Tracking Hyperloop, Elon Musk's high-speed pipe dream

Hyperloop Transportation Technologies (HyperloopTT) has unveiled the first of its full-scale capsules that it hopes will one day be used to transport passengers at 750 miles per hour, reports Bloomberg. The California-based company is one of several Hyperloop contenders that have sprung up to deliver on Elon Musk’s 2013 transportation vision. The company will now transport the capsule to Toulouse in France, where it has begun construction of its test track, for further assembly and optimization. HyperloopTT says it hopes it’ll be “passenger ready” by 2019.

HyperloopTT’s ‘Quintero One’ pod is around 105 feet long and weighs 5 tons. It’s constructed “almost completely” out of the company’s own composite material which it has dubbed “Vibranium,” in a nod to the fictional material from the Marvel comics. The company claims the material is “eight times stronger than aluminum and 10 times stronger than steel alternatives.”

Hyperloop One just got a major vote of confidence from one of the world’s most recognizable billionaire industrialists not named Elon Musk. Virgin Group founder Richard Branson is investing in the super fast transport system and will be joining Hyperloop One’s board of directors, the two companies announced today. As a result, the company is rebranding as “Virgin Hyperloop One.”

“As a train owner, I felt this is something that I want to be able to operate,” Branson said to CNBC. “At the moment our trains are limited to 125 miles an hour... There are consumers, for instance, that would love to go from London to Edinburgh in roughly 45 minutes. And that will be possible [with hyperloop].”

Make no mistake, Elon Musk is now taking the commercialization of his Hyperloop idea very seriously. His Tesla-branded Hyperloop pod hit 220 mph (355 km/h), according to Musk, breaking the 201 mph speed record set by the students of team WARR at the Hyperloop Pod Competition earlier this week. Both records occurred at the 0.8-mile-long SpaceX Hyperloop test track that runs parallel to the company in Hawthorne California.

The Tesla pod, while fast, isn't anywhere near the supersonic speeds that Musk thinks are possible in the (near) vacuum of his test tube. And the mere 20 mph margin obtained by the Tesla pod makes the WARR accomplishment all the more impressive given the relatively tiny budget the students had to work with. Still, Musk thinks he can "get past 500 km/h (about half speed of sound) next month with a few tweaks or maybe tiny pieces," according to his Instagram post announcing the record.

After over a year of incremental progress and underwhelming, low-speed tests, the hyperloop is finally starting to show us what it can do. On July 29th, Hyperloop One’s prototype pod accelerated down the length of its 500-meter-long test tube in the Nevada desert, reaching a top speed of 192 mph before gliding to a stop. The company claims it was the fastest hyperloop test yet, which isn’t a tough sell considering Hyperloop One is the only company in the world that we know of with a full-scale hyperloop.

The nearly airless tube was depressurized down to the equivalent of air at 200,000 feet above sea level, the company says. The pod, dubbed the XP-1, glided above the track using magnetic levitation, which limits aerodynamic drag and theoretically allows for a top speed of 760 mph. In a statement, Hyperloop One chair Shervin Pishevar didn’t mince words: “When you hear the sound of the Hyperloop, you hear the sound of the future.”

There are two hyperloop startups based in Los Angeles: one is extremely eager to publicize its progress on this futuristic, insanely fast transportation system, the other... not so much. Until now.

Hyperloop Transportation Technologies (HTT), the more coquettish of the two startups, finally released a handful of images and a video to prove that it is building what it says is the world’s first full-scale, passenger-ready hyperloop, capable of speeds of up to 760 mph. Unfortunately, the pictures raise more questions than they answer.

Hyperloop still feels a little more like science fiction than an actual project, but as new pictures from superfast transportation company Hyperloop One show, the technology is slowly making its way into the real world. The new images give an insight into how construction is progressing on Hyperloop One’s very own hyperloop in the Nevada desert, showing suspended track that could one day carry (possibly screaming) passengers at ridiculous speeds across the United States.

The test track — known as DevLoop — is 500 meters long and 3.3 meters in diameter, giving enough space for Hyperloop One to conduct public trials of its technology in the first half of this year. The track itself can be found some 30 minutes from Las Vegas, out in the kind of desert that hyperloop pods could one day traverse in minutes.

