The Hyperloop was always a scam
disconnect.blog
disconnect.blog
Those are for Elon's; Virgin also has a hyperloop which he's covered too: https://youtu.be/VrbstnzbhZA and https://youtu.be/EeWcQf9QCmg
The defence of Musk is "Musk has lots of ideas, and some worked out and some didn't".
To be fair she's very easy to hate. She has no identity but to be a victim.
I think if we had built 10-20 shuttle orbiters turnaround wouldn't have been an issue either. (not really, shuttles were eyewateringly expensive).
SpaceX has eaten the entire western launch market by simply pricing their launches slightly below legacy prices. And at the same time they give themselves (starlink) the at-cost price so no one can compete with them there either.
Maybe Jeffery Bezos and his deep pocket book will eventually present some competition, but Blue will be fighting headwinds the entire way down to the bottom price. SpaceX has this down pat and BO will be learning on the go. Any price improvement BO makes for years to come can be matched effortlessly by SpX.
The only other plausible challenger is China, but those launches are not really available to the west.
Besides, Nasa doesn't uses SpaceX because they are secretly a bunch of Musk fanboi's... I suspect they are actually cheaper!
It looks to me the problem is not engineering or technical but political. It's a shame that the US can't build any more, no matter what excuses we produce.
What an excellent pun!
Meanwhile, out here in the real world, we know it costs 5x more, on average, to build passenger trains underground than above ground. Hyperloop was always a means for developing mining technologies - specifically, lithium mining. That sounds boring (see what I did there?!) so you frame the discussion as passenger transport to lure in investors. Technology was developed, knowledge was learned, investors were duped, and we move on.
While I imagine it would reduce cost to build one at ground level, I think it makes sense to go underground or high up on pillars at least where it intersects roads, rivers, or things like that.
Also there's boring company that seems to fit perfectly with hyperloop.
Of course you _can_ go underground but that doesn’t make sense economically for long-range (nobody is digging a tunnel SF-LA). And the hyper bit (vacuum pump and acceleration at each stop) makes less sense for short-range transport in urban environments.
I don't think reading a proposal to build a tube on pylons which it stated would mostly be located on highway medians to [theoretically] be cheaper than an intercity rail line and concluding it isn't intended to generate demand for a later startup developing tools to drill through rock is making a particularly wild assumption, especially not compared with taking the opposite position...
I think you're thinking about "The Boring Company" which is entirely separate from Hyperloop One.
Hyperloop was always a transportation fantasy. They didn't even hire people with civil engineering or mining experience, as some early employees are starting to explain on Twitter now that the company is gone.
> Technology was developed, knowledge was learned, investors were duped, and we move on.
Again, I think you're confusing different companies. Hyperloop specifically worked on transportation, not mining/digging/tunneling.
The Boring Company is the Elon Company supposedly targeted at digging tunnels.
I fail to see what the hyperloop nonsense brings to the equation.
I can't say whether it would be effective (or even beneficial enough to justify the construction cost) but it sounds more plausible than high speed mass transit for passengers.
The future is here!
> There is huge demand for hourly package delivery
The market is huge, because what little demands there is, it's very inelastic. You either need super low latency delivery and are willing to pay almost any price (pizza gets cold, deliverator to the rescue!), or you don't. If someone could magically offer the service at lower cost they could own that market, but that market would hardly grow.
In practice, it’s just really not competitive with conventional high speed rail or air freight.
>>Musk told me that the idea originated out of his hatred for California’s proposed high-speed rail system. … He insisted the Hyperloop would cost about $6 billion to $10 billion, go faster than a plane, and let people drive their cars onto a pod and drive out into a new city. At the time, it seemed that Musk had dished out the Hyperloop proposal just to make the public and legislators rethink the high-speed train. He didn’t actually intend to build the thing. … With any luck, the high-speed rail would be canceled. Musk said as much to me during a series of e-mails and phone calls leading up to the announcement.
I have no divine insight into Musk's or any tech billionaire's minds, but if this article's thesis is that the billionaires' are conspiring to put down viable public transit, I would like to see more evidence.
