Hyperloop and the Boring Podcast

I cover all things technological. I love technology, and I've been doing this for about eight years, so uh not that I've gotten really great at it, but I'm still so enthusiastic. I'm so enthusiastic in fact, that I'm going to revisit a topic that we covered way back in two thousand thirteen. That would be hyper loop. Yeah, that's when we published the episode titled the Hype about hyper Loop,

because I'm clever with headlines, y'all. Since that time, we've had a couple of startups that formed in order to pour in money, time, resources effort to make hyper loop into a reality. Change it from just this interesting vision Elon Musk had into an actual form of transportation. So I thought it would behoove us to revisit the topic and see where things stand now. Plus I can use the word behoove again. That's twice in the same day.

I'm recording this. The same day I did a live stream about the game Dungeons and Dragons on a show called Game Changers. Behoof is my word of the day. Anyway, I can also talk about a really boring company, and that's what's called foreshadowing. Now, before I jump into the latest news, I should go back over the history of the hyper loop concepts upped and explain not just where it came from, but what is the actual idea of the hyper loop and how is it supposed to work?

And why is it even something worth talking about. Well back in August, that's when the world at large learned about the hyper loop concept. It's when Elon Musk published a white paper that was about fifty eight pages long. And Elon Musk, in case you aren't aware, is the entrepreneur behind such companies as SpaceX, the private space company,

and Tesla, the electric vehicle company. This white paper was all about a high tech transportation system is kind of a train, kind of like a subway, kind of like well, Elon must described it as a cross between a hockey table, like an air hockey table and a rail gun, which is a pretty exciting way to think about getting from point A to point B. Now, the motivating factor for all of this seems to be that the state of California had approved a high speed rail project and Elon

Musk it got his dander up. If you were to look at Elon Musk's dander that day, it would have been in the up position. Now, that's because in that white paper, Musk laid out all of his frustrations with this high speed rail project, and they really boiled down to two major ones with a lot of subsidiary ones. The two major ones was that would be that that one it was incredibly expensive, just really a multibillion dollar project,

so it was in his mind financially wasteful. Secondly, he argued that out of all the high speed rail systems that were in operation or proposed, it was one of the slowest. So he said, on a per mile basis, it's one of the most expensive. On a speed basis, it's one of the slowest. So why would you want to spend a lot of money to not get anywhere fast.

He thought that that was an incredible waste of time and money, and that it wasn't going to solve the issue of of of of speeding up travel between major cities, specifically Los Angeles and San Francisco, which are quite far apart. If you're not familiar with California geography, you might think, oh, well, those are two cities in the same state, but they are hundreds of miles apart from one another. It takes more than five hours of driving to get between the two.

So a high speed rail system would be nice, if in fact it were high speed. But Must argued that the the one that was proposed was not nearly fast enough to be any more advantageous than just taking a flight from Los Angeles to San Francisco, and that there had to be a better way, And so he said there needed to be a less expensive, safer, faster method of getting from San Francisco to Los Angeles or vice versa,

and that he had the better idea. Now Must acknowledge that for cities that are really far apart from each other, think about a thousand miles or kilometers or more, supersonic air travel is likely the best option, assuming we can solve a few major issues with supersonic travel. One of those is getting the right airplane geometry to minimize sonic booms so that air travel doesn't become massively disruptive for

the population on the ground. A sonic boom, by the way, is when you have uh some mass traveling faster than the speed of sound through whatever medium you are traveling through. So, in the case of air, depending upon air pressure and temperature and that sort of thing, if you're traveling faster than the speed of sound, you're building up this pressure wave that ends up collapsing in on itself after the object passes through that area, and that collapse creates this

sonic boom. The sonic boom travels with the object as it moves through. So if you have a supersonic jet traveling overhead, that boom you hear as it passes over, it's not just a single boom. That boom is actually traveling with the supersonic aircraft as long as it is traveling at those incredible speeds. So there are companies that are working on building out better plane models that can travel at these supersonic speeds while minimizing that sonic boom,

and they're making some amazing progress. Uh. These are include private companies as well as NASA working on these designs. So, assuming we get that problem solved, Musk says, it's probably going to be the case that the most efficient way to travel the most uh the cheapest way. Really, it's everything from the amount of time you're spending to the amount of money you spend, will probably be supersonic travel.