Last weekend, excitement ran high at the SpaceX Hyperloop competition, a culmination of a year’s work on dogged research and development to imagine and build the transportation of the future. Just before the first finalist’s pod launched, a rustle ran through the crowd of SpaceX employees, hyperloop teams, and journalists. Elon Musk appeared on the stage.

Back in 2013, Musk released his white paper that theorized the possibility of aerodynamic aluminum capsules filled with passengers or cargo that could travel in a nearly airless tube at roughly the speed of sound. “Hyperloop Alpha” teased the possibility of traveling from San Francisco to Los Angeles in just 30 minutes. His idea inspired engineers and investors around the world, ultimately prompting Musk to launch the design contest. Part one was held at Texas A&M University last year, while part two — in which actual pods were propelled through an actual hyperloop tube, a global first — wrapped up last Sunday.

Hyperloop One, the well-funded, slightly dysfunctional, futuristic transportation startup announced that it has settled a lawsuit brought by four former employees, including co-founder and chief technology officer Brogan BamBrogan, for an undisclosed sum of money.

In an email sent to employees earlier Friday, Hyperloop One CEO Rob Lloyd said he was “pleased” to announce the settlement of the suit, which stunned many when it dropped weeks after the company’s first public test. “Lawsuits can be distracting for companies; they often halt momentum until they can be resolved,” Lloyd said in his memo to staff. “That didn’t happen here.”

Hyperloop One — the well-funded, slightly dysfunctional, futuristic transportation startup — said Tuesday that it would study the possibility of building the world’s first passenger-ready hyperloop in Dubai, in the United Arab Emirates.

But more than that, the company also released a slickly produced video to give us a glimpse at what riding in a hyperloop would be like from the passenger perspective. And the biggest shock is that the designers envision their Dubai hyperloop to be both ultrafast transportation system and a smartphone-based, on-demand service, à la Uber.

Brent Callinicos has a reputation as one of the smartest financial minds in Silicon Valley. He helped spearhead Uber’s fastest years of growth as the ride-hailing startup’s chief financial officer, and served similar roles at Google and Microsoft. Now he’s heading to Hyperloop One, a futuristic transportation startup that has both a lot of potential and a lot of baggage.

Callinicos will serve as chief financial advisor to Hyperloop One CEO Rob Lloyd, as well as to the board of directors, the company announced Thursday. He was courted by company executive chairman Shervin Pishevar, who was also an early investor in Uber. In an interview with The Verge, Lloyd said Callinicos invested in the startup’s Series B fundraising round, and after relocating from the Bay Area to Los Angeles, decided to join the company officially. “We hope he can help us do the same things he helped Uber do in those early days,” he added.

Last January, Hyperloop Transportation Technologies (HTT) announced it had filed permits with Kings County in California to build "the world's first passenger-ready Hyperloop system." But the company never completed its planning application, according to a recent feature story in Wired.

Turns out there’s a bit more to it than that. Back in January, HTT said it would build its Hyperloop as part of Quay Valley, a proposed development meant to house 75,000 people located halfway between San Francisco and Los Angeles. The company said it would start principal construction in the middle of 2016. But HTT has yet to submit its environmental review application, which is delaying its building process. "This is nothing unusual," Sandy Roper, the principal planner at the Kings County Community Development Agency, told The Verge "There’s no set timeline" for projects such as these, Roper added.

Hyperloop One is celebrating the grand opening of what it calls "the world’s first Hyperloop factory," just two weeks after one of its co-founders filed a lawsuit against the company, claiming, among other things, that a noose was left on his desk. The lawsuit includes a number of potentially damning allegations against the company and its leadership, and it was followed by a countersuit from the current management with equally aggressive claims.

It all means that the timing couldn’t be better for some good news like the opening of the new factory. Other than management controversy, Hyperloop One seems to be the Hyperloop company with the most momentum behind it, thanks to its considerable funding lead, and the head start of being the first company to begin testing their prototypes.

