Hyperloop

Hyperloop is a high-speed transport idea Elon Musk published in 2013: passengers ride electric pods through steel tubes with most of the air pumped out, at speeds the paper put at up to 760 mph. He released a 57-page design called Hyperloop Alpha, declined to patent it, and invited anyone to develop it, since neither Tesla nor SpaceX planned to.

What is Hyperloop?

Hyperloop Alpha described pods floating on a thin cushion of air inside low-pressure tubes, pushed by linear induction motors, electromagnets that move the pod forward without touching it. The headline goal was the roughly 350-mile trip from Los Angeles to San Francisco in about 35 minutes. Elon had called the idea a fifth mode of transport, after planes, trains, cars, and boats, in July 2012, and he released the paper on August 12, 2013.

Why Hyperloop Exists

Hyperloop started as an argument with California's high-speed rail plan. The state was committing tens of billions of dollars to a conventional train between its two largest cities, and Elon argued the route deserved something faster and cheaper. Hyperloop Alpha priced a passenger-only line at about $6 billion, with room for about 7.4 million passengers a year in each direction. It aimed at cities less than about 1,500 kilometers (about 900 miles) apart, where a car is too slow and a flight loses most of its speed advantage to airport security.

How it Works

Pumping most of the air out of the tube removes most of the drag a fast vehicle has to push through, and floating the pod on air removes the friction of wheels on a track. On paper that let a pod cruise at about 500 to 600 mph and reach 760 mph on straight sections, close to the speed of sound at sea level. With so little air and friction, the paper argued, running costs would stay low. The hard parts were building hundreds of miles of sealed, nearly straight tube and buying the land for it.

The Economics of Hyperloop

Elon gave Hyperloop away, so the investment went to the startups his paper inspired. Hyperloop One, the best-funded of them, moved to freight in February 2022 and wound down on December 31, 2023.

The State of Hyperloop Today

SpaceX backed the idea by sponsoring a student Hyperloop Pod Competition from 2015 to 2019 and building a 1-mile test tube, the Hypertube, beside its then headquarters in Hawthorne, California, finished in October 2016. Student teams showed designs in January 2016, and by August 2017 a pod from the Technical University of Munich (TUM) had reached 201 mph.

The TUM team raised the record about 41 percent, to 284 mph, in July 2018, and to 288 mph in July 2019.

The pod races ran through 2019, and in 2021 The Boring Company replaced them with a tunneling contest. It built a short Hyperloop tunnel in Bastrop, Texas in 2022 to test vacuum pumps, and it still lists Hyperloop as a proposed system for pods traveling at more than 600 mph.

What Comes Next

The next milestone for Hyperloop is a full-scale line, with pods running near the paper's speeds, millions of tickets a year, and sealed tube built for less per mile than any test so far.

The Bottom Line

Hyperloop is an idea Elon set loose in a free document in 2013, and it started an industry of startups, student teams, and test tracks around the world.