But for cities that are closer together than that but still a good distance away, let's say, like nine hundred miles around kilometers apart from each other, you would want a different solution because with a supersonic jet, you would reach cruising altitude and you would only then be able to accelerate to supersonic speeds, but you would only be doing that for a very short while before you had

to descend. You would be essentially be up and down so fast that you can't really take advantage of the supersonic travel part. So it doesn't make sense to take a supersonic flight between two cities that are nine hundred miles or closer together. What you could do is build this hyper loop system in order to travel at incredible

speeds between those points. And that's where the sweet spot is between two cities that are nine miles apart or less, and that they have to be two cities where you would typically have a lot of heavy travel between the two. There's gotta be a lot of traffic. So assuming you have that situation, that's where hyperloop, he argues, would make

a lot of sense. Again, his example being Los Angeles and San Francisco, but any major metropolitan areas where there's a lot of travel between the cities that are at this distance from one another would be candidates for this kind of transportation system. Uh. He would want this train sort of hybrid system to travel at incredible speeds, not quite supersonic. We'll get into that. This is a system that that consists of an enclosed tube or tunnel, and

the air pressure inside that tube would be low. It would still be present, but it would be low. So you would have these giant pumps along the tube that would pump out a lot of the air. So you have a very low pressure system inside the tube that lowers the air resistance considerably but does not create an

actual vacuum. So there's still air inside the tube. Usk acknowledges that the vacuum approach, though very effective it removes air resistance, UH, would be incredibly difficult to achieve from an engineering perspective, because even the smallest imperfection in the tube would allow air to leak in. You know, if you have an extremely low pressure system and you've got greater pressure on the outside, obviously any leak, any crack

is going to allow air to rush in. So he says going with a low pressure system would make more sense than a vacuum. UH, it's too difficult to maintain a vacuum within a room, much less a five hundred mile long loop of tube. In his words, so rather than using something like a mag lev system magnetic levitation system in which the train would levitate above the tunnel floor using electromagnetic repulsion, Musk was proposing using air bearings instead.

So this would not be a system where you use magnets in order to repel one another and that would make the capsule float off the floor of the tube. Instead, it would be like an air hockey table. So if you're not familiar with these, UH, an air hockey table is a table that's got a surface with tiny pin prick holes in it, and a fan under the surface of the table blows air up through those holes. You put a little plastic hockey puck on top of the table.

The air coming up from the bottom ends up making the hockey puck glide across the table. So that's kind of the principle he had for the the hyper loop concept, except instead of having the tube generating this air and blowing against the capsule, he thought of the capsule having essentially these pin pricks at the bottom of the capsule blowing air down, so that would be where the capsule would generate some lift. It would also generate left through

its forward momentum. And at the front of this capsule he wants he post putting a pump a fan essentially, because there's still air inside the tube. If you didn't have a way of moving that air around the capsule, you would run into an issue where you're compressing the air ahead of you. As the capsule moves down the tube, it's pushing a column of air, and if the air cannot get around the capsule fast enough, you start compressing it and that ends up being like an air braking system.

It will actually slow down and ultimately stop the capsule pushing against it in the other direction. So he proposed putting a fan in the front of the capsule to pull air in partly to allow the capsule to continue moving down the tube at speed, but also feeding into an air compressor that then would power these air bearings and allow the capsule to maintain lift on the bottom of the over the top of the tube flooring. And because you're not using wheels, you're not losing a lot

of energy to friction. Right. You've got a little bit of airs instance that you're dealing with, but you're not dealing with wheels running against a surface, so that loss of energy to friction is minimized. It's still there, you still have some air resistance, you still have some other elements of friction, but it's greatly reduced. So uh, this approach, he said, was going to be an effective engineering solution

to the problem. Um, now, what about propulsion. The air bearings provide lift, but how does the capsule actually move forward? This is where Elon Musk was suggesting the external linear electric motor version of of propulsion. So if you know how an electric motor works, let's use a very simple version. You've got let's say, a permanent magnet, and you've got some uh, you've got some electromagnet, you know, conductive wire, insulated conductive wire. We're we're talking more of a dynamo

than a motor here. And you move the permanent magnet so that it's north and south poles are rotating and going. The coil of inductive wire is then being exposed to a fluctuating magnetic field that's going to induce current to flow through the wire. Uh. That also, by the way, generates its own electric field because you have electricity voltage essentially applied to this, uh, this conductive wire. He's thinking about the same sort of thing, but in a linear pathway.

So you've got this, uh, this electro magnetic force that is pulling and pushing the capsule. You have opposite poles, magnetic poles attracting one another that's pulling the capsule forward. Then you have like poles pushing against each other that continues to push the capsule forward. This allows you to accelerate the capsule like a railgun. You're using the electro magnetic force to accelerate it in a linear motion. So it's going straight their bearings or what allow it to

have the lift. The electric motor allows it to have the forward momentum, and this was kind of his general idea for the infrastructure. As for the capsules themselves, his version of it would seat twenty eight passengers per passenger capsule. He had a couple of different models of capsule. He also proposed a version that would have slightly larger capsules.

