of failing railroads, I'm not sure what the fix was--although the Federal government could have made a much bigger investment at the time than it did. (Basically, spend what it would take to create popular Shinkansen routes.)
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.
Yeah, but there is also a reason that privately owned companies have no interest in passenger rail travel.
Because the US government shovels hundreds of billions of dollars of subsidies every year into competitors of passenger rail?
You've missed the Brightline news, huh?
Radio too, Marconi suggested to the Italian Post they use radio for mail.
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.
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-freig...
There's a British startup founded by a hyperloop engineer trying to do this.
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.
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.
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".
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.
Hyperloop’s lack of scalability makes it even less suitable for transporting cargo than passenger travel.
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.
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.
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.
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/hyperl...
2. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hyperloop#Hyperloop_companies
3. https://arstechnica.com/tech-policy/2016/07/former-hyperloop...
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.
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
By that distinction, I'm not sure why VHL is called "Hyperloop" either - it is using maglev AFAIK.
have you seen the size of that Vegas tunnel?
Now google Tesla's battery fire and imagine it happens inside that tunnel.
Those tunnels are death traps.
TBC works on Loop systems, not Hyperloops.
Basically returning to Pneumatic tubes but probably way less elegant and over-engineered
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.
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.
The letter “r” is also being laid off
> 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.
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.
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.
You don't really need to remove air resistance to beat Amtrak though.
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.
I think investing in trains today makes little sense. We are on the verge of electric aviation.
Electric planes will not only be much cheaper to they will also be much more quiet and thus can potentially be operate in more places closer to where people need.
A major investment into a that technology seem a far better bet then trains at this point.
I think investing in [existing tried and true technology that powers the whole world outside a bubble] makes little sense. We should invest in [technology that doesn't exist but could possibly be applied in roughly the same space for many times the cost].
It's impossible for electric planes to be cheaper than electric rail - everything about a plane is harder to achieve, the size will be smaller (since it also needs to lift off the ground, not just drive), safety is a much bigger concern (leading to much more time for boarding procedures). The only advantage air travel has is that it doesn't require real-estate.
Instead, electric planes still need decades of engineering work, and what we know for sure is that they will be less efficient than kerosene planes, as there is no type of battery even plausible today that could achieve anywhere near the energy density of gasoline (in Wh/kg, not Wh/l as is sometimes shown).
Your logic would imply that it's impossible for conventional planes to be cheaper than conventional rail, which is definitely not always the case in the US.
What are we talking about here? Passenger fare? That's almost entirely abstracted away from actual cost of installation because it's in large part driven by demand not supply.
Infrastructure cost? New railway projects are notoriously expensive, but so are new airports.
Per unit cost? Train locomotives and carriages are far cheaper than planes.
Operating cost? Trains are far cheaper over time than planes. Their maintenance is far less intensive, they can run on just about anything, and they last for many decades without issue
Many small and medium under utilized airports already exist.
Many regions where it would not make sense economically to connect high speed trains can be connected with electric plains. For many regions you simply don't need more then a small number flights.
Trains make sense when you need transport very large numbers of people.
Airplanes can be dynamically allocated where needed much easier.
And the simply fact is, despite massively subsidized rail infrastructure, even current planes are the cheaper option. Electric trains will require far less maintenance and will use electricity.
Legally speaking building a train line across developed region is an absolute nightmare. It takes a very long time, often isn't successful at all and the project takes so long that financing interest is a killer.
Comparatively a really quite electric plane is easy, far easier then current planes.
The far faster speed of planes is preferable to most people. Sure there are super fast trains, but those are really only viable on a incredibly small set of routes.
This article about Virgin Hyperloop and they did basically use Maglev.
The Musk blue paper by Musk does not.
https://www.tesla.com/sites/default/files/blog_images/hyperl...
> A viable technical solution is magnetic levitation; however the cost associated with material and construction is prohibitive. An alternative to these conventional options is an air bearing suspension. Air bearings offer stability and extremely low drag at a feasible cost by exploiting the ambient atmosphere in the tube.
