That was my first thought - that he’d doodled this on the back of a napkin while stoned* and never gave it even a minute’s serious thought (and was stoned the entire time he talked it up to people, who were too polite to point out how idiotic it was). And maybe that’s true - and he thought it was so genius it would undermine high speed rail, and someone would take it upon themselves to actually fund and build his super-expensive fantasy car mover.
*I mean, I know the guy’s not smart, but you’d have to be really, really stupid to not see the obvious problems with his plan or to come up with any of the assertions he made about it (e.g. the low price). And I dunno, maybe Elno is effectively that stupid, his head so far up his own posterior that he convinces himself of the genius of some random idle thought, and never actually fleshes it out or thinks about it, and the drugs don’t help any.
Don’t forget, at one level, Elon is still a 13 year old boy with a stack of 1980s Omni magazines and the vague realisation that it’s the future now so surely all the technology is ready to go and the only reason we haven’t got flying cars is because nobody’s brave enough to just do it, there can’t be any technical or societal problems stopping it, right?
Of course, he’s also a 13 year old boy with a stack of 1980s Penthouse magazines on the other side.
Some concepts are beautiful, beautiful traps. The idea as such isn’t wrong. The technology as such is available. It is clever, very clever. The ‘oh I wish I would have thought of this’ kind of clever. It promises to solve real, nagging problems. It’s appealling to the point of being sexy, and not only to engineers either. It just looks good. The media like it. Politicians like it. Potential investors like it. Kids will want toys based on it. There are stories in it.
But… It won’t scale. It’s practical in one way, but at the same time impractical in at least two other ways. It brilliantly solves problems that don’t really exist. Other technologies can do almost as much, at much, much lower cost. The time window where it actually can be useful is closing fast. And so on.
There will be a niche or several where it is the best answer to a very specific problem, but there will never be a general use case on a scale grand enough to make it truly viable and sustainable.
Ekranoplans. Hovercrafts. Zeppelins. Flying cars. Gigantic rockets. Nuclear powered trains. Flying boats. Jet packs. Amphibious cars. Even helicopters are borderline cases here. And that’s just examples from the field of transportation.
I love all that, but what I need is something that improves my daily commute.
Hyperloop was especially attractive to American exceptionalists because it offered a chance to leapfrog the rest of the world in high speed rail without first going through the tedious business of catching up, which would require admitting that the USA is not the best at everything and then actually learning from foreign countries.
Americans hate being behind. The form of right-wing populism that succeeded in the United States made that explicit: Make America Great Again. Culturally, this exists outside populism as well, for example in Gordon Gekko’s greed is good speech, which begins, “America has become a second-rate power.” In the late 2000s, Americans interested in transportation had to embarrassingly admit that public transit was better in Europe and East Asia, especially in its sexiest form, the high-speed trains. Musk came in and offered something Americans craved: an American way to do better, without having to learn anything about what the Europeans and Asians do. Musk himself is from South Africa, but Americans have always been more tolerant of long-settled immigrants than of foreigners.
In the era of Trump, this kind of nationalism is often characterized as the domain of the uneducated: Trump did the best among non-college-educated whites, and cut into Democratic margins with low-income whites (regardless of education). But software engineers making $120,000 a year in San Francisco or Boston are no less nationalistic – their nationalism just takes a less vulgar form. Among the tech workers themselves, technical discussions are possible; some close-mindedly respond to every criticism with “they also laughed at SpaceX,” others try to engage (e.g. Hyperloop One). But in the tech press, the response is uniformly sycophantic: Musk is a genius, offering salvation to the monolingual American, steeped in the cultural idea of the outside inventor who doesn’t need to know anything about existing technology and can substitute personal intelligence and bravery.
Well, that’s a whole big old topic of its own. But the main point of HS2 was never the “high speed” part anyway. (In retrospect, that branding was clearly a catastrophic mistake).
The point of a segregated, long-distance passenger route was always to release capacity to the rest of the network. Trains can’t overtake, so local services can’t use – or even pass over – track where a long-distance service is scheduled within a certain period of time.