Hyperloop Transportation Technologies (HTT) announced today that it will build an “innovation train” for Germany’s Deutsche Bahn, the largest railway operator in Europe. The train will not be a super-fast hyperloop, in which pods are propelled through aluminum tubes at speeds of up to 760 mph, but a conventional train that includes some of the futuristic technologies the startup has been showcasing at tech conferences around the world.

As a startup that relies on crowdsourcing and volunteer engineers, the collaboration with Deutsche Bahn may allow HTT to start generating revenue while it works toward the larger goal of building passenger-ready hyperloop systems. Indeed, HTT’s CEO Dirk Ahlborn said in a statement that the partnership will help create “new monetization strategies and business models” for his company.

Hyperloop One, the LA-based startup focused on futuristic, super-fast transportation, was supposed to be racing toward the future. But after Brogan BamBrogan, the co-founder and chief technology officer, filed an explosive new lawsuit today, the company appears headed toward implosion.

In the complaint filed in court today, BamBrogan alleges that the company’s top executives engaged in financial misconduct, abuse, and physical threats, marginalizing many of the company’s employees and jeopardizing its future. He accuses CEO Rob Lloyd, co-founder Shervin Pishevar, and Pishevar’s brother Afshin, of using Hyperloop One "to augment their personal brands, enhance their romantic lives, and line their pockets (and those of their family members)." As first reported by BuzzFeed, BamBrogan, who left an engineering job at SpaceX to found Hyperloop One, has also filed a restraining order against against Afshin Pishevar.

Hyperloop One, an LA-based startup working to realize Elon Musk's dream of 760-mph tube-based transportation, announced today that it struck a partnership with the city of Moscow thanks to the support of a mysterious Russian oligarch. The startup and the Summa Group, a Russian port and oil business owned by billionaire Ziyavudin Magomedov, says it has signed a Memorandum of Understanding (MOU) with Moscow to explore connecting the city's transportation grid to the Hyperloop. It's also further evidence that the first Hyperloop is likely to be built in a country other than the US.

The announcement that Hyperloop One has found favor in Russia should come as no surprise to those who watch closely the Facebook page of co-founder Shervin Pishevar. On June 16th, Pishevar posted a photo from a meeting he attended with over a dozen wealthy Russian investors and President Vladimir Putin, whom Pishevar noted was particularly enamored with the Hyperloop. "Putin called on me as last word to talk and then responded," Pishevar wrote. "Spoke on Sherpa, Uber and Hyperloop One. Putin said Hyperloop will fundamentally change the global economy."

Later this year, dozens of college teams from around the world will travel to Hawthorne, California to compete in a high-stakes contest to prove Elon Musk’s vision of super-fast, super-sustainable, tube-based transportation known as the Hyperloop.

The teams were chosen last January in SpaceX’s Hyperloop pod design competition held at Texas A&M University.
From over 120 schools, 29 college teams (plus one high school team and one non-student team that formed on Reddit) were picked to advance to the next round. They are now building fully functional, three-fourth scale models of their pods to test on SpaceX’s one-mile track. It’s unlikely that any of the pods will get up to the Hyperloop’s theoretical full speed of 760 mph, but the shot of adrenaline to the burgeoning Hyperloop industry should be huge.

The most common reaction I get when explaining the concept of the Hyperloop to people who have never heard of it is: "Hell no." No one wants to be the first to step inside a windowless pod that careens through an airless tube at almost the speed of sound. No one wants to imagine what could happen to their bodies if something goes wrong. No one wants to be liquified, Roger Corman-style.

One startup, Hyperloop Transportation Technologies, is working on waylaying those fears through — what else? — pretty pictures of cool technology. The company, which is based in LA, is very good at releasing loads of images of a transportation system that, so far, does not yet exist in the world. And this morning, at a technology conference in Vienna, the company’s executives played a video that shows what a passenger experience could be like inside one of their pods.

Hyperloop Transportation Technologies (HTT) announced today that it will be using a new type of sensor-embedded carbon fiber to make its capsules, capable of transporting passengers through a nearly airless tube at speeds up to 760 mph, safer than ever. The company is calling this new material "Vibranium," which may sound familiar to anyone with a passing knowledge of Marvel Comics and its wildly popular Cinematic Universe.