20 miles of maglev track from the shanghai airport to the city cost 1.2 billion dollars for China to build, god knows how much it would cost Americans (NYC spent about a billion per mile on the last expansion to the subway, and that's hundred year old tech)
Japan is building a maglev between Tokyo and Osaka. The Nagoya stretch will be done this decade.
The Shanghai maglev is kind of a pink elephant, it doesn’t even go to downtown Shanghai. I took it once for the novelty l, but a cab is much better time wise and about the same price.
I was really looking forward to taking it since I read about maglev in Popular Mechanics as a kid, but my flight was 6am and the train didn't start running til 6:30! cab ride it is...
Not exciting enough to him if it already exists elsewhere.
The crazy thing is the idea of small pod electric trains is still possible. Look at americas 99% idle railroad tracks.
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
I wonder if they decided that the risk model of rocketing human beings through an evacuated tube was just too high?
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.
Colonizing the moon makes sense because you can easily build hyperloop on it?
If you have a helium 3 reactor, yes.
> 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.
> The leak would start an implosion
Depends on the materials, but most materials have very different characteristics and won't implode. Leaks are seen in modern vacuum systems all the time, and implosions are rare. I've personally caused a leak in a vacuum system when I disconnected the vacuum hose from the pump - air rushed into the hose and no implosion!
> in particular thermal expansion of steel. The only way to deal with thermal expansion is by using expansion joins
After some thought (I've been thinking about them for a while), there are two solutions: first go far underground where the temperature is stable year round. Put the tube inside something that you do careful HVAC in to ensure there is no temperature changes. Both make the whole system even more insanely expensive than what it already is. I have zero confidence in expansion joints unless we replace them yearly which means the whole is even more insanely expensive.
Throw enough money at it and I think engineers can solve the engineering problems. However nothing changes the fact that it is insanely expensive no matter how you look at it.
The real problem isn't engineering though, the real problem is political: you can't get enough money to build the thing, and if you even try you will discover that nobody will let you build it in their backyard.
> The leak would start an implosion
This is a science fiction trope with no basis in reality. The pressure differential is one atmosphere to zero atmospheres which is functionally equivalent to one atmosphere to two atmospheres or what you get from diving 10 meters into the ocean.
The Apollo LEM had a shell that was pretty equivalent to aluminum foil in places. One atmosphere to zero atmospheres is the sort of thing you can plug up with duct tape.
Here is your reality: https://youtu.be/Zz95_VvTxZM
You're not entirely wrong however. There is effectively one atmosphere differential at sea level, but framing the difference that way is at worst intellectual dishonest, or at best a rather naive understanding. In actual reality there is a very long tube, and all the surface area is under pressure. In metric is 10,000 kg per square meter, multiplied by all the square meters down the length of tube. Of course this simplified understanding ignores the weight of the transport capsule inside, which causes a momentary higher differential. And, the hyperloop won't work at sea level, as others have pointed out, it would have to be underground to avoid thermal expansion issues... meaning higher pressure.
Is there another justification for the continued existence of the Boring company then?
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.
They are also interested in drilling tunnels on the moon and Mars for habitation.
Anyone else hear The Jetsons theme song in their head when they read Hyperloop?
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.
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.
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.
You don't need business models when you have a reality distortion field and 450M investment
Where has it been shown to be incredibly inefficient and prohibitively expensive? I’d love to read about it.
this idea will one day return, it’s never gone for good. just delayed
It's a bootstrap for Mars construction. Hence the undersized tunnels. Mass transit is just a cover story.
TFA has nothing to do with the boring company or underground tunnels
Underground habitats
pivot to..
crypto get rich quick schemes: hyperdupe? faster chicken egg laying tech: hyperkoop silly putty: hypergoop squatty potties: hyperpoop?
Perhaps sending Burritos would be more profitable:
https://idlewords.com/2007/04/the_alameda_weehawken_burrito_...
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/.
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.