I do not disagree, however, that Hyperloop was an infeasible project from the get-go.
That being said, the biggest hurdle is with the HSR is not technical but the political disfunction within the US that cripples large projects:
> “There were so many things that went wrong,” Mr. McNamara said. “SNCF was very angry. They told the state they were leaving for North Africa, which was less politically dysfunctional. They went to Morocco and helped them build a rail system.” Morocco’s bullet train started service in 2018.
https://www.nytimes.com/2022/10/09/us/california-high-speed-...
The original route that was supposed to service SF <-> LA now has detours that have added substantially to the costs and slowed down the rail (no longer a straight line). Similarly, they started building it out in the easiest possible point (in the middle of the country in the flat lands) rather than in places where they could start operating it and providing value (Bay Area/LA). It was clearly hijacked as a way to steal funds earmarked for transit and now is such a large project that has begun, that funding will probably continue indefinitely to help save face.
What "original route"? The route is quite literally encoded into the state law, passed by plebiscite. The route is required to serve Fresno, Bakersfield, and Palmdale. The fact that SNCF thought it would be easier to build a TGV in a depopulated colony is immaterial.
Seriously look at the cover of the 2005 EIR that was published before Prop. 1A was passed. This is the original route! There was never another one!
https://hsr.ca.gov/wp-content/uploads/docs/programs/eir-eis/...
> It was clearly hijacked as a way to steal funds earmarked for transit
More ignorance here. It's the opposite. Prop 1A funds are funding local transit projects, in the billions of dollars. HSR funds paid to electrify Caltrain.
Look, it's perfectly obvious that you do not have a factual grounding for your beliefs. Instead of posting, why don't you research?
That same issue applies to any high-speed project that's not air travel, regardless of if it moves along asphalt or rails and if it runs on or below the ground.
I don't disagree entirely. Public transport is kind of rubbish and, all else being equal (travel times, cost, availability, etc.), I'd prefer to be in my own car as it drives itself directly to my destination. However, it's a question of whether it's possible to build a city around cars without it turning into a horrible traffic-filled hellscape, and so far Musk doesn't seem to have found an alternative solution. Certainly, there's nothing better on the table that works with current technology.
A _lot_ of people share this sentiment, especially in America. I've said much of the same, and I don't own a car company or benefit from them.
Tell me you're an American without telling me you're an American[0].
If travel times, cost, and availability were actually equal, you'd pick public transit every time, because you don't have to focus on the cognitively stressful task of operating a motor vehicle. The reason why you care about being driven directly to your destination is specifically because the availability is so poor and gaps in the network get papered over with shittons of walking.
The car has an analogous 'last mile' problem - i.e. finding a place to legally park it at your destination. We fixed that by mandating free parking everywhere. This pushes buildings away from one another, which means walking is even less viable, which exacerbates the traffic issue with lots of short trips. It also disaggregates traffic flows, which makes availability more expensive to produce, et cetera.
[0] Or Canadian.
However, I recognise that driving is a selfish action with significant externalities, and I prefer to live somewhere that prioritises alternative forms of transportation. I vote for anyone who prioritises public transport and to restrict cars, because cars make cities ugly, noisy, dirty, unwalkable, and dangerous.
Come to Switzerland and you will see how it should work.
I agree it sucks, but the fact that it sucks and is also one of the best does suggest that good public transport is difficult. Note how all the places with half decent public transport tend to be rich.
However even Switzerland (which I have been to) if I had to pick which form of transport has the most utility, I’d still choose the car. Public transport usually takes longer door-to-door and involves changes in modes or doesn’t quite get you to your destination. Also it isn’t 24/7. It’s great for commuting, not so great for other things. I guess nightlife though isn’t a huge concern in Zurich :)
London hardly has some of the best public transport system in the world.
And London really does have some of the best in the world. There are a lot of rough edges, for sure, but nearly all rankings I can find have it around 10th best city public transportation system in the world which is pretty up there. Maybe now that they've finally fixed Bank station, it could even go up a few points ;). Zurich is probably the best I've experienced, and Stockholm, Tokyo and Singapore are also very good. Paris, Moscow, Madrid, New York City and Amsterdam are probably all roughly on par with London; better in some ways, worse in others, and which one you prefer probably depends on your individual preferences.