These would hold up to three full sized automobiles, and you can have passengers inside the automobile, so you could be sitting in a car inside a capsule, and that way you would start in your car in l A and then thirty five minutes later you'd drive out of the capsule in San Francisco, which would save you a

ton of time from the normal five hours plus of driving. UH. The maximum width for a passenger only capsule would be four point four three feet or one point three five meters, so not very wide, with a height of six point one one feet or one one zero meters, so again not very tall. If you're a tall person, you'd be stooping a bit in order to move around this cabin.

UH doors would either be of a goal wing design, meaning like the DeLorean, they lift up, or they would be slides so that it would allow for easy uh

loading and unloading of the vehicle. Luggage would go on one of the two ends of the vehicle, depending upon where you would put the rest of the components, so either in the very front or the very back, And the weight of the passenger capsule without the interior components, just the weight of all the external parts would be about six thousand, eight hundred pounds or three thousand one ms, and Musk estimated the cost for each capsule's exterior to

be about two hundred forty five thousand dollars apiece. Now, all the stuff on the inside, like the seats, the door panels, the restraints, the various displays, would weigh another five thousand, five hundred pounds or two thousand, five hundred ms, and it would cost another two hundred fifty five thousand dollars. Then there are all the other elements that add to the cost, such as the propulsion system components that would be in each capsule, the air compressor blades, the air bearings,

all of this stuff. All of that told, Musk estimated that a passenger only capsule would cost one million three hundred fifty thousand dollars apiece and have a weight total of fifteen thousand kilograms, And he goes on to estimate that you need about fifty four million dollars to make enough capsules for the hyper loop system he was proposing

between Los Angeles and San Francisco. Now that's enough capsules where you would have them at either end so that you could have a consistent UH service between the two cities on any given day. So fifty four million dollars for just the capsules, that's not too bad. However, that doesn't include the cost of the infrastructure. Will get to that if you were traveling on that route, helps safe

would it be? Well? Elon Musk, again arguing for the system he was proposing, said that there would be a lot of redundant safety features, including maintaining a healthy distance between capsules. So between you and the next closest capsule would be a gap of twenty three miles or thirty seven kilometers on average, which is a lot of safety space to prevent collisions between capsules. Still, tons of other safety issues that you would have to take into account

and make sure we're UH prepared for. So that way you don't have any massive issues. Now. According to Musk, the hyper loop would allow for eight hundred forty passengers to travel per hour between Los Angeles and San Francisco. Now that number could be increased by decreasing the amount of departure time between capsules. He was envisioning capsules arriving at a station, unloading, loading up, and every two minutes you would have a capsule leave either l A or

San Francisco. Now that that doesn't mean that a capsule only spends two minutes per station. You would have one station or one capsule arriving at a station while another capsule, maybe three capsules ahead, is leaving, So you would still have several minutes to unload and load each individual capsule before it blasts off and heads over to its destination. Uh.

These capsules would be going pretty darn fast. Musk talks about them hitting speeds of seven hundred sixty miles per hour or one thousand, two hundred twenty kilometers per hour, which is also known as mock point nine one at sixty eight degrees fahrenheit or twenty degrees celsius. So you're talking about going nearly as fast as the speed of sound, but not actually breaking the sound barrier at that speed

at those temperatures. And again that offers me the opportunity to remind you guys, sound travels through the air at a speed that depends on other things like air temperature, So you have to take that into account when you talk about the speed of sound. It's not a constant

through all altitudes and temperatures. You have to have these other variables in account before you can actually talk about the speed of sound, although we can usually just assume we're talking about a standard temperature when we're usually using that term. Back to the show, At that speed, you would be able to make the trip between Los Angeles and San Francisco in about thirty five minutes, and the high speed rail system would take two hours and thirty

eight minutes on that same trip. So the system that Elon Musk was saying was inefficient, slow, and expensive would take two hours thirty eight minutes. Driving takes five hours. A plane trip would take a little bit more than an hour, like an hour and fifteen minutes. So the hyper loop would theoretically be the fastest way to get

from Los Angeles to San Francisco, assuming it works. The way Elon Musk imagines, so thirty five minutes is a huge amount of time saved going from point A to point B. It would be the fastest solution by far. You might wonder what it would be like to actually

travel inside one of those capsules. According to Musk, he imagines that the entire interior would have displays, kind of like television displays or computer displays that would show a landscape, maybe a model of the landscape that you're actually passing through, or maybe it would be something else like outer space or under the water or some other city if you wanted to, Or maybe it would just be television, because there's no point in having windows your inside and enclosed tube.