Richard Branson doesn't have a car company ...
This makes literally 0 sense.
I still don't understand why there is any interest in this concept, either for freight or passenger transport, over a regular train.
Because the current passenger rail “system” in the US is horrendous.
I don't think you're necessarily wrong, but how does putting a train in a vacuum tube solve the problems we currently have with passenger rail?
The limit on speed is air resistance.
That would be true if US passenger rail was actually capable of high speeds to start with.
As it stands right now US passenger rail is total joke compared to the rest of the developed world. Slower, less reliable, more expensive. Air resistance in the US is the same as everywhere else, so that isn’t the limit factor.
True, but hyperloop isn't needed to solve any of that.
That is just one of the limits. At the speeds hyperloop was proposed to go, you need really wide curves to limit g-forces on the passengers. Not just when going left or right, but also up and down. It would be an absolute nightmare to get all the right-of-way done, and even then you would need immense amounts of earthworks to start curving uphill miles before the hill actually starts.
Let's walk before we run. Getting Shinkasen-style trains in the USA should be step 1.
I agree. Lets stop trying to innovate trains. The laws of physics make it clear there isn't much left to do for speed. Any innovation left would be around construction (and even there the world is doing well, most innovation really needs mass production)
The limitations are financial (both building the tracks and acquiring at some new right of ways) and geographical (a lot of distances in the US are quite big and most people won't take a train if it's a lot slower than flying).
So.. maglev?
None of the reasons that the current passenger rail system in the US is horrendous are technical. It's entirely feasible to build proper passenger rail networks with current, look at Japan and western Europe for some examples. The problems are all sociological in nature.
Not really helpful. It can go slightly faster, but wind resistance is a problem you can't get around.
You can plasma sheaf the train head. The stability of wheels/rails and other mechanical stuff at say 700km/hour is probably a bigger issue than air resistance.
Nobody has tested maglev at 700km/h. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Railway_speed_record The conventional train speed record is only 30km/h slower than maglev. The issue with the conventional train wasn't wheels it was the overhead wire contact (though at that speed maglev is more efficient)
>The conventional train speed record is only 30km/h slower than maglev
there is a reason that train is so short https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Railway_speed_record#/media/Fi... - in the wheeled train the vibrational modes induced at those speeds and the resulting forces will tear the train apart.
>the overhead wire contact
well, batteries on the train would solve that. That one thing in HyperLoop Musk got right.
> well, batteries on the train would solve that. That one thing in HyperLoop Musk got right.
Batteries will never have the energy density to solve that. Just basic physics. Even diesel fuel isn't really good enough
Because airplanes are slow. In a vacuum (or in space!) you can go a lot faster without using a lot of energy. NYC to London in 2 hours including stops (Note that this assumes you cross from Alaska to Russia if you can cross the Atlantic instead it would be faster).
The expense is what kills it. The other problems are solvable with money, but there is no way getting around all the material needed to build it.
Vastly higher speeds is the reason it would be valuable if it can be made economically feasible.
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).
The original Hyperloop system is designed to not require a vacuum as strong as other vacuum systems of the past.
https://www.tesla.com/sites/default/files/blog_images/hyperl...
> Another extreme is the approach, advocated by Rand and ET3, of drawing a hard or near hard vacuum in the tube and then using an electromagnetic suspension. The problem with this approach is that it is incredibly hard to maintain a near vacuum in a room, let alone 700 miles (round trip) of large tube with dozens of station gateways and thousands of pods entering and exiting every day.
> All it takes is one leaky seal or a small crack somewhere in the hundreds of miles of tube and the whole system stops working. However, a low pressure (vs. almost no pressure) system set to a level where standard commercial pumps could easily overcome an air leak and the transport pods could handle variable air density would be inherently robust. Unfortunately, this means that there is a non-trivial amount of air in the tube and leads us straight into another problem.
Well, the best way to get very high speed rail is to abandon the pumps and tubes entirely and do it in open Air, e.g. Maglev. You won't see any significant energy efficiency gains until you get to pretty low pressures, and even then that will be entirely compensated by the effort of pumping out air if you can't maintain an excellent seal.
