Hyperloop could see shake-up
As three main companies forge ahead, Elon Musk suggests he might join in, too
Musk might join an already crowded field
Ever since billionaire entrepreneur Elon Musk presented a white paper in 2012 laying out the idea for a highspeed transportation system called hyperloop, there’s been a lot of hyper-talk.
Little surprise. Stuffing humans and freight into slick pods that ride inside vacuum-sealed tubes at 700 mph sounded more like a design brief for the next Blade Runner movie than a realistic way to move around the planet.
Musk got folks buzzing again Thursday, when he blasted out a vague tweet saying he had received “verbal govt approval” for his Boring Company to start drilling tunnels under northeastern states for the purpose of installing a hyperloop system that could whisk passengers from New York to Washington, D.C., in 29 minutes.
The Tesla and SpaceX CEO had expressed disinterest in building a company around his hyperloop idea, giving Hyperloop One co-founder Shervin Pishevar his blessing to pursue the mission and limiting his involvement to sponsoring a contest for amateur hyperloop-interested scientists.
But The Boring Company released a statement following Musk’s tweets saying its talks with officials should lead to breaking ground on a tunnel “lat- er this year.” If Musk truly is considering starting a new company to build a hyperloop, his track record with Tesla and SpaceX signals a major shake-up among the small group of start-ups that are getting closer to building these futuristic transportation platforms.
After a few years of much breathless conjecture and even an internecine lawsuit at one company that was fit for reality TV, hyperloop now seems to be approaching the next station: building and selling it.
“All the tech and engineering work our team is doing today is to show how hyperloop as a concept can be commercially viable, so we don’t have to sell the value of it based on the public good or boosting GDP growth in that region,” says Brogan BamBrogan, who, with a legal scrap with Hy- perloop One in his rearview mirror, recently started a competing company here called Arrivo.
“I spent a lot of years at SpaceX working for a bold vision with amazing people,” the engineer told USA TODAY in an interview at Arrivo’s headquarters, a large warehouse with room for expansion. “But I thought it was time to turn that knowledge back towards Earth, where there are a lot of problems to be solved, including transportation.”
All three main hyperloop companies — Hyperloop One, Hyperloop Transportation Technologies (HTT) and newly minted Arrivo — are in a race to prove that tube-based mobility is to the 21st century what the locomotive was to the 19th, a potent promise of cheaper, faster, safer.
But they’re on a time-sensitive search for deep-pocketed individuals, states or nation-states eager to be first to take a gamble on the transportation option of the future and to reap the commensurate financial rewards.
Each of these hyperloop companies currently is forging ahead with tests and trying to secure partnerships, and they promise that anyone with at least a decade to live may well have the opportunity to enjoy the high-speed horizontal elevator ride that is hyperloop.
“Will this happen within my lifetime? Well, I think it’s within five years, and I certainly hope to live that long,” BamBrogan says with a laugh.
“My estimate is three years,” says Dirk Ahlborn, CEO of HTT, a global consortium of engineers collaborating via the Web and paid in equity. He says the company hopes to have a full-scale hyperloop capsule ready to test in a year, but the rest of the time
will be dedicated to “dealing with the regulations and political hurdles we are facing continuously.”
Hyperloop One head of engineering Josh Giegel says his conversations over the past few years with various Department of Transporation officials have been “positive overall. They were thinking this would be feasible by 2025, but the more we talk to them, they see this could happen sooner.”
But skepticism about the technology’s viability remains high. Chief hurdles include infrastructure questions (If above ground, how to buy the land? If below, how fast can one tunnel?), safety concerns (traveling at the speed of sound, getting stuck in a tube during a breakdown) and perhaps most significantly, profitability.
A few years ago, Musk published notes indicating that a hyperloop system in California would cost around $7 billion, or far less than the state’s mired high-speed rail project that could push $70 billion. But how much passengers might pay for the swift ride remains to be seen.
“I’m not sure this meets the cost-benefit-analysis test yet,” says Hani Mahmassani, director of Northwestern University’s Transportation Center. “It’s a long stretch from a 5-mile test track to a 600-mile deployment, so it’ll be interesting to see if hyperloop makes it to the next level on the investment level.”
Mahmassani adds that realworld conditions, which could include soil imperfections and instability that could ultimately compromise the seal of a vacuum tube, could also threaten to derail a large-scale hyperloop project. “There will be uncertainties in building a larger version,” he says.
Hyperloop company leaders all say that the science behind hyperloop won’t be the stumbling block.
To simplify the science: Copper coils embedded in stretches of a track serve to both magnetically levitate as well as propel hyperloop pods inside their vacuum-sealed tubes, creating a frictionless environment that sees the pods race along on momentum much the way an air hockey puck floats on a cushion of air.
As technological tests continue, the remaining hurdle is by far the biggest: How to get a city, country or investors to plunk down the billions required for the project, which critically includes payments to a hyperloop team for its expertise before its company’s funding runs dry.
Hyperloop One, a start-up that has raised about $150 million in funding, recently revealed that in May its engineers had succeeded in getting a prototype up to 70 mph in a 500-meter tube, and that 250 mph is the company’s next milestone.
It continues to tout a variety of feasibility studies and agreements inked with municipal officials in Europe and the Middle East, including landing $50 million in investment from DP World to explore ways to bring cargo ashore from freighters using underwater tubes.
Engineering team lead Giegel says the appeal for countries such as Dubai include “being able to skip a generation of transportation technology, say trains, and move right to hyperloop to showcase the newest in tech.”
Hyperloop Transportation Technologies, has, much like Hyperloop One, a number of feasibility studies in the works around the globe with a specific focus on passenger transportation solutions.
CEO Ahlborn reels off a long list of hyperloop studies partnerships in countries that include the Czech Republic, Indonesia, UAE and France. He says that HTT’s collaborative approach that leverages essentially volunteer engineering talent keeps the operation’s expenses down, which means less of a race against a burn-rate clock.
“Overall though, I welcome the competition, because if one of us succeeds, it helps everyone,” he says. “What’s difficult here isn’t the tech; it’s really not hard to get the capsule moving in the tube. The real challenge is to help create new regulations that can make this a reality.”
And then there’s the new entry in the hyperloop sweepstakes, Arrivo, the brainchild of former Hyperloop One CTO BamBrogan who last year settled a lawsuit with his former employer. He claimed harassment, including the threat of a noose left on his desk; they claimed the onetime SpaceX engineer was plotting to start his own hyperloop company.
A few dozen engineers crowd the open-plan office space, which has labels on the walls indicating where future tests will be conducted on various aspects of hyperloop technology.
The atmosphere is casual, befitting the air of the boss who sports a white T-shirt with the phrase, “Thanks for nothing.” Says BamBrogan: “I don’t tell anyone here what to do. I just ask them, if you could build the future, what would you build?”
BamBrogan is tight-lipped about Arrivo’s mission and plans, citing Hyperloop One’s muchballyhooed press event in the Nevada desert in April 2016, where media and investors were bused an hour outside of Las Vegas to witness a five-second high-speed sled test.
But he says the company will have an announcement about its vision and potential partnerships in the coming weeks. He agrees with his rivals that in order for hyperloop to take a step closer to becoming the next transportation model, it will take far more than the brainpower of a few engineers.
“For this to work, you need a classic infrastructure finance model,” he says. “We’d provide the tech, but you’d also have a construction company to build, an architecture firm to support how this interacts with a city, and land owners who get behind the vision that ultimately might increase the value of what they hold.”
“I welcome the competition, because if one of us succeeds, it helps everyone.” Dirk Ahlborn, CEO, Hyperloop Transportation Technologies