All you would see is the interior of a tube whizzing by at seven miles per hour. Using the displays would help you get some other sensory input. Uh. There's other interesting questions like would this affect your sense of of your your perception of space, Like would you feel an emotion sickness due to this kind of thing. Uh, that's a question that I don't know the answer to because as far as I know, no one's actually tried it.

But it is really interesting Now we've got a lot more to talk about, uh, and I'm going to dive into some more details about what travel aboard the hyper loop would theoretically be like, as well as talk about some of the companies that are trying to bring it to life. But before I do that, let's take a quick break to thank our sponsor. Now I just mentioned about being inside those capsules and looking at those displays, and you know, seeing some gorgeous stuff and and that

sounds really nice. You would have restraints on your your seats because you're talking about accelerating too pretty incredible speeds and then eventually decelerating. Now, the ideas that you would do this gradually so you wouldn't be experiencing any very powerful G forces. That would also mean that the tube itself would not be able to have any sharp turns on it because the amount of G force you would

experience as a passenger would be too great. You would be very very much uncomfortable, if not blacking out due to those G forces being placed on your body if you were making sharp turns. So you'd have to have very gradual curves to your hyper loop track, and you would have to again have this long acceleration and deceleration so that you're not placing too much stress on your passengers. But let's go back to price for a minute. So I talked about the capsules and that they would cost

a cool fifty four million dollars each. But what about the tube itself, Well, Musk said it would be several billion dollars. He eventually came up with the figure rough Napkin figure of being six billion dollars for a hyper loop system, but he adds that this would still be less expensive than the high speed rail system that California had approved. He said, Yeah, it's six billion dollars for this hypothetical thing I just made up, but it's many

more billion dollars for this other thing that exists. So, um, you know, it's it's kind of easy to say that it's only six billion dollars, only six billion dollars, when you have just proposed it and no one said to actually build the thing yet. But let's just for argument's sake, say that, in fact, it would cost six billion dollars to build. Because I don't want to cast aspersions towards

Elon Musk. I'm just saying that until you build something, you really can't say how much it was going to cost, not with any real authority. It's only after you've built it that you really understand the cost of it. The tube, he says, would be made out of steel, and he says that you could constructed and prefabricated sections and then kind of snap them together, which is being a bit flippant on my part. It actually would involve using an orbital seam welder to create a seal between each length

of tube. So you would put in a prefabricated length the tube, and then you would just seal it to the previous one using this orbital uh seal welder which kind of goes around the entire tube and make sure that they are nice and tightly welded together. And he also suggested that these tubes would rest on pylons, so it would be an elevated track that would be above or really to the side of Interstate five in California, which was more or less a direct path between l

A and San Francisco without too many sharp turns. He says that you would have to have a few deviations from the highway in order to avoid putting too strong a curve in the track. But those deviations would be in his words, minor uh. That way, you could avoid putting those unacceptable g forces on the bodies of your passengers, which, as we have already discussed, would be a bad thing to do otherwise. Musk also said that the energy needed to power the hyper loop could come from solar panels

along the top of the tube. Now, according to Musk, the panels would be enough would be able to generate enough electricity to power the entire system and also charge batteries that would allow the system to operate even if the sun weren't out. So if it were an overcast day, which is common in San Francisco, not necessarily so in Los Angeles, or if it were nighttime, you can still take the system from LA to San Francisco, or San Francis Cisco to l A, because you'd have enough battery

power to keep it going. This is one of the reasons why he was arguing for this air bearing system. He said the air bearing system would be less expensive than a fully electro magnetic mag lev system, and it would consume less power than a mag lev system, so you wouldn't have to worry about creating a huge drain on the existing power grid. You could have it all self powered through these solar panels and batteries. Keep in mind, Elon Musk again is behind Tesla, and Tesla's big product

that's coming out aren't really electric cars. I mean, that's the flashy side. It's really the battery solutions that Elon Musk is behind. So are wing for a system that would rely heavily on battery power also serves his interests to some extent. In his paper, Musk argued that the energy per passenger using the hyperlop technology would be less

than any other form of transportation. Travel by airplane would represent the greatest amount of energy expended per traveler per mile, So he was saying the hyperlop, based on his calculations, would end up being less of an energy drain per person per passenger than anything else that includes cars, motorcycles, trains, any other system in existence would be more energy per passenger to get people from point A to point B

compared to his hypothetical hyper loop. And I keep saying hypothetical and things of that nature, again not to disparage the idea, but just to acknowledge the fact that without an actual working system where we're relying upon theoreticals, hypotheticals, We're not relying upon actual hard data that we can look at and say, oh yeah, in fact, the math

