The dream of Elon Musk to create a faster transportation system that a high-speed train has derailed. Hyperloop Oneone of the few companies that was still trying to make the magnate’s vision a reality, has announced that it will liquidate all its assets, close its offices and lay off workers before the end of 2023.
After seven years and more than 450 million dollars invested, the company had only managed to create a small test track in a desert in the state of Nevada and its prototypes of the futuristic transportation system, the only ones that have actually transported people, have not even reached a speed of over 175 kilometers per hour. A scale model without human occupants managed to accelerate a little more, up to 324 kilometers per hour, a speed lower than what a modern high-speed train can achieve.
It is an undignified but somewhat expected ending. Elon Musk announced Hyperloop in 2013 simply as an idea accompanied by a white paper, with no intention of carrying it out personally. “Maybe I’ll invest in or advise companies to make it happen in the future, but I don’t have time right now,” he said at the time. The valuation of Tesla It had not yet catapulted him to the top of the list of the world’s greatest fortunes, but he was already enjoying enormous popularity and a handful of companies, including Hyperloop One, took up the idea and began developing prototypes.
Musk’s original vision for this “fifth form of transportation” (complementary to the car, boat, train and plane) was to create a network of near-vacuum tubes capable of moving small pressurized capsules with passengers inside at a speed close to 1,200 kilometers per hour. A trip between Los Angeles and San Francisco with a system of these characteristics could take just 30 minutes, less than what a regular airliner takes and with the promise of picking up and dropping off the passenger in the very center of the cities.
The idea of using vacuum or partially evacuated tubes to transport capsules at high speed was not new. In 1799, the British inventor George Medhurst proposed a similar system. Musk, however, added to the vision of Medhurst and other later engineers some recent advances, such as the use of magnetic levitation to accelerate the capsules and even theorized about a system that would allow the automobile to be mixed with this transport system, with capsules in which it would be possible to park a vehicle to transport it at high speed to a distant city and, upon arrival, continue driving normally. .