Basically, the only energy efficiency can come from the seals, since those essentially allow you to store the energy spent to move the air out of the way of the train ahead of time. Otherwise, whether you move the air by pushing the train through it, or move the air by pumping it out in front of the train, the total energy expenditure will be similar.
And again, the problem of maintaining even a somewhat low pressure in a hundreds of kilometers long above ground tube with no airlocks is well outside our current engineering capacity.
I have not done the math on the energy required to create the original low pressure and maintaining it compare to how much you save.
You speak pretty confidently about that, can you actually show any of that?
It also depends on how high the utilization of the tunnel is.
Who says there are no airlocks?
The proposal has been simulated by both SpaceX and Tesla, I don't think they made some basic mistakes about it being impossible to sustain a low pressure tube.
I suppose relatively bad vacuum is possible with enough energy expenditure that is pumps. What in my mind always made it stupid is throughput. First overall and then getting stuff in and out. Oh and safety... Minor thing being stuck in vacuum capsule middle of some hundred of kilometres long tube. I sure hope there is plenty of spare air...
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.
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.
The outside is a vacuum, the inside is at pressure. While the forces are reversed, the problem is otherwise the same.
The ISS is not a tube hundreds of kilometers long, so I have no idea how this compares. Also, the ISS doesn't require pipes, and can easily have many segments which are airlocked from each other, which a high-speed train would not do well with.
I don’t think businesses care about speed but rather stability and throughput. If the vaccuum is broken how long does it take to get it fixed, the tube emptied of ”pods”, and so on.
Passengers care about speed.
> pivot from passenger transport to freight
This isn't about passenger transport anymore
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.
Does freight need to go that quickly? Quicker than a normal high speed train? Is there enough value in the freight going faster to fund the infrastructure?
Some freight yes, some freight yes, probably not. Fruit and mail needs to go very fast and is often shipped by airplane. There are a few cases where regular shipping doesn't deliver on time and so an emergency order is air freighted in - at great expense.
I doubt that they can get their costs lower than airplanes. They need to buy land all the way from point A to point B, vs only at airports. Airplanes also run at a partial vacuum (30000 feet) by nature. As such it is hard to see anyone using them instead of something else. Where speed counts airplanes are faster, where speed doesn't count ships and slow trains in air are a cheaper.
How long does it make sense to investigate that question?
Practically speaking, as long as they can convince people with control of capital (including the US gov't) that it's worth investigating.
The proper answer to your question requires information you're not going to get by asking HN, it's like asking how much time we should spend investigating fusion power. It completely depends on what leads people have, how promising the those leads look, how many "hard steps" are ahead of us, the benefit if we made it past them, etc.
Why do articles about fusion power keep hitting HN over regular nuclear power?
Fusion has no waste products except ordinary elements, low on the periodic table. It's an entirely different beast. You could theoretically have a little Tony Stark reactor powering your home, safely.
No, that is entriely false. The main product of all currently plausible fusion reactors are neutrons. Those are extremely destructive to living tissue, requiring heavy shielding. Even worse, any material which absorbs neutrons becomes radioactive itself, so the shield inevitably becomes radioactive.
The advantage of fusion is that this radioactivity is short lived compared to uranium - decades instead of centuries or millennia. However, this also means that you have to stay much farther away from it, as it's much more radioactive than a piece of uranium which you can typically hold in your hand without any ill effects (just don't hold it under your pillow for a few years).
And hyperloop has the potential to replace millions of gas-burning cars, buses, trains and planes...
How? The initial plan was discussing something on the order of 850 passengers per hour between SF and LA. Fundamentally, such an expensive piece of infrastructure with critical safety concerns can't be a mass transit system.
It still has to be powered..so the gas-burning thing is a bit disingenuous.
Innovation is dead and its rotting corpse is used to scam foolish investors.
Elon Musk
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/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.
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.
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