does work out the right way. Uh. Due to this low cost of operation, Musk says that you can charge a very reasonable price for tickets on the hyper loop. His suggestion for a one way ticket from Los Angeles to San Francisco or vice versa, would be twenty dollars for a thirty five minute trip between the two cities. He says charging twenty dollars per ticket for twenty years would offset the six billion dollar estimated cost of constructing

the whole shebang, which is pretty incredible. I mean, it's making a lot of assumptions again that you would have enough of a passenger base to be busy and charge at twenty dollars, and that you're patient enough to take twenty years to pay off this investment. But if it's correct,

that is amazing. Twenty dollars would be a steal compared to an airplane ticket or even a ticket on the California Train, because that high speed rail train they were talking about much more expensive tickets than twenty bucks a person for a one way ticket. Uh. Again, without having all of the math done, we can't be sure that twenty years would be enough time to recapture the cost

of construction. I don't know if that also builds in any potential maintenance costs that surely would come up over those times, but he claimed that twenty dollars a seat that would do it. A couple of notable companies have formed to try and bring this vision to life, and one of those is hyper Loop One. So let's take some time to talk about this company because it's got

some stories behind it. So there's an entrepreneur named Shervin Pishamar who first talked to Musk in January two thousand thirteen. I remember it was August when Musk announced this idea of the hyper loop and they were traveling to Cuba and apparent Lee. During this trip, Musk talked about this hyper loop concept and Servin was really interested in it, and he even said later on that Musk should go

public with this idea. So, according to the hyper Loop one web page, it was Servin who convinced Elon Musk to publish that white paper and talk about this after Musk's announcement, Servin gathered a team together to form the startup hyper Loop one. Now, if you go to hyper Loop one's website and you look at this team and includes some names on there, there's Jim Messina, there's Joe Lonsdale,

David Sachs, and Peter Diamandis. But there's one name you will not find on the hyper Loop one website, but he was among the founders, and that's the name Brogan bam Brogan. So Brogan Bam Brogan, formally known as Kevin Brogan, was an engineer who worked at SpaceX and of course that's the private space exploration company. He married a woman named Bambi Lieu In. The two decided that they would merge their names together, so it was kind of forming

a new name by combining their names. That's where he got Brogan bam Brogan, which I think is endurable. And he became the chief technology officer for hyper Loop one. But then things seem to go very wrong, and we don't know the full story, but we do know about the lawsuits, so I can tell you what the lawsuit said. According to bam Brogan and a few of his colleagues, things went sour at the corporate level at hyper Loop one, so you've got this company that is trying to create

the actual technology that Elon Musk was talking about. Meanwhile, according to bam Brogan, there were some shenanigans going on at the corporate level. He alleged that the company leaders were being wasteful, that they were blowing through investor money on things that weren't necessary, or that we're fraud gialant

in his eyes. And he also claimed that the corporate leadership was engaging in nepotism, that they were hiring on friends and family for things that they weren't necessarily qualified for, or that there might have been more qualified candidates out there that were being ignored in favor of these folks. He also accused Pischavar of using stock options as leverage to get what he wanted from employees, essentially holding it over their heads. Uh as both a stick and a

carrot at the same time. So, in other words, these were a whole series of really ugly all allegations and accusations. Beam Brogan then says that he and some of his colleagues voiced their objections and concerns and then they were all met with repercussions they were met with punishments. Beam Brogan was met with a threatening gesture. Specifically, he says that Pischavar left a rope nodded in a noose on bam Brogan's desk, and there's some security footage that seemed

to potentially back up bam Brogan's accusation. There's a man who you know, they say was pishamr and he's clearly holding some rope, although you can't necessarily see if it's a noose or not, but still, if that is true, it's a pretty ugly move of intimidation. It's not your typical corporate behavior unless you're salesperson trying to move property in Glengarry Glenn Ross style. Always be closing guys, always

be closing well. Ben Brogan then said that one of his colleagues was fired in front of his own family the next day and another one was demoted, and that bam Brogan himself was encouraged to take a leave of absence from the company, so he responded with a lawsuit.

Hyper Loop One's response was also accusatory. The company lawyer said that the lawsuit was quote unfortunate and delusional end quote, and also claimed that bam Brogan had been trying to undermine Pischamar and was actually trying to do a corporate coup and and change the leadership through some other form of corporate leverage, and so there were accusations flying on

both sides. Now, in November twenty sixteen, news broke that the two parties had settled this lawsuit out of court for uh an unreported sum, so no one was talking about how much money changed hands. According to a statement from bam Brogan's lawyers, uh It's said this quote, My clients are pleased to announce they have reached a confidential resolution of litigation with their former employer and look forward

to moving on with their future plans end quote. Bam Brogan, by the way, recently founded his own company called Arrivo, with its headquarters apparently less than one mile away from hyper Loop one's offices, So that's got to be awkward if you're ever in traffic. Arrivo is also in the hyper loop design game, so they're getting in that space. According to bam Brogan, his new company has a quote unique take end quote on the hyper loop concept. No

idea what that means. Meanwhile, back at hyper Loop one, the company was installing a They installed a fifty ft long, twelve ft wide structure called the Big Tube. Now this was not a hyperloop tube. It was a testing facility. It was meant to create low pressure environments to test things like seals in test tracks, test tubes. Not a test tube, but a tube that they were testing to make sure that it was constructed properly. So it was a testing facility, not a hyper loop tube on its own.

