Didn’t he do this one two years ago? Not sure if it’s the same exact company but they were recently focusing on using it to transport cargo, not people, so I think the points in this video definitely apply:
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These days, when I talk about Europe I’m really thinking of the Continent and not Brexit Island. But yes, seemingly firm commitments can be scuppered mid-project by bad actors if the malice is sufficient (as it always is with the Tories). It’s not like Mancunians and Brummies who take trains count for anything in the eyes of Sunak and his crowd.
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He recently did a “where are they now?” update too.
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wow. what an asshole.
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So when will they be launching Hyperloop Two?
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There was talk about one in Ohio… Cincinnati/Columbus/Cleveland. Would definitely make Ohio a more attractive state to live in. Pretty sure it was scrapped which is a shame. I mean it’s Ohio but the coasts are expensive/overflowing and Ohio is affordable and has room for folks. Not sure what it’s long term prospects are with climate change. I recall the temperature swings 100+ to well be zero… but it should be safe from rising oceans.
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Engineering-wise it’s a solved problem. Many systems are designed to withstand atmospheric pressure against a vacuum, which is a very different structural problem than simply containing high pressures.
The crushed tank pictured above was made with thin walls designed to contain an internal pressure (placing the walls in tension.) It was not designed to withstand an external pressure (placing the walls in compression.)
It only requires rigid tubing that can withstand one atmosphere, plus whatever margins of safety are needed to protect against damage.
Also, note that the entire tube won’t collapse due to the failure of vacuum in a segment. The photo that accompanies the article shows one of the safety measures, a gate valve. That white square waffle on the pipe opposite the shed houses a sliding panel that can be pulled closed whenever that section of the pipe is not in use. The gate valves can be opened whenever the train is passing and closed the rest of the time. This can be done with ordinary existing train interlock signalling that protects main lines against things like inadvertent switches. All they have to do is to make sure the tube is clear ahead within the train’s stopping distance (which will be quite considerable at those speeds).
The hyperloop would be a useful mode of transportation, if it wasn’t being built as a political tool by an absolute fool.
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The few test sections that have actually been built refute the theory that such a structure would be sturdy or safe from collapse. It’s much, much easier to build a vehicle that can contain one atmosphere of pressure than to build hundreds of miles of tubes that can hold a vacuum against one atmosphere of pressure.
No, not really. There are dozens of reasons such a system would be impractical at any scale and for any purpose. As Adam Something points out in one of the linked videos above it would be virtually impossible just to acquire the land needed to connect any two major population centers in the straight (or nearly straight) line a hyperloop-style transportation system would require.
It’s not merely a bad idea because Elon was promoting it. There’s a reason no one has made one of these things work even though the idea has been kicking around since the 19th Century.
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there’s always the possibility that musk never realized his idea was idiotic. take a look at his other decisions: he’s just not very smart
what probably happened was, he proposed a stupid idea, and people who wanted a boondoggle - or heck, even a distraction - from public transportation were happy to run with it
the idea got traction because of them, not him is what i think
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I always called it hype-loop.
Tho if he is serious (not) about Mars, he’ll need electric or nuclear power, electric vehicles and tunnels to live in (red rabbits gonna cook on the surface, or sublimate real quick due to the lack of atmospheric pressure). And he’ll need mind control chips to keep the meat on the hoof from revolting. Seems like he’s actually thought this Mars thing through! You know he and PTheil have a special bottle of chianti reserved for this eventuality…
Recently took a high speed train in Italy: super cool. Cheap. Fast.
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Musk himself criticised the California high speed rail project and explicitly proposed Hyperloop as a superior alternative for the San Francisco-Los Angeles corridor.
From Paris Marx’s blog that I linked to earlier:
Elon Musk, as an automaker and (let’s be honest) somewhat of a conservative himself, eagerly adopted the arguments against the bullet train with his own spin. He began incessantly repeating a line he doled out at the D11 conference with Walt Mossberg and Kara Swisher in 2013, calling it, “the slowest bullet train in the world and the most expensive bullet train per mile in the world” — and that meant it not only had to be opposed, but that the geniuses in Silicon Valley could surely do better than people who actually had a clue about trains and transportation.
