Hyperloop shuts down

It was a dumb idea, championed by a guy who thinks he's a lot smarter than he really is:

HYPERLOOP ONE, A futuristic transportation startup highly touted by Elon Musk, is shuttering its airless tubes.

The company is laying off employees, selling remaining assets (which include a test track and machinery), and closing its offices, Bloomberg reports. After hiring more than 200 people in 2022, remaining workers — who are tasked with supervising the asset sale — were told their employment ends Dec. 31. All of Hyperlooop One’s intellectual property will be handed over to majority stakeholder, Dubai-based DP World.

The billionaire estimated in a 2013 proposal that a pod would be able to whisk passengers from Los Angeles to San Francisco in just 35 minutes and “feel a lot like being on an airplane.” After its founding in 2014, the buzzy startup raised around $450 million in venture capital funds and other investments, and even constructed a test track near Las Vegas to develop its technology.

For a moment, things looked promising for the company that vowed to end traffic once and for all. Originally founded as Hyperloop Technologies, the business changed its name to Hyperloop One in 2016, and then rebranded to Virgin Hyperloop One after Richard Branson invested in the company and joined its board of directors. After an exodus of top execs, Virgin dropped its name from Hyperloop One after opting to focus on cargo rather than passengers.

The Hyperloop - a vacuum-sealed tube through which magnetically-propelled pods are theoretically able to travel at high speeds due to low air resistance - is little more than a gadgetbahn: an unproven technology in search of a need. Riding on the Hyperloop would not "feel a lot like being on an airplane:" the passenger pods would be a lot smaller than an airplane and have no windows (because they would be traveling inside an either elevated or subterranean sealed steel tube), and passengers would be subject to intense G-forces and vibration as the pods accelerated. Any sort of damage to the hundreds-of-miles-long steel tubes - a crack or a small hole - would allow air into the vacuum and render the technology useless. Equipment malfunctions or power outages would leave passengers trapped in their sealed pods until they were somehow rescued. A Hyperloop journey would be claustrophobia-inducing and perhaps even terrifying.

The Hyperloop is not financially or politically feasible and it offers no advantage over existing and proven forms of transportation technology, such as commercial aviation or high-speed rail systems in use in Europe or Asia. (Perhaps, in fact, Hyperloop was little more than a ploy to stop construction of California's [admittedly controversial] high speed rail project.) A decade after Elon Musk first trumpeted its prospective benefits, it remains little more than a (vacuum-sealed) pipe dream. 

It's time to consign this dumb idea to the trashbin of history. And it's also time for credulous media and "tech-savvy" influencers to stop hyping impractical, pie-in-the-sky ideas like Hyperloop just because they're championed by a blowhard asshole like Elon Musk.

Kuff has more.