Elon Musk’s Hyperloop Becomes Reality as Agreements Secured in California

Actually the paper answers the question of how it would cross the bay--it wouldn't. The proposed "San Francisco" terminus is in the East Bay (IIRC, pretty far east, as well). A significant part of the cost savings of the route proposed as an alternative to the HSR route cones from, unlike HSR, not actually going anywhere near the urban centers on either the SF or LA end.

I'm not sure how 'an extra hour' is critical when driving takes many hours. Its still an order of magnitude faster, right? It takes 'an extra hour' at the airline terminal and I put up with that for every flight.

Go fast enough, and jump?

Everything revolving around Musk seems fishy to me. His Tesla and Solar companies are harvesting government subsidies and he writes a half-baked technical paper on hyperloop and suddenly there is money to spend on this boondoggle too. Something just doesn't add up (like Enron or Worldcom from a few years back) and I suspect that Musk and/or associated companies are (willing or unwilling) fronts for the FED to directly push money into the economy. The problem the FED has is that lowering the interest rates no longer works to boost the economy once you are at zero and they still need/want inflation to recover from the mortgage bust. I'd bet that there are academic papers on how to deal with ZIRP when you need to inflate that advocate such direct funding policies.

Everything is here to stay...as long as it is here to stay! (That bothered me too).

Reminds me of the whole "20% of the time it works every time".

Even if it was a rock solid, proven solution major construction projects almost never go to plan.

exactly. Why is everyone so negative? Sure, it hasn't been fully worked out yet. So, isn't still fantastic that we have yet another potential alternative ?

By all means try. But saying it "becomes reality" is massively overhyping it.

This is what I keep thinking. I'm excited about the tech that will be developed to make it work!

I live in Texas. I can't give a flying tube torpedo about whether CA gets a fancy speedy train thing. But I would love to have some very large-scale vacuum tube tech developed that can safely launch people. There's all kinds of great innovation that will come out of it.

I was super negative when it started because I expected the initial release that they pulled an all-nighter for (according to his Twitter feed) to have been more than just like a sketch of an idea typed in Word.

Now that things are moving forward, my opinion has radically changed. That, and in the meantime his car won the Consumer Report's Best Buy, SpaceX darn near landed a rocket vertically in the ocean, and ground has been broken on their spaceport.

> at 200 - 300 mph

What supercar are you looking at which is capable of this?

Now imagine the 2 techs combined, hyperloops to link major hubs at the speed of sound and self driving cars for everything else.

For that matter, so long as we're having blue sky thinking involving untold billions of dollars of infrastructure, you might as well bring in new airports well out of the urban centers because that's what hyperloop is likely to be anyway.

Fast cars like that already exist, the main problem with those is that thanks to drag (air + surface), they become really uneconomical at higher speeds. 800 of the Bugatti Veyron's 1000 BHP only kicks in above 200 kph, maybe later - that's how much extra power is needed to squeeze out the last bit of performance to reach that max speed. Do that times the amount of cars, and you see the problem there.

Although it probably would work if the cars drove in a partially evacuated tunnel. But then you wouldn't have the downforce needed to get the cars through corners at those speeds. If you put the cars on monorails though, maybe...

Self driving cars, which aren't likely in that timeframe to do 200-300mph on roads that will exist, make rail and similar things, including hyperloop, more, not less, viable. They provide a solution to the need for a local transport component that doesn't rely on everyone owning a personal vehicle but still provides good local point-to-point transport to help enable the centralized long-distance arteries whose termini can't be convenient to every source and destination point without a good local network.

It's functionally impossible to drive at 250 mph for any meaningful period of time. Drag is a gigantic problem (as james may says "it's like driving through custard"), not to mention the fuel requirements to go that speed. One of the bigger problems is actually tires. The veyron's tires can only last ~20 minutes at those speeds and a new set is 20 grand. If you want to go those speeds you can't do it in the open air (unless you're actually flying) and you certainly can't do it on rubber tires.

> on the existing infrastructure [...] at 200 - 300 mph within the same timeframe or shorter.

This isn't even remotely plausible. 250 mph in a conventional car is more of a party trick than a transportation strategy.

You can get a few very specialized cars up to these speeds on a few very specialized tracks, that's it. Even if you built a much longer straight section (you're not cornering significantly at these speeds) the question isn't going to be how many of them can you get from A to B, it's going to be what runs out first, fuel or tires. The range would make todays electrics look positively luxurious. Fuel efficiency would be low single figures.

You can't beat the physics here - you are fighting a velocity cubed term and it will always win (on existing infrastructure).

Self-driving cars going at 200-300mph for long periods of time seems unlikely. At that point you might as well build lanes for maglev trains.

Also, the hyperloop technology could at the very least be useful for transporting stuff across the ocean (and hopefully cheaper than it is to do it by plane).

300 mph at sea level atmosphere on land is pretty tough to do efficiently, you're looking at ~18x the drag force of normal highway travel with only a ~4x speedup. Self-driving "trains" of cars can alleviate the drag force, but I haven't seen any 300mph "train"ed proposals that would work on existing road and bridge infrastructure.

Maybe it's because I don't live in the US but I couldn't disagree more with this. Public transport is infinitely more valuable than just something used on a few short routes/use cases. When designed properly they are far quicker, safer and cheaper even if we had self driving cars on the road.

And it is ludicrous to imagine self driving cars moving around at that speed: (a) there will always be non self driving cars which will cause accidents and (b) self driving cars no matter how good will still cause accidents e.g. sensor failure, poor weather condition, inability to determine future road quality, edge conditions etc.

The few cars capable of driving over 200mph (none exist that can break 300, and they probably never will) are incredibly fuel inefficient. The Bugatti Veyron will empty its entire 26 gallon tank in 12 minutes at top speed, that's not sustainable for mass-transit.

I have a hard time believing that the infrastructure here in the Northeastern US could sustain vehicles regularly traveling at speeds in excess of 200 mph. Which means the cost would also require a great deal of overhaul to the existing infrastructure. It seems that many public works departments are having trouble keeping up with the demands of repairing roads for 40 - 60 mph.

If you could do a few hyperloops* that would connect Boston - NYC - Philly - DC, suddenly the strain on the highway system plummets. That gives self-driving cars even more room to speedily take people between locations outside of the reach of public transportation.

* I don't mean it would have to be hyperloops. Any HSR system would be beneficial.

> EDIT: I do think we'll solve for 200 - 300 mph in 20 - 25 years. But insert 150 - 200 mph.

Honestly, averaging 150-200mph is still hopeless for conventional infrastructure and cars. Hell, 100mph averages are probably out for conventional cars due to fuel efficiency. You could imagine an improvement from co-ordinated drafting (don't try this at home) but that's too marginal to make up the difference.

I'd love to hear your reasoning behind thinking that we'll solve 200-300mph in the next three decades on conventional roads. What kind of vehical are you thinking of?