And the hyper loop one approach doesn't use air bearings the way Musk's design did. Instead, it did use mag lev as the means to suspend capsules in the tube,

so they went with the electromagnetic levitation route. Uh so it requires a bit more power, more than a bit more power than the hyperloop one or hyperloop concept that Elon Musk was first chatting about back in In December, hyper Loop one built the APEX Test and Safety site outside of Las Vegas, Nevada that would become the testing ground for prototype hyperloop infrastructure and capsules, and on May eleven, sixteen, the company hosted a Propulsion System Open Air test or

p o a t POPE or poe AT. In this test, a hyper loop sled accelerating to a top speed of a hundred thirty six miles per hour in two point two seconds. That's an incredible acceleration. The test was to see if the acceleration motor would work properly, so they weren't trying to accelerate up to top speed. A hundred thirty six miles per hour is nowhere close to the top speed of what their capsules would ultimately take. The company also announced a global challenge to find the best

hyperloop projects in the world. Hyper Loop one has proposed a system that would link Helsinki and Stockholm together, which would be pretty nifty, and in August seen the company began construction on the Development Loop or devl loop in Nevada. This was the first full scale hyperloop test track, and November of twenty sixteen, the first section of the devl

loop was installed. It was called Fixity, and in January hyper loop announced that thirty five semifinalists had been uh had been had reached the global challenge, so they got down to thirty five semifinalists and these were proposals that would link various cities together to create hyper loop routes. On March seventh, seventeen, the DEVL loop construction was completed, and on May twelve, seventeen, the first full scale hyperloop

test was conducted. On July twelve, seventeen, Hyperloop unveiled a prototype aero shell. This is the outer hall of the capsules that would be in its system, and it's kind of nifty looking. You should take a look at the picture of it. Sadly, this is an audio podcast and I cannot show you one. On July seventeen, they tested out a vehicle that traveled down the full length of the five DEVL loop track, accelerating for three and then

gliding the rest of the way again at fives. You're not going to get to your full speed, you just can't, but you can test out the various systems to make sure that the concept behind them does in fact war. The company wants to have three production systems working by one, which is pretty ambitious. So hyper Loop one is probably the furthest along out of all the different hyper loop companies, and it inadvertently spawned a second one or EVO, but

it is not the only one. There are other hyper loop companies out there, and they're all competing at this I'll talk about another one in just a second, called hyperloop transportation technologies. And it's really interesting to see people jump on this again in an area that hasn't had proven success. That's not to discourage them, but it kind of shows how Elon Musk has this amazing ability to inspire people to take chances without necessarily being able to

show that you can have a return on them. People have talked about Tesla Motors struggling to be profitable while they are clearly creating products and people have a strong desire or to own them. The company as it stands is one of those that is always striving for profit

but hasn't emerged as an enormously profitable company. So for Elon must to continue to go forward and make these bold proclamations and have people not just take it to heart, but then pour their own money and investments and resources into trying to make it come to pass. That's a pretty insanely awesome thing to be able to do. Uh. I can't convince people to give me a seat on

the subway. So although I find that if I talk to myself a lot and argue, I often end up with a seat all to myself, but I think that might require that doesn't rely so much on charisma as it does just social awkwardness. All Right, when we get back, I'm gonna talk a little bit about hyper loop uh more, you know, the hyper loop transportation technol alogies, as well as Elon Musk's attempt to get into the hyper loop

game himself. But I really wanted to cover that weird controversy of hyper loop one first and get that out of the way. We'll come back in just a moment, but first, let's take a quick break to thank our sponsor. Okay, let's talk about hyper loop transportation technologies for a second. This is, like I said, was the other big startup to come out shortly after Elon Musk's announcement. Arriva was new to the scene, but hyper loop transportation technologies and

hyper Loop one have been around for a while. So this company is also using mag lev technology, but in this case it's passive mag lev, not active mag lev. Now that means that part of the system, the system that would actually be lining the the tubes is just unmpowered coils of conductive wire, and so you're not putting any electricity through them and are not acting as electro

magnets on their own. UH. This method was pioneered by a physicist named Richard Post and the concept itself ends up getting a little complicated, so I'm not going to dive too far into it because it would require almost a full episode all on its own. But basically, what you have are these various coils of conductive wire, and then you take these magnets and you put them in a specific configuration so that their polls are lined up in a very specific way with respect to one another.

