Could go either way

Hyperloop: Elon Musk’s pipe dream or actually the future of travel

From mind-reading machines to colonies on Mars, no idea is too ambitious or eccentric for Elon Musk. But it is the billionaire Tesla founder’s concept of a “hyperloop” to end traffic jams that has perhaps drawn the greatest scepticism.

In 2013, he outlined his vision for a magnetic levitation train that would fire passengers in pods at speeds of up to 700mph.

While many dismissed it as a pipe dream, the proposal captured the imagination of a select group of engineers around the world who believed the concept could, one day, become a reality.

One of those ventures is Dutch start-up Hardt Hyperloop based in the quaint, medieval town of Delft.

Its narrow canals and bicycles may seem far removed from Musk’s original dream of a Silicon Valley hyperloop, but here a team of university graduates have taken to his vision with gusto.

“It’s a major challenge that will have a huge impact on the world as a whole,” says Tim Houter, the 27-year-old chief executive of Hardt.

Musk’s hyperloop plans led to a grand, global challenge; the Hyperloop Pod Competition. In 2017, the entrepreneur put out calls for teams to design and build pods for the technology.

It was an idea that Houter, a student at the time, took to immediately. “One of my friends said on our group chat: ‘Time to drop your studies because we are going to build a hyperloop’.”

Hyperloop was dreamt up by Musk as a “fifth mode of transport”. He believed the hyperloop would fire passengers at hundreds of miles per hour using magnetic levitation and air pressure in a vacuum-sealed tunnel. In theory, it would require less land and power than traditional trains and achieve plane-like speeds due to a lack of air resistance.

Houter and his co-founders – product head Marinus van der Meijs, commercial boss Mars Geuze and research lead Sascha Lamme – were a team originally made up of members of a club at Delft University designing electric race cars.

The ambitious students set up the

first Delft Hyperloop team, a group that has sent pod designs to the competition every year since 2017. The group developed a hyperloop pod that they took to the 2017 round of the hyperloop challenge at Spacex’s headquarters (another Musk company) in Hawthorne, California.

After the competition, they spun out of the venerable engineering university into a start-up. But turning the hare-brained idea into reality is something that will take time and will need, Houter says, someone to sign off on “a couple of billion”.

So far, Hardt hyperloop has raised just €7m (£6.4m) from investors such as Innoenergy, although it is arguably Europe’s best-known hyperloop effort.

“We are working on acquiring financial resources,” Houter says. The company has projects with Amsterdam’s Royal Schiphol Airport Group and the Netherlands’ largest engineering firm, BAM Group, which are providing support. It also has deals with industry giant Tata Steel and Deutsche Bahn to research the technology.

And yet larger rivals, backed by hundreds of millions of dollars from venture capital, have made only limited progress on the technology in the six years since it was proposed.

The largest is Virgin Hyperloop One, the Nevada-based hyperloop company that has built a 500m-long test track (Hardt’s is just 30 metres and cannot do speed tests). It has said it plans to develop a 330-mile hyperloop from London to Edinburgh some day. The Branson-backed firm laid off 60 staff last year, including its chief financial officer and head of engineering. In May it secured further funding, bringing its total raised to £330m. One hyperloop venture has failed outright. Los Angeles-based Arrivo, a hyperloop start-up founded by the extravagantly named former Hyperloop One founder Brogan Bambrogan, laid off all its staff in November last year, despite claiming it had a $1bn (£820m) deal with a Chinese firm to develop its technology.

These failures have led to no shortage of sceptics. “There are still zero full-scale hyperloop test tracks worldwide,” says Gareth Dennis, director of engineering consultancy Permanent Rail. “Once you realise it is just maglev made more expensive, you realise why it is so ridiculous.”

Venture capital firms have ploughed money into early hyperloop firms, many of which have splashed cash on marketing as they try to convince governments to provide backing to any kind of hyperloop infrastructure project. Start-ups have boasted of plans for tracks spanning the US, India and the Middle East, none of which have even been started. “That is the world of venture capital,” Dennis says, “if the hype reduces from a boil to a simmer, the cash disappears.”

Despite the challenges, Houter is full of optimism. Hardt will need every ounce of it, a start-up founded by four university students and with only a few million euros in backing certainly looks like a long shot. It currently has just 25 staff. “We said we had to dream big, but start small. We are really now at the point of scaling up to a larger test facility,” he says.

Houter claims they are planning a project of two to three years, the first stage of which will be a 3km proof of concept track in the Flevoland region of the Netherland.

“Implementing infrastructure takes a lot of time,” Houter says. He says he expects to build a “showcase route of around 10 to 15km” around 2023, “that will be the first moment you can sit in and travel in a hyperloop”.

It is also planning more ambitious ventures, such as a concept for a 280-mile route from Amsterdam to Frankfurt. Houter is hesitant to talk funding, but a filing on the European Investment tendering website suggests Hardt is looking for an initial €150m. Its filing says the track would create around 400 jobs.

But any serious European project is likely to be far off, with little government appetite for major infrastructure projects and sluggish economies across Europe. An estimate from the Transport Research Laboratory put the cost of a hyperloop at £53m per mile, while a leaked internal estimate from Virgin Hyperloop One suggested upwards of $121m (£100m).

In a country that has just started a £56bn high speed rail project, HS2, a UK hyperloop seems even more remote. A report from Innovate UK last year said Britain could play some role in developing a technical supply chain for hyperloop, but added “some doubt the logic of building a hyperloop in the UK based on geography”. A source close to the UK’S innovation strategy said they “don’t think there is any possibility” of a hyperloop happening in the UK.

Houter is undaunted. “Take aeroplanes 100 years ago. People could not imagine how that would change the world, enhance the development of society as a whole. That is something we are truly striving for with a European hyperloop connecting capital cities faster than aeroplanes.”

For now, Hardt will have to make do with its 30m test track. “This would never have been done without our team working day and night to realise it,” Houter says.

Unfortunately, it will take more than hard work and Dutch courage to get Europe’s hyperloop on the rails.

‘That is the world of venture capital. If the hype reduces from a boil to a simmer, the cash disappears’