> Also it isn’t 24/7.
Some public transport absolutely is 24/7.
Where London really struggles, as the whole of the UK does, is the awful ticketing system. That said if you don't care too much about the cost and stick to the Oyster zone, you can just tap your phone and not think about it beyond that. Oh, also the lack of AC for the few weeks of hot temperatures we get, but that at least is apparently being fixed soon.
Functionality wise, I've never had any issues in London. The open data is accurate and comprehensive, so the app of your choice has accurate route planning, you pay by tapping your phone and follow the instructions. Other systems have mostly caught up now, but for a long time London did better than 90% of other systems in that area.
I'd say the city I found most surprisingly good was Stockholm. Very comprehensive for the relatively small population size, and all the stations were beautiful and clean. If anything, it seemed overbuilt and almost desolate a lot of the time. I'm not sure how they afford or justify the upkeep on it given that most other systems in the world seem to be struggling.
> Some public transport absolutely is 24/7.
It may well be, but Zurich's isn't, which is what I was talking about! Very few places have 24/7 trains, but Zurich doesn't even have 24 hour busses except at the weekend.
In _London_?! I would’ve thought that would be condemning yourself to a slow painful death looking at traffic lights, tbh.
I'll give you an example trips I take quite frequently (not exact so that I don't dox myself completely): Homebase Catford to Grove Park Cemetery: public transport 25 mins excluding waiting, driving 10 mins; Anytime Fitness Hither Green to Manor House Gardens: 22 mins vs 9 mins; Voodoo Rays Peckham to Mountsfield Park: 15 mins vs 55 mins. It's also often cheaper to drive, especially if it's more than one person, and I usually have my partner with me.
Even in zone 1 at peak times, driving is usually about the same as public transport once you factor in the time for connections, waiting, getting down into the stations and back, etc. It's just expensive as hell with the congestion charge and parking costs.
The surprising thing about London's traffic is it really flows quite well, even compared to much smaller and less densely populated towns in the UK. I've driven across quite literally the length and breadth of the UK, and I've experienced much worse traffic elsewhere. I'm not sure if it's the fancy "smart" traffic light system we have or some other aspect of urban planning, but I find that I quite rarely get stuck in frustrating traffic jams. That is, except for if there's a bad crash in the Blackwall Tunnel. That can cause gridlock all the way back to Blackheath.
Sounds like a case of projection. Most people aren't especially intimidated by driving, and quite a few actually enjoy it. Far fewer people enjoy being packed onto a crowded bus or train with strangers (and those are the ones who inevitably sit next to me.)
When people have the option to drive, and the money to do so, they usually prefer to.
https://jalopnik.com/did-musk-propose-hyperloop-to-stop-cali...
“The Boring Company is one of [Musk’s] ventures that I’ve never understood, really,” Vance replied. “I totally get your point. In general, though, there’s no part of me that believes Elon was trying to kill public transport so people would stay in cars. I just don’t believe that.... Elon didn’t even need to bemoan the high-speed rail project for it to undermine itself.”
But I can imagine Musk being outraged at the idea of spending an enormous amount of money to build a project that is already old and uninspiring by the current standards. And it's not like Musk's perception of how public administrations waste money by applying the same old schemes again and again is entirely naive and wrong- he revolutionised the world's space industry based on those perceptions. He probably wanted to say "hey, with some imagination and research you can build something new and better for less".
He also didn't try to build something better; he floated an idea for something worse. Transportation doesn't need some "new technology" to solve the problems of moving people around; trains have existed for a very long time now.
He wants full control over transportation and communication infrastructure. It's really just that simple. Doesn't matter what it cost, profit (for shareholders at least) has never been the primary goal.
You're honestly saying that reduced cars, and therefore Tesla sales in one city in one country is going to hurt Tesla/Musk?
Do you realize the Tesla Model Y is now the second best selling vehicle across the entire US, and the best selling car in the entire world? [1]
One city in one country is insignificant at best.