When he unveiled the Hyperloop concept, Musk claimed that building it on the Los Angeles to San Francisco route would not only result in a far faster trip, but would also cost only a fraction of the price — as little as $6 billion. That figure was immediately debunked by people who actually understood what went into building that kind of infrastructure, with the real cost estimated around at least $100 billion, even though it would have far less capacity than a high-speed train. But there’s another feature that’s often forgotten: the Hyperloop was also for cars. “You just drive on, and the pod departs,” Musk told Bloomberg Businessweek in his first interview about the idea. That fantasy would show up again in the Boring Company a few years later.
The paper that introduced Hyperloop described a line from Los Angeles (ish) to San Francisco (ish).
In principle, Hyperloop is supposed to get people from Los Angeles to San Francisco in half an hour, running in a tube with near-vacuum at speeds topping at 1,220 km/h. In practice, both the costs and the running times are full of magic asterisks. 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. There is a crossing of the San Francisco Bay, but there’s no mention of the high cost of bridging over or tunneling under the Bay – we’re supposed to take it on faith the unit cost is the same as along the I-5 corridor in the Central Valley.
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This was possibly the most batshit insane claim of all. How on earth was “high speed rail in never-before-built vacuum tunnel” supposed to be cheaper than “high speed rail on conventional track”?
The mind boggles that anyone was ever taken in by this nonsense.
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It helped that the CAHSR project was already going to take a long time to build, with a projected completion date of 2028 (IIRC) for the full Los Angeles-San Francisco route when Musk announced Hyperloop in 2013. This was not anything intrinsic to high speed rail but because California could not afford to build the whole line in one go. Musk claimed that he could develop and build a Hyperloop between Los Angeles and San Francisco faster than that, so he had the advantage of time as well as cost.
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sorry, my point was unclear.
here’s two formulations:
he’s a master schemer, super smart, and amazing at pulling strings behind the scenes. he set out to propose something that just enough people would believe, but that wouldn’t succeed, and all to keep america’s dependency on cars because tesla
or,
he believes he’s smart. he believes he can come up with a superior form of transportation. he gets high as hell, and proposes an unworkable recycled idea* as his own. other people with vested interests jump on the idea, tell him he’s a genius**, and promote that idea because they know it will divert public money into private hands. they don’t give two @#$ about tesla.
( * hell, this may have even been his attempt to put his own stamp on transportation since tesla was something he bought, not something he invented. )
( ** a hyper feedback loop? )
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Why not both? Musk himself is also a vested interest committed to cars and opposed to public transport. As Paris Marx mentioned, the original idea for the Boring Company was a subway for cars, with “skates” carrying cars though miraculously cheap tunnels.
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i mean, i absolutely believe someone pointed it out to him eventually. but they probably didn’t tell him his idea was unworkable. you’ve got to “manage up” with people like him
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Richard Branson couldn’t run a conventional railway ; how delightful that his self-delusion led him to think he’d be better at this boondoggle.
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… it always seems odd to focus on The City in regional transit planning when most of the population lives in the East Bay
but with trains from L.A. I guess it wouldn’t really matter which BART stop they got dropped off at
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The UK isn’t really large enough to need super high speed trains. We already have trains which go at 125mph. But even a medium high speed train is useless without a good network of main lines and a supporting network of local lines.
HS2 as finally conceived will take you from the centre of London to the centre of Birmingham about 8 minutes quicker than now, at a cost of £70Bn+. All that money is no longer available for the rest of the national network.
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can you elaborate how do you figured that? sorry my attitude but after a decade of multiple and extremly detailed debunking of this stupid and quite insane concept I would not have expected such statement ever again anywhere outside the usual hardcore musk fanboi bubbles.
it wasnt built at all. and elno is not a fool. he is rich, insane and dangerous. also a fucking idiot, but not a fool.
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