A hyperloop startup has built the first full-scale test track for the transportation system in the desert outside Las Vegas.
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Elon Musk, creator of SpaceX and Tesla Motors has been talking about a high-speed Hyperloop train for a while, claiming that it could theoretically move people through a narrow tube at a speed of 760 miles per hour, enough to shoot riders from San Francisco to Los Angeles in 30 minutes.
Hyperloop Technologies, the company developing some real, revolutionising personal transport tech, announced on Tuesday that it is all set for the first major Hyperloop test.
The concept, originally drawn up by Tesla and SpaceX founder Elon Musk, is created to move “pods” filled with passengers through tubes, which move at ridiculously high speeds-700 miles per hour. According to a Gizmodo report, Mr. Ingels “will give some much-needed design direction for how Hyperloop One’s projects might start to integrate with the cities they’re meant to serve”. Musk hasn’t patented the idea (it wasn’t even his to begin with), which is why Hyperloop One not only tested a proof of concept today, but also changed its name.
Late a year ago, Hyperloop chief executive Rob Lloyd said in an online post that the team was working toward a “Kitty Hawk” moment in 2016.
It’d take place on its first-ever test track in North Las Vegas on Wednesday morning.
It’s still early days but if all goes to plan Hyperloop One hopes to have an operational system around the end of the decade.
“Hyperloop One has built a powerful global ecosystem of companies that are definitive experts in their fields and now come together to unlock the true impact of Hyperloop”, said Rob Lloyd, CEO of Hyperloop One.
The way Hyperloop trains achieves these speeds is by using magnetically propelled train cars or pods that travel through a tube featuring air pressure that has been reduced to a partial vacuum.
Hyperloop One hopes to be moving cargo as soon as 2019 and predicts it will be ready for passengers by 2021. In fact, a rival company, Hyperloop Transportation Technologies, lauded its own prototypes Monday, and said its “levitation system” is based of work done out of Lawrence Livermore National Labs.
Using extremely low air pressure, the human-sized tubes can potentially move people in pods from Los Angeles to San Francisco in just 35 minutes, a trip that now takes an hour by plane, five and a half hours driving, seven hours by bus, and 12 hours via train. It’s now partnering with the Åland Islands-based company FS Links AB to look at the possibility of a track connecting Stockholm and Helsinki.
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Essentially one set of magnets will constantly be pushing away from each other while another set will be attracting towards each other, allowing the pod to accelerate from 0 to 60 miles per hour in about 1 second.
