> Mr Musk says the cost of building the route would be in the region of $6bn (£4.1bn), an estimate most agree is extremely conservative.
I'm pretty sure that should say "extremely optimistic". Musk's estimate of $6bn is over 10x cheaper than the high speed train line cost for the same route
It seems likely that for the same amount of service as high speed rail, the hyperloop would be a lot more expensive.
> I'm pretty sure that should say "extremely optimistic".
A conservative cost estimate is essentially an optimistic cost estimate. A stronger statement might be that it is unrealistic.
Honestly, even $50Bn sounds like chump change for a project as ambitious as the Hyperloop. Nearly all large scale public infrastructure projects end up costing billions of dollars over estimated costs anyway.
His last bid was 40% less than United Launch
Hyperloop doesn't have anywhere near that amount of free R&D or established, easy-to-increment-to-get-there technologies to draw on.
I think almost the sae can be said for Hyperloop. There's no fundamentally new technology that needs to be engineered for it to work. Maglevs are common in many countries, evacuated tubs aren't complicated.
All that said, the US seems to be the wrong place to start Hyperloop. Regulation and land property will most likely be the biggest hurdle, not technology, especially in California. Hyperloop seems to me like a perfect project in China though, in regard to property rights, regulation, city planning, human capital in the high speed train sector, as well as crazy supply side economics.
Why haven't we gone to the moon since the 1970s? Because there wasn't the political will to keep funding the programs that went there. Why was the Space Shuttle such an awkward and ultimately non-viable way to go to space? Because there wasn't the political will to fund genuine reusable launch technology. SpaceX's big advantages are in having the hard up-front R&D already done for it by someone else, and in not having to rely solely on political decisions for the existence of its market; even if there are no more nice-PR resupply missions to the ISS, there are still going to be private actors who want to launch satellites.
Thus the argument needs to be that Hyperloop is intrinsically cheaper, whether built by Musk's company or any random civil engineering company. I don't see any reason why that is the case, Hyperloop looks a lot more complicated than HSR to me.
SpaceX has and continues to do amazing things, that doesn't mean suddenly everything we want is feasible.
A simpler way to make the same argument:
If Musk can actually build a Hyperloop across California at his proposed cost, he's made revolutionary improvements to civil engineering that will be far more impactful than the Hyperloop itself; the same techniques should revolutionize, well, much of conventional civil engineering! Why isn't that happening?
IDK, indeed $X/10 is ambitious but he does have a decent track record with this already. SpaceX is already $X/3 or $X/4 and is on the path to $X/10 with reusable rockets, and it's also more ambitious (rocket reuse, highest payload in the world by 2x, new capsule has powered rocket landing on any surface in the solar system).
In my mind he's earned some benefit of the doubt. Of course, there's still a ton to prove, and the idea sounds looney. You'd also have said that about SpaceX 10 years ago, though.
$6 Billion is something that I think many civil engineers would consider to be a dubious figure, even as a first estimate. I'm sure Musk is cognizant of this.