And I'm I'm glossing over this because again, to get into real details, we'd have to dive into physics pretty deeply. If you pass this array of magnets over the coils of conductive wire, it induces uh a charge to flow through those those coils, and that in turn creates an

electromagnetic field. The key to this is you have to get the capsule up to a certain speed before this will have But once you do get to that speed, then you are able to achieve magnetic levitation with a passive system, so you don't have to send any electricity through that that those coils of wire that would line the the hyperloop tube that means that you're saving a

lot on energy. You just have to have the right uh systems aboard the actual capsule, but you don't have to power the whole tube itself, so that cuts down on your electricity needs. It also cuts down on the cost of operation, so you end up being able to pass the savings onto maybe the consumer, or maybe you're just pocketing a whole lot of extra profit. But it's

a really cool form of magnetic levitation. Uh. The cool thing about it also is that in the case of some sort of problem that there is some sort of power loss on board the capsule. For example, the the capsule will start to cope and it once it dips below a certain speed a threshold, then it will not be able to create the electro magnetic field or won't be able to induce the electromagnetic field from these coils of wire, and the capsule will come to arrest on

the bottom of the tube floor. So in a way, it's kind of a safety measure because in a catastrophic failure, the capsules are all going to slow down on their own and then gradually come to arrest because just by the act of slowing down, they can no longer remain

above the tube floor hyperloops. Hyper Loop Technologies leadership team includes Dirk all Born who is a co founder of jump Starter Incorporated, and Bebop g Gresta, who is another entrepreneur, and both of them have extensive experience in starting and funding ventures, so these are people who are used to starting up big companies or getting funding for big companies.

They have agreements with lots of different cities, including cities in South Korea, in Indonesia and France, In Czech Republic, in the UH, they have an agreement with Abu Dhabi UH. There's an agreement in Slovakia all to construct hyperloop systems in the future. But all of this is really early on obviously, so it's the earliest phases of the hyperloop game from that aspect. Now recently, as of the recording of this podcast, Elon Musk has actually decided to get

into this game himself. So when he first announced this back in two thousand thirteen, he did so as it as an open source project, meaning that he was allowing anyone to take this idea and run with it and alter it in any way they wanted to in order to build the sort of systems that he had in mind. So he was saying, look, I've got this great idea, but don't have time for this. I'm going to space and putting people in electric vehicles and other stuff. Being

an international man of mystery, perhaps I don't know. I don't have time to get into this as well, so someone else do it. Well, now he's saying, you know what, I think I'm gonna do this, And he has said that he's getting into this as well. And in fact, SpaceX has been working on building out a tube that would be not not quite hyperlop, but is sort of a stepping stone toward hyperloop technologies, and they've talked about

also building a hyper loop test facility in Texas. So part of this involves a new company that Elon Musk announced, the TBC Company or the Boring Company insert tons of pun jokes here. The boring Company in this case does not mean a company that is uninteresting and we'll put you to sleep, although it may also do that. It is talking about a company that bores holes in to the earth or tunneling purposes, so it uses boring machines, machines that bore a hole into the ground so that

you can build out tunnels. Now. They didn't build the boring machines. They bought them. In fact, as far as I know, they only have one right now, and it is named good And they decided to name their machines after literary characters and figures, so Goodo being from Beckett's play Waiting for Godot and Uh. I don't know if that's a commentary about literature, about whether or not literature is supposed to be boring. I hope it isn't. I was a literature major in college, and I would find

that deeply insulting. Not that I think Elon Musk would really care about that, but still, come on, Ellen, be a nice guy. So these machines would bore tunnels into the earth, presumably for a either an underground transportation system within US that would not be hyper loop. Instead, it

would use electric skates. Imagine slot cars. If you've ever played with a slot car system where you've got these little cars and they fit into a slot, they snap into a slot on a track and then use a little controller and you can make the car zoom around the track. It's not dissimilar to that. Instead of slot cars, you would have these sleds that would be attached to

this underground tunnel system. And what you would do is, if you wanted to travel across town, you would drive your car onto a platform of some sort that would lower you down onto one of these sleds, and then you would put the car in park and then the sled would zoom off, So it's like you're in a parking space that is moving. The sled itself can move through the tunnels, and it can even join in two tunnels that have existing sleds already moving through it using