[1] https://www.theverge.com/2023/5/26/23738581/tesla-model-y-ev...
> California's population
Goalposts go in the ground. They stay fixed in place.
Really the only perk of public transport is not having to deal with traffic and parking. But as soon as traffic and parking are not an issue, people will always prefer cars.
I mean, I'd love it if everyone took the train to work. Then I could zip right in using my own comfy car and park right next to my job.
City councils can start doing the inverse of what they’ve been doing. Traffic increases, so roads are widened, more parking is created, leading to more cars, and traffic increases.
As traffic decreases, roads can be changed to reduce the focus on cars, and increase the focus on other forms of transport / pedestrians / additional commerce, which then serves to discourage further traffic because … there’s nowhere to create more space for cars anymore.
See various European major cities (e.g. London, or less so, Madrid) for examples of this happening in real time.
You can’t zip in and park next to work if there’s only a single lane of one way traffic permitted on each road, and there’s only 100 parking spaces within a 5 min walk of your office (and about 10,000 people working in that area)
2) and 3) are only true for a small subset of people, e.g. for handymen or people who transport stuff regularly
1) cost is the big one, and currently a big reason that trains are sometimes more expensive than cars, at least in Germany, is subsidies and external costs. Also, that people underestimate what owning and operating a car costs, and just compare the train ticket price to the gas price for a specific trip.
What is more farfetches: 1) trying to derail a project that might hurt your interests 2) getting into an argument with some cave divers that are trying to rescue some kids and call them pedophiles 3) jeopardizing everyone's safety by testing experimental tech on the public roads. I could go on
1) seems perfectly reasonable to me and it's not unique to Musk. Happens all the time.
Did you read the linked article?
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/General_Motors_streetcar_consp...
The thing about the current standards is they demonstrably work, whereas vactrains have been the epitome of “nice idea, won’t work” for over a century (there were quite serious engineering studies in the 70s and they did not end well). And the US probably shouldn’t be trying to run before it can walk here; its first real high-speed line (Accela hardly counts) should probably use proven tech.
If we could build high speed rail that's as fast as the ones in China, Japan, and Europe and cost the same amount, then that would truly be amazing and there would be no need for hyperloops.
Anyway, a lot of these "hyperloops are scams" articles just talk about how Elon hates high speed rail and never delve into the technical details of why hyperloops don't work (so far, anyway).
The main idea of hyperloop is to use a compressor in the front of the pod to send air to the back, avoiding the inefficiency of pushing a lot of air in front of it like a syringe. This would allow the tube to contain some air, making it cheaper to maintain than a truly vacuum tube. The idea was explored in the 1990s for the similarly ill-fated SwissMetro project. However, aerodynamic simulations showed that the Hyperloop pod design would need to be redesigned to avoid supersonic flow, and the tube would need to be much bigger. I'm not sure if anyone has actually managed to make an active bypass pod that uses a compressor in front to improve efficiency in a tunnel and would be very curious to learn more.
CAHSR design speed is 10% faster than anything in service in Japan or Europe, and the same as the fastest China trains, excluding maglevs.
* San Francisco–San Jose: 30 minutes; this would require about 100 mph (160 km/h) on average
* San Jose–Los Angeles: 2 hours, 10 minutes; this would require about 200 mph (320 km/h) on average
Which is rather uninspiring compared to traveling by air, and somewhat worse than the Nozomi Shinkansen travelling between Tokyo and Osaka.
The slow leg between SF-SJ reminds me of taking the TGV from Paris to Nice. The part between Marseille and Nice took just as long as from Paris to Marseille.
With all that said though, I would still take the CA HSR once it is built and I am looking forward to its completion.
I think it's a sad state of affairs when someone simply puts an idea out into the world and says "We think it will work, but needs more input" and people get extremely angry and spew vitriol and hatred towards them simply for sharing an idea.
Back in the day Musk and SpaceX engineers put out a white paper about Hyperloop. In it they laid out as much of the work and calculations they had done, and they said "We're pretty sure this can work, but it's a first draft, and it needs more input and refinement and testing and all the rest. We're not going to do that. But hopefully others will pick it up and run with it."
