Virgin Hyperloop, a firm briefly helmed by Richard Branson but majority-owned by DP World, which runs Dubai's ports, has also had to scale back its promises. "We're a little more cautious now about those types of announcements," said Miller. None of these projects has come to fruition. In 2019, the firm promised a 10-kilometre (six-mile) track would open in the UAE the following year.
In its early years, Hyperloop TT signed exploratory deals in India, China and beyond. However, proposals are one thing, and revolutionising public transport is quite another. Rob Miller, the firm's chief marketing officer, told AFP it was "further validation" for the concept.īut he stressed that hyperloop was now much bigger than just one man.īearing out his point, new proposals have emerged in recent months from local authorities ranging from Italy to India. Los Angeles-based firm Hyperloop TT, among the first and most enthusiastic firms to run with Musk's idea, welcomed his return. Musk first mentioned the idea in a 2012 media interview before publishing a white paper about it a year later.īut his direct involvement has been sporadic, and he has always encouraged others to develop the idea. READ | Elon Musk fathered twins with Neuralink exec last year: report.Now, his team is taking part in a student-led competition, European Hyperloop Week, which he hopes will refocus on sustainable energy and developing levitation systems.Īnd Musk himself recently gave a jolt to the hyperloop fraternity by tweeting that his tunnelling firm The Boring Company would "attempt to build a working Hyperloop" in the coming years. He is now chief engineer of Delft Hyperloop, a non-profit university spin-off.ĭe Bos said the SpaceX competitions, which were discontinued in 2019, were too focused on speed and became like "drag races in a tunnel".
"It made me really excited to see what the possibilities were," he told AFP. His university at Delft in the Netherlands excelled in competitions run by Musk's SpaceX firm, which invited students to develop pods to fire through vacuum tunnels. Hidde de Bos, a 22-year-old engineering student, first heard of it four years ago. Musk's initial proposal would have been a "barf ride", transport blogger Alon Levy wrote at the time.ĭespite all the problems, though, the hyperloop idea still energises university campuses, corporate board rooms and city halls across the world. The difficulties have ranged from costs and finding suitable locations, to simply persuading people that travelling through a narrow tunnel at speeds faster than a jet plane is a good idea. But nobody has come close to making the hyperloop work.
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