Hyperloop was one of Elon Musk’s crazy projects. It was presented in 2012 and in the following months organizes a competition for startups to develop in this area. Elon Musk is passionate about the idea of a subsonic train (faster than sound), and will finance part of the development of the project with his company SpaceX.
But everything, his dreams are sometimes too big, and even the richest man on the planet can’t buy everything. After seven years of more or less complicated development, a Hyperloop test site is being demolished. In Hawthorne, California, very close to SpaceX’s offices, the test “tube” for the Hyperloop is retracting.
First failure for The Boring Company
The project never managed to break the “tech lock,” and according to Bloomberg, the site will be turned into a parking lot for employees in the coming months. The tunnel has been out of service since the beginning of the year. Also according to information from the Bloomberg agency, it is in this area that the tests of the technology would have taken place.
The idea of the Hyperloop is to create huge, empty “tunnels” or “tubes” with no air inside. A train would then move, thanks to the laws of magnetism, at incredible speeds. In the absence of air friction, this technology could make it possible to connect cities in minutes.
The project still has supporters
Other similar projects are under construction, notably in Canada and the United States. With a maximum speed of around 1200 km/h (this varies depending on the project), this train of the future would be able to connect Barcelona with Paris in less than an hour.
Very confident in the success of his project, Elon Musk assured in 2018 that the Hyperloop would be able to replace the huge Los Angeles ring road. The boss of The Boring Company explains that the journey will take a few minutes and will only cost a dollar.
Last April, the company announced that “full-scale” testing would begin in 2022. Today, a network of tunnels is present under Las Vegas. Currently, it can be used by Tesla cars while they wait for the first Hyperloop tests to take place.
Hyperloop: a project that will never succeed?
The destruction of the Hawthorne site is not the only negative signal being sent to the fledgling industry. Another major project, Virgin Hyperloop, decided to throw in the towel at the start of the year. More precisely, the company announced that it could not make travel passengers and to go to concentrate on the development of a technology for freight.
Another sign of the failure of the Hyperloop project as a whole. The city of Dubai was to showcase a working Hyperloop tunnel at its World Expo. The facility would have been retained afterwards to allow locals to cross the city in minutes.
Despite the very numerous investments in the small oil emirate, the project never got off the ground, and the Universal Exhibition, postponed to 2021, was carried out without it.