Elon Musk’s dream of building the ultimate transportation seems to be slowly fading away. Almost a decade after his announcement there are still too many loose ends.
Back in 2013, Elon Musk provided the first brushstrokes of what was to be a transportation system that could send passengers and cargo in compartments through a low-pressure tube at an access speed of about 1,000 km/h.
There was talk that it would be able to replace the 6-hour drive from Los Angeles to San Francisco in just over 30 minutes.
However, there he stayed and continued to develop other ideas. Instead, Musk shared basic engineering plans and encouraged others to develop the concept. Although several companies and researchers have been working steadily on the Hyperloop for almost a decade, there is not yet a working example of the system anywhere in the world.
In 2016, the Boring Company, Musk’s company behind the project, completed construction of a test track at SpaceX headquarters, but Bloomberg reported on November 3, 2022 that it was torn down to make room for a SpaceX employee parking lot.
Hyperloop: a constant want and cannot
Musk first spoke publicly about this technology a decade ago. The following year, he launched a sweeping plan to build a Hyperloop along a route between Los Angeles and San Francisco, using a combination of magnetic levitation—a series of magnets in the tunnel repel magnets attached to the train—and a tube to allow that passengers reach speeds greater than 1,000 km/h.
As almost expected, critics quickly pounced on the problems and difficulties of the project. Some argued that the system would be more expensive and require more power than Elon Musk had calculated, making the Hyperloop impractical.
Even if this proved to be safe and reliable, another possibility came into play: that passengers didn’t exactly like the feeling this transport was meant to create.
It is because of all this little by little the idea of the Hyperloop was losing force as many have been noticing that Musk’s own Boring Company has redirected its efforts towards tunneling small routes under cities instead of building tubes to connect them.
The only ‘recent novelty’—April 2022—in this regard focused on the change in strategy from carrying passengers to end the supply crisis at high speed. The Boring Company started with the idea of finding fast and efficient ways to excavate networks of tunnels for vehicles and high-speed trains that would eliminate traffic congestion.
“In the next few years, Boring Co will try to build a working Hyperloop. From the point of view of known physics, this is the fastest possible way to get from one urban center to another for distances less than ~2000 miles. The ship stellar is faster for longer journeys”according to Musk’s own words.
“Underground tunnels are immune to surface weather (the subway is a good example), so Hyperloop wouldn’t care if a hurricane raged on the surface. It wouldn’t even be noticeable,” explains in another tweet.
Apart from all this —which has little to do with the original idea of the Hyperloop—, the ambitions of this functional transport can still fail due to the immense design challenges that remain.
There are several technical and logistical challenges that must be overcome before the Hyperloop can be deployed on a large scale. Some of these include building safe and airtight vacuum tubes, developing reliable maglev and propulsion systems, and solving safety and regulatory issues.
In addition, the implementation of the Hyperloop requires a considerable financial investment. Building a large-scale Hyperloop network would be expensive and would require the collaboration of governments and private companies to carry it out.
Of course, all madness, although they do not give up: “The question of Hyperloop is not if, but when”argues, “And HyperloopTT is proud to play a leading role in developing a transportation system that has the potential to be cleaner, safer, and faster than current transportation systems.”
The time and resources required to overcome technical and logistical challenges may be holding back the progress of the project and its full-scale implementation. As a result, the long-term viability of the Hyperloop has yet to be fully demonstrated.