Tesla Motors chairman, CEO, and product architect Elon Musk has posted a 57-page PDF detailing the company’s Hyperloop project. Touted as a groundbreaking form of public transportation, Hyperloop will (theoretically) be able to complete trips between Los Angeles and San Francisco in 30 minutes. It (allegedly) offers safe and comfortable travel at speeds higher than 700 miles per hour, using a system that’s described as a combination of a rail gun and an air-hockey table.
Other bonuses touted on the Tesla Motors site include:
- Safer
- Faster
- Lower cost
- More convenient
- Immune to weather
- Sustainably self-powering
- Resistant to Earthquakes
- Not disruptive to those along the route
All of this sounds immensely cool. That’s the good news. The bad news? It will cost somewhere between $6-billion to $7.5-billion, depending on of if it’s configured for passengers or a combination of passengers and cars. Still, that’s lower than many of the high-speed rail proposals floating around California.
The really cool part is that Musk has published the document as a reference design. Tesla Motors has no plans to build it and has released this information for engineers to study. Hopefully, an enterprising company will take the design and make it a reality.
What do you think of Hyperloop? Would you ride one? Do you think we’ll see Hyperloop transport in our lifetime?
Id love to see a hyperloop. Itd let me visit cali more often. Also traveling 700 mph would add minutes to my life.
As a science/physics nerd, I can tell you that this thing won’t work as it’s proposed. The compression of air would generate too much heat in a confined area. That heat would have to be released somehow. Also, I think this guy underestimates the factor of metal fatigue and overall long-term issues with stress on the pod, especially if you have any type of turbulence like tectonic shifts (if it’s underground) or wind (if it’s above ground).
The solution of water tanks absorbing the heat is commendable, but impractical. Water is heavy as shit and the pods have limited space as it is.
This is a really cool high school science project, but until someone comes up with a better solution for the heat dissipation, then you can actually believe that it could be practically built.
-M