Then some test tracks were built to foster student input/learning/ideas (Great!), then everyone called Musk a scam artist and says it was a crock of shit from the start.
I wish we lived in a world where new ideas were encouraged and discussed in a productive manner so that we can all learn and improve the world around us. Of course not all of them will "work out", but that is the whole point of learning and trying new experimental things.
I was open minded, until I read the white paper.
OK, so your feedback is "I don't think this will work for reasons x, y and z."
We can learn from that and either modify the design until it does work, or move on with other projects that do work (i.e. High Speed Rail).
In either case, anger, hatred and vitriol are not required for a productive outcome. We should not shoot down people for sharing information about possibly new and better ways of doing things, lest we discourage everyone from doing so.
Again, that is perfectly fine and someone putting an idea out there that doesn't work should not result in attacks and name calling. It's just petty high school garbage that doesn't help anything, and in fact hinders future discussions about important topics.
There is a good reason companies keep engineers in the back room away from customers. They are masters of machines, not people.
If he used a proper PR team, they would filter most of this out, and shape his communications into a form meant for regular people.
Or, y'know, they might put the idea as an idea rather than an argument about why the government should stop funding wind farms or chemotherapy...
Elon can trash and actively try to stop infrastructure projects actually due to be built all he likes, but as soon as someone suggests his vaporware alternative might not be proposed in the best of faith, we have to worry about about how hurting his feelings might set back infrastructure growth?
The way you characterize it, Musk came out with an itty bitty idea, said “hey I think this might work but I need some help figuring things out” and the whole world hated him for it.
This is a very generous characterization of Musk, but it has little to do with reality.
What actually happened was that Musk has a history of floating ideas around by presenting them as the best thing since sliced bread.
Shitting all over conventional wisdom, going as far as to say that it’s all BS in an effort to add credence to his own snake oil because conventional wisdom happens to debunk his claims.
All while promising the moon on timelines that would put the Lord Almighty to shame with his 7 days and then, when there’s a big enough wake of unfulfilled promises and exposed BS that could sink an entire continent, that’s when people started to get suspicious en masse.
Maybe if he was more focused on improving his plan instead of “faking it till he made it” by claiming he had approval to start building[0], people would take him more seriously.
And that’s not even touching on the question of if we actually should entertain every random piece of science fiction, which you seem to imply. Because I don’t know if you’ve read the alpha paper, but we’re dealing with “the laws of physics don’t exist” levels of fiction here.
0: https://www.theguardian.com/technology/2017/jul/20/elon-musk...
IMHO currently a Hyperloop will require much more investments than what is reasonable to expect, but in 20 or 30 or 50 years if the human progress continues new technologies will make it viable.
Merry Christmas, HN.
I mean sure, it challenges the narrative that billionaires aren't selfish parasites that shouldn't exist, so right, not very pro Y combinator of me.
He has certainly helped maintain Twitter, Tesla, and PayPal at different points, but they were already built before he arrived.
Tesla, the car, was not, but we are clearly talking about companies, not cars.
Is it that you are unaware of the difference between companies and cars?
How big do you think it was exactly when he joined? And at what level of product maturity?
1%. It is at 2% now. Which isn't a knock on what Tesla is doing today, but to tell how it pales in comparison to what the company will be doing 1,000 years from now. We are still in very early days.
If that is how you want to measure it, Tesla hasn't been built yet. It is still under construction. No matter how you slice it, it is impossible for Musk to have built Tesla.
Building a company isn’t about who filed the paperwork, it’s about defining the product, the path to profitability and executing on that vision.
You might not like the guy, but he clearly built Tesla.
That's fine if we want to hold that definition, but then your insistence that Musk built Tesla does not logically follow.
Which makes his descent into erratic flimflammery all the more tragic.
Tesla was already built before Musk came along. He has helped maintain it, granted.
The second important company he built is OpenAI.
Whatever Musk's faults, it's really interesting to see people rewrite history.
A sustainable, profitable automobile manufacturer would be slightly more difficult.
