The Boring Company will finally be making a scale version of Elon Musk’s Hyperloop – a new form of high-speed transportation – later this year.
Back in 2013, Elon Musk published a white paper describing what he called the “Hyperloop,” a new mode of transportation that consists of building a near-hard vacuum environment inside a tunnel or tube to move electric vehicles at high speeds more efficiently inside them .
It was then that Musk floated the idea and encouraged other companies to look into it. Several companies were formed around the idea, but almost a decade later there are still no commercial applications of the system – although there are some prototypes.
Musk later founded The Boring Company (TBC) to improve tunnel boring technology and reduce traffic.
The main applications of the TBC tunnels were “loops”, which are similar to the Hyperloop without the low-pressure environment. The company is focused on developing loops between cities, like its first commercial application in Las Vegas, but has also been working on some Hyperloop system proposals to connect cities over longer distances.
Today, The Boring Company announced that it will be testing its first full-scale Hyperloop system this year:
Full-scale Hyperloop testing will begin later this year.
— The Boring Company (@boringcompany) April 25, 2022
Musk believes the system, which could enable travel at up to 700 mph (1,100 km/h), would be the fastest way to cover distances under 2,000 miles (3,200 km):
From a known physical point of view, this is the fastest possible way to get from one city center to another for distances less than ~2000 miles. Starship is faster for longer trips.
The idea is that the Hyperloop system replicates the low-pressure environment in which an airplane would fly at high altitudes, but on the ground, or in the case of tunnels, underground. Unlike airplanes, with the Hyperloop you don’t waste time and energy getting on and off. Instead, it will be about acceleration and deceleration. There are also ways to save onboarding time and space compared to airplanes.
There is a chance for people to travel between city centers that are 400 miles apart, such as the United States, in as little as an hour. B. Los Angeles and San Francisco.
TBC recently bought a piece of land near Austin, not far from the Tesla Gigafactory Texas, and it’s been secret what it plans to do at the site. It would be a likely place to deploy a Hyperloop test system.
In the past, Musk has also mentioned building Hyperloop systems between Tesla manufacturing plants to reduce logistics costs, which have been rising across the industry.
SpaceX and TBC have also collaborated on their Hyperloop pod competition, which is more about designing the vehicle system in a Hyperloop tube or tunnel.
FTC: We use income earning auto affiliate links. More.
Subscribe to Electrek on YouTube for exclusive videos and subscribe to the podcast.