UH software. So it's essentially like an autonomous car, except instead of the car being on onymous, it's the sled itself. It's programmed to know where you want to be dropped off, and it picks you up, takes you through the tunnel system, drops you off wherever you need to go, and it can do so at a very high speed, at least according to Musk's design, like a twenty miles per hours,

so pretty fast. And again this is for intercity travel from one point in a city to another, and the reason for this, Musk says, is to alleviate traffic issues. He says there are only two solutions. You have to alleviating traffic ultimately in big urban centers, and that is either to go up in the case of flying cars, or to go down in the case of tunneling. And he says, by tunneling, you can create this whole three dimensional transportation system that can get you anywhere within a

city super super fast, uh, avoiding street traffic. So it's an interesting idea. Well, that was what the boring company was supposed to be, but he also said, oh and also you could, if you wanted to, you know, dig high per loop tunnels. So remember originally he had talked about hyper loop being a tube on top of pylons, but now he's also talking about the possibility of building

a hyper loop that would be subterranean. You would go down a couple dozen feet, and then you would dig a tunnel to uh to house this hyper loop tube and you would go through that way. He says that you know, this would be less expensive than other tunneling companies, largely because he's thinking of building one way travel tubes. So instead of it being a double wide tunnel, it

would be single wide. He says they would have to be only fourteen ft wide compared to your standard tunnels which are twice that length, and that would speed things up and make them less expensive. By speed things up, I think he's talking in relative terms because your average boring machine moves slower than a snail's pace. And that's not an exaggeration, that's legit. They actually moved slower than

snails move. Now, Elon Musk wants to use this potentially to build this hyper loop system, and he tweeted not long ago in that he had received quote verbal approval and quote from the White House to build out a hyper loop system that would connect DC to New York City and also potentially connect other cities like Baltimore and Philadelphia within this loop. So verbal commitment isn't a contract.

There are lots of other layers that any sort of agreement would have to go through before you could actually build out such a system. We're talking state level, we're talking city level, county level. There are tons of different layers that stand in the way of building out the system, and a verbal agreement doesn't really hold up as anything really firm. So we still have a long way to go.

But if Elon Musk has his way a he would end up building out this system on the East Eastern seaboard, and you would have a way of getting from Washington, d C. To New York City in less than an hour, going more than six hundred miles per hour on one of these hyperloop trains. Um Obviously, we're still in the early days. Back in when we talked about this the first time, it was all very conceptual and no one

had really built anything, not even a testing facility. Yet today we can say that there are testing facilities out there and they're showing some promising results. We still don't know exactly how expensive it will be to build out these systems, or how much interference or or resistance they might encounter. At a political level, there haven't been enough studies on the safety of such systems or potential environmental impact. I'm still curious to find out about how all these

systems will be powered. If Elon musk system can in fact be powered by soul or power if he does a subterranean version, is he going to align the upper level with solar panels to power this hyper loop, or will it in fact draw its electricity from some other source. We don't have any details for these to answer these questions.

As it stands, so I'm sure, assuming that tech stuff is still alive and kicking in the future, when hyperloop either becomes a reality or is abandoned altogether, we can revisit this again and talk about what did happen, what didn't happen, what went right, what went wrong. I can say that I want it to succeed. I want this to be something that works. I want to see cities connected in this way where you can have very fast,

convenient travel. I want to see it at a price where the average person could in fact take advantage of it. If it's twenty dollars a ticket ends up being a reality,

I think that's great. A lot of people have suggested that perhaps the expenses would be much greater than what what's anticipated, and therefore the price per ticket would be way way higher, which means you ultimately create a transportation system for rich people, and rich people, while they can afford to take it, there's not enough of them to

support an entire transportation system on their own. You have to have something that can have the volume of passengers needed to keep it going with that flow of revenue. Ah Otherwise you're just gonna have a very expensive toy that ends up getting a little bit of use out of the gate, and then overtime winds down because there's just not enough financial support. Even if all the technology works,

the economics might not work. And that's the interesting thing about tech is that sometimes all your parts are working just fine, it's just they're not working enough. So that's kind of the update on hyperloop, how it stands now and where it's going. We'll keep an eye on this and see if again, any actual construction happens on a major level in any of these cities, and if so, how it all turns out. Meanwhile, if you guys have suggestions for episode topics I should cover in future episodes

of tech Stuff, let me know. Send me an email. The address is text stuff at how stuff works dot com, or you can drop me a line on Facebook or Twitter. The handle of both of those is tech Stuff HSW. You should keep in mind I do live stream my podcast recordings. This episode was live streamed in front of a live studio audience who are chatting at me right now, and you can find that at twitch dot tv slash tech Stuff. Every Wednesday and Friday, I record episodes of

tech Stuff, So come join me. Be part of the conversation, and I'll talk to you again really soon for more on this and bathands of other topics because it has to works. Dot com nine