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Elon Musk’s Hyperloop Super High-Speed Transportation Solution Goes Testing

Thinking that Elon Musk’s ambitions are restricted to his Tesla EVs would be a huge mistake. In fact, his two other endeavours are a lot more spectacular: space travel and some sort of weird trains that travel really, really fast.
Hyperloop test track in Nevada 1 photo
Photo: Screenshot from YouTube
We’re here to talk about the latter of the two. According to Elon Musk’s own characterization, the Hyperloop (that's its name) is a “cross between a Concorde, a railgun and an air hockey table.” Believe it or not, that actually makes sense. The project started to take shape in 2012 when a group of engineers from both Tesla and SpaceX began working on it. In 2013, Elon Musk pulled an "I'm just gonna leave this here" move by offering the chance to develop the project to any interested party.

The main idea behind Hyperloop is to take air friction out of the equation, which happens to be the one thing holding back “ordinary” high-speed trains at the moment. Musk’s idea goes further than that since his design doesn’t even need rails - or any wheels whatsoever - because his pods glide on a very thin cushion of air inside a partially vacuumed steel tube. This setup makes rolling resistance and air resistance virtually obsolete.

The initial plan for Hyperloop was to link Los Angeles to the San Francisco Bay Area, running along the Interstate 5. According to simulated data, the 354-mile (570 km) route would be covered in 35 minutes, which means an average speed of 598 mph (962 km/h) and a top speed of 760 mph (1,220 km/h). Which is basically Mach 0.99.

Don’t save the money for the ticket just yet, though, as the whole project is still in its early phase. The fact that a test track is about to begin construction in North Las Vegas, though, shows that Hyperloop Technologies, the company that took Musk's idea and decided to try and turn it into reality, is dead serious about it.

This open air testing track does away with a lot of the final project’s ideas (there’s no steel tube, and the testing vehicle will be sitting on a rail), but that’s only because its sole purpose is to check if the induction motors are up to their part of propelling the future pods to nearly the speed of sound. If everything goes to plan, the vehicle will be reaching 300 mph (483 km/h) in just two seconds and on just half a mile of track. Most of which will be probably used to slow down the test vehicle, anyway.

This development comes just after news of a five-mile fully-enclosed Hyperloop test track beginning construction in Kings County, California. The $150 million investment is supposed to take up to 31 months before completion, so this simpler facility in Nevada is likely to be the first to become operational.

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About the author: Vlad Mitrache
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"Boy meets car, boy loves car, boy gets journalism degree and starts job writing and editing at a car magazine" - 5/5. (Vlad Mitrache if he was a movie)
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