It is really interesting to see people rewrite what we're talking about.
Actually building any car at all was just maintenance?
He joined in 2004. First car in 2008. Path to profitability starting in 2015.
I'm inserting the opinion that maybe some of that stuff since 2004 was highly relevant to "building" Tesla.
Interestingly, one of Musk's faults is dishonestly rewriting history to make himself appear to be a co-founder of Tesla.
And here are many of us saying the same about the people who fall for the cult of personality that surrounds this serial liar. To be fair, many of us are speaking with hindsight, as we too fell for it years ago, before his penchant for lying was laid bare.
It would be "cult of personality" to pretend the Musk did everything personally, obviously a lot of dedicated people contributed.. but it's just as dumb to act like he wasn't involved.
SpaceX was luck. Luck he ran into the people he did (people like Zubrin) at that time he did. Luck that his Tesla con paid off.
>Ten years after Elon Musk unveiled the white paper for the vacuum-tube transport system he dubbed the Hyperloop, it’s time to drive the final nail into its coffin.
Opens with Elon Musk jab for the clicks, meanwhile a few paragraphs down
>To be clear, Hyperloop One is not associated with Musk himself.
Nice, top quality post.
>The technology was never really meant to go anywhere. Its main goal was always to stop a better transport future from being realized.
Conspiracy theory take, I'm probably going to get a lecture about how shitty city buses and 100 year old metro trains are better
>In the early 2010s, there was a big debate around California’s plan to build a high-speed rail line from Los Angeles to San Francisco, with further extensions to San Diego and Sacramento to follow. Naturally, conservative, automotive, and airline interests were vehemently opposed to a technology that Japan and Europe had been living with for decades arriving on American shores because it threatened their commercial interests.
More conspiracy theories, meanwhile californias (not-high) speed rail system is insanely over-budget and behind schedule.
>Elon Musk, as an automaker and (let’s be honest) somewhat of a conservative himself, eagerly adopted the arguments against the bullet train with his own spin
Yes, because a slow train for tens of billions of dollars is going to magically transform the world into a carless bike-transit utopia
>with Walt Mossberg and Kara Swisher in 2013, calling it, “the slowest bullet train in the world and the most expensive bullet train per mile in the world” — and that meant it not only had to be opposed, but that the geniuses in Silicon Valley could surely do better than people who actually had a clue about trains and transportation.
All of this is true, note that he has zero rebuttal to these facts. Instead he resorts to deflection.
>hat figure was immediately debunked by people who actually understood what went into building that kind of infrastructure, with the real cost estimated around at least $100 billion, even though it would have far less capacity than a high-speed train.
Zero sourcing for this claim, meanwhile california's low-speed train project is going to deliver inferior results for $88-$128B
https://www.cnbc.com/2023/05/17/why-californias-high-speed-r....
Seems like the tunnel + hyperloop would have been a steal at "just" $100B
>And that was the point. Musk never had any intention of building the Hyperloop. He only needed it to help kill or substantially delay the high-speed rail project and the alternate vision of sustainable collective transportation it offered.
What a complete joke of an article, nothing was killed. Nothing was "substantially delayed" due to Musk or anyone else speaking about hyperloop. This article is a pathetically transparent attempt to rewrite history and transfer the blame of californias systemic failures on... some news articles?
Get this trash off of HN
There are bountiful fanboys. The same folks that would flog themselves 5 times if it meant the libs get hit once.
I remember like six or seven? years ago when I used to be active on reddit I was on a sub called r/enoughMuskSpam. At the time this was kind of a fringe view. It is less so now, partially due to work like this (and partially due to Musk's own, very public stunts)
I don't understand the point of this question in that you could ask it of almost anything.
Contrasting that with Branson biting off more than his collection of Virgin brands could chew (which are all failing/reorganizing) is not really the hit piece this author thinks it is.
By contrast, no analog for the "hyperloop" has ever existed outside of sci-fi novels.
Didn't the Apollo project use propulsive rocket landings to land on the moon (which was kind of necessary due to the moon's lack of a dense enough atmosphere)? IIRC, that was much earlier than the 1980s.