In the comics, Captain America's iconic shield is made of a nearly indestructible metal called Vibranium. It is almost exclusively found in the tiny (and fictional) African nation of Wakanda, the ancestral home of the Black Panther, who had his silver screen debut this month in Captain American: Civil War — and will be starring in his own standalone movie in 2018. Or around the same time the first Hyperloop is expected to be in operation.

It only lasted about two seconds, but wow, what a sort of thrilling two seconds it was! Hyperloop One, the LA-based startup striving to realize Elon Musk's pipe dream, conducted its first public open-air test in the Nevada desert Wednesday.

A crowd of wealthy investors, transportation experts, media, and even North Las Vegas Mayor John Jay Lee, watched as a roughly 10-foot long sled shot down a short train track and then crashed into a pile of sand. It was an inauspicious way to kick off what's supposed to be a global revolution in transportation.

It was over almost before it began. Hyperloop One's first public open-air test just happened out in the Nevada desert, and if you blinked you may have missed it. A metal sled accelerated from zero to 116 mph in 1.1 seconds, or about 2.4 Gs of force. It traveled little more than 100 meters, then stopped, kicking up a cloud of sand in the process.

It was a dramatic build-up with a less than dramatic end. Hundreds of eager onlookers assembled on a huge riser watched with their smartphones held overhead. Many of them were investors, watching to see if there money was well-spent.

Say goodbye to Hyperloop Technologies Inc., one of two LA-based startups working to realize Elon Musk's dream of super-fast, tube-based transportation. The company announced today that it is rebranding as Hyperloop One. The name change is partly to avoid any mixups with the similarly named Hyperloop Transportation Technologies, but it's also to highlight the flurry of announcements it's making ahead of the first open-air test of its propulsion system in North Las Vegas, Nevada on Wednesday.

On Tuesday afternoon, the day before the test, Hyperloop One announced it had raised $80 million in venture capital financing, formed a number of key partnerships with established transportation, engineering, and infrastructure firms, and said that it will create a new global challenge "in order to harness the most creative minds in making Hyperloop a reality." It also says it will study the feasibility of building hyperloop systems in Finland, Sweden, Switzerland, and the Port of Los Angeles.

Hyperloop Transportation Technologies, one of two LA-based startups working to build Elon Musk’s futuristic transportation system, announced today that it has licensed a technology called "passive magnetic levitation" to power its prototype. The system is "a cheaper, safer alternative" to regular magnetic levitation, or maglev, which is currently in operation powering high-speed trains in China and Europe.

Passive magnetic levitation, which was developed by the late physicist Richard Post in 2000, uses unpowered loops of wire in the track and permanent magnets in the train pod to create levitation. By contrast, maglev requires complex and expensive infrastructure upgrades, such as power sources placed at intervals along the track. Post, who worked for the Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory in Livermore, California, until his death in 2015, called his new system "the Inductrack."

If navigating a Hyperloop pod through an airless tube at breakneck speeds is as difficult as the new Break-a-Pod 8-bit video game, then Elon Musk's vision of a "fifth mode of transportation" may be in trouble.

Maybe you've heard the Hyperloop mantra of "San Francisco to LA in 30 minutes?" Well, what about Bratislava to Vienna in eight? Hyperloop Transportation Technologies (HTT), one of the two LA-based startups working to realize Elon Musk's dream of 760 mph, tube-based travel, announced Thursday that it had reached a deal with the government of Slovakia to explore building a system in the central European country. The startup says possible routes include the capital Bratislava to Vienna, Austria — eight minutes at full speed — and Budapest, Hungary.

The company's CEO, Dirk Alhborn, has been traveling the world looking for foreign government's willing to accept the gospel of the Hyperloop. And they found one in Slovakia, a country trying to shed its communist past by investing heavily in technology. Alhborn praised Slovakia as a "technology leader," and said he hoped this deal — details of which are still pretty vague — would "incentivize collaboration and innovation within Slovakia and throughout Europe."