So, yeah, the existing routes from London to Edinburgh (and certainly to Birmingham) are OK, but that’s not the point. Those routes badly need to run more trains, and they can’t, because it would obliterate local services in the North; and those local and regional services really need improvement, but it can’t happen because long-distance services are using the tracks. You could upgrade existing local infrastructure, but that would cost more than HS2, and be even more politically fragile, and make services even worse while it was happening.
HS2 wasn’t an alternative to fixing trains in the North; it was the solution, and almost certainly the last we’ll ever see.
I can understand it with Branson. The Virgin businesses are all glamorous and flashy moonshots. Branson funds and staffs up a separate company for each. If it makes money and works he keeps going. Otherwise (as is more often the case) he shuts it down , usually relatively quickly.
It’s the movie studio model, where one big hit picture sustains everything else they try. It’s not my cup of tea, but it seems like it’s gotten Branson (who has a sense of humor about the flops) enough money and attention to satisfy himself. Musk, in contrast, is a thin-skinned megalomaniac who believes everything he touches should work because he believes his own hype and has yes-men and media courtiers fanbois enabling him.
True. Unlike TFG, his saving grace is that he’s gleefully honest about his not actually doing anything in those cases except slapping his brand on them. No pretense about building or running the business. I’m not sure if hyperloop was one of those.
Hmmmm I’m more anti-Branson because he’s become latched on the public teat for some of his projects - not just his crappy trains, but Virgin Health got its claws into the NHS to the tune of £2 billion; and then there’s god knows how much public money has been spent by New Mexico on his spaceport.
Branson is so proud of being British he lives in a tax haven.
Not sure if size is a good comparison. England, Scotland and Wales together are about the same size as Honshu - and the Shinkansen between Tokyo and Osaka made perfect sense in the early 1960s and even more so nowadays.
Closer to home there is a high speed corridor on the Thalys link from Paris to Amsterdam via Brussels in some of the most densely populated land in Europe.
When you factor in the enormous amount of space it would free up on the West Coast Mainline for freight and local traffic, HS2 was a no brainer - problems, we have a government with no brain and a vindictive streak wide enough to be seen from space.
The predictions are that our already crucifying expensive, inadequate existing railway service will only get worse; and because the Tories are now selling off the land needed for HS2 between Crewe and Manchester, it will be impossible for future governments to restart the project. They are salting the earth:
No, it really isn’t a solved problem. It is a solved problem at smaller scales like a house, but not even slightly at the scale under discussion. The largest vacuum chamber in the world is along one of the proposed hypeloop routes and is excellent for highlighting how far from reality the hypeloop is. The space power facility us a little under a million cubic feet and takes 8 hours to evacuate. If we’re assuming a tunnel width of something like NYC subway tunnels that would be a comparable volume of just under 500 feet of track. The proposed Cleveland to Chicago hypeloop would be around 300 miles, depending on where you put the station, assuming an absurdly direct route. Any system of sections with gates will still have to clear large swathes of the system at once just due to the speeds and how long it takes to pump out that volume.
But if we set aside the fact that the problem is only building hundreds of the world’s largest vacuum chambers, we’re stuck in the realm of the problems of giant strings of metal and thermal expansion. As a weather front of only a couple degrees moves down the line you have to have enough expansion joints, suitable for cycling vacuum pressures . Yes, we could get there, but it isn’t solved by a long shot.
So you have to build the world’s largest tunnel, by a huge margin, or the world’s largest building, again by a huge margin. That would have to then become the largest vacuum chamber on the planet. All of that gets comparatively marginal gains over existing tech. And for the financials to work we have to pretend that it will be cost competitive with lake freight.
Hey, nuclear trains are great, when the reactor is somewhere else and the line is electrified.
The 539-kilometre run to Montreal would take a exactly a 3 hours and 59 minutes—a full hour better than the next fastest CN express—the press was told. The trains could get there quicker, but the high speeds achieved in testing were outlawed due to the roughly 300 level crossings on the route. All Turbos would be capped at 153 km/h—100 km/h slower than the top speed.
Hey. With DARPA working on getting by high sea issues, there’s still some hope for WIG aircraft… and users could see some cost savings depending on the types of time-sensitive cargo being moved; they may not have toupee as much vs. slow boats.
