The Hyperloop May Disrupt More Than Just Travel

the hyperloop there's a good chance you've heard the name by now this is the hyperloop system it can take people hundreds of miles and minutes the hyperloop a series of tubes that would transport people in pods at ultra high speeds over long distances it's a remarkable new form of transportation that can whisk people from city to city in a flash 29 minutes from new york to dc 30 minutes from la to san francisco for years we've been seeing these futuristic utopian renderings of some cross between a spaceship and a monorail but lately the hyperloop is becoming much more real it was surreal to be even sitting inside a hyperloop and just even more incredible to actually be like riding down a track in something that was nothing more than a crazy idea six years before companies all around the world have been developing and testing the technology needed to propel passengers at speeds of over 1 000 kilometers per hour but for many speed is only the first step to unlocking the full transformational effects of a new mode of transportation fast is what we just take for granted in the hyperloop world it's the network effects that really deliver the benefit and that opens up a completely different scale of economic opportunity [Music] we've got planes trains automobiles and boats before getting around earth what if there was a fifth mode and i have a name for it named for it which is called the hyperloop the hyperloop hyperloop yeah in 2013 while riding high on the growing success of tesla and spacex entrepreneur elon musk released a white paper outlining the basic framework of the technology he called hyperloop the basic idea goes a little something like this a tube reduces the air pressure to a near vacuum-like environment a hyperloop pod is then suspended in the tube usually by magnetic levitation the whole pod can then be propelled forward because there's no traditional friction sources like air resistance or rolling friction that would push back against the pod the hyperloop is able to move at incredibly high speeds and do so fairly efficiently despite its futuristic name however the general concept behind hyperloop is actually pretty old in fact new york city's first attempt at an underground public transit system in the 1870s was based on a similar principle the pneumatic transit system was short-lived however only stretching one block and topping out at a rather leisurely 10 miles per hour while elon would make some 21st century improvements to this concept and bestow a very 21st century name he wouldn't end up pursuing the technology itself instead electing to focus his efforts on something a little bit deeper literally digging the requisite tunnels via his boring company it would take another billionaire industrialist who dabbles in space flight no way not that one yeah that's the one after richard branson would make a large investment in the company hyperloop one it would be renamed to virgin hyperloop what we've always been trying to do as a company is show that this technology could work that it could be made safe and that ultimately it's something that's happening in the next couple of years not the next 20 years [Music] josh geigel is the co-founder and ceo of virgin hyperloop in a familiar tech startup story he's seen the project go from a garage to a large-scale testing facility outside of las vegas so we started building the first kind of hyperloop system in 2016 we've done a lot of work about 500 tests that we've done on that over the last five years and what we realize that we need to do is take that technology show that it can be commercial so drive the cost down improve the efficiency improve the performance but the key thing is you know is actually making it approachable and safe for individuals in order to do that josh along with virgin's head of passenger experience sara lucian bravely volunteered to take the inaugural ride what her and i were realizing is like we're the first two people sitting in a hyperloop the only type of people that have gone through this environment are in space suits and there we are in just like normal clothes because of the system the safety of what we designed three two one launch and then once we started going uh you felt a bit of acceleration we accelerated a little bit harder than we would in commercial be like a sports car we got to about 108 miles an hour on that test and it's a short run it's about 500 yards or so and came to a stop the test lasting only about 20 seconds and covering only a quarter of a mile at just over 100 miles per hour is a long way away from a true functioning hyperloop but as for optics it's a crucial step for the future of funding the number one question we got from investors or from project proponents or just people in general was like is a hyperloop safe and what better way to show something is safe than by actually getting people on it but convincing investors and governments that would likely be fronting some of the construction costs for an unproven technology is no easy task first and foremost is the question of safety most people don't know how an airplane works but yet they get on an airplane they get on an airplane because you know it's faster than driving and most importantly they've probably gotten off of one before they've seen someone get off of one before and so what we set out to do was actually show that hyperloop could be safe with two normal people not astronauts not adrenaline junkies or test pilots or anything like that to normal people getting on a hyperloop and then most importantly those two people getting off but beyond safety concerns constructing hyperloops will undoubtedly require a significant capital investment to the estimated tune of around 60 million us dollars per kilometer of track so a track from san francisco to los angeles for example is likely to come with a price tag over 10 billion dollars and before large governments are willing to come in and front those costs investors who are funding hyperloop development must accept it as a long-term mixture of technology and infrastructure investing investors that are used to short returns because you're developing apps or something to that effect you know those aren't the investors that really get excited about hyperloop what you start to see is the people that are looking at platform technologies right so this idea that because the smartphone existed uber could exist right so who are like the vanderbilts of this century and that's the part where you're going to get a lot more no's than yeses but those people that have the ability that the fortitude to stick it out to see the game-changing platform here those are the people that we're looking for and since we've done that passenger test there has been a lot of interest that's really oh this is a lot sooner than i thought envisioning the ripple effects of what hyperloop could achieve though is fairly challenging at this stage of development it's fast yes but for point-to-point travel traditional maglev trains can move pretty fast as well and outside of china south korea and japan even those haven't seen much adoption elsewhere due to the high costs and questionable profitability the shanghai line in china for example loses around 100 million dollars every year hyperloop companies however believe they can offer something different than traditional railway lines my name is alan james and as far as i know i'm the only guy on the planet who's written a government level business case for 300 kmh conventional high-speed rail 500 kmh maglev and 1000 kmh hyperloop it's fundamentally about moving people from where they are to where they want to go when they want to make those journeys and doing it in much smaller numbers so pod designs for hyperloop range from 12 to 28 seats typically why are they small it's because small enables the network to operate flexibly and a great example of that is the east-west strategic route across the north of england from liverpool to manchester to leeds so to get from liverpool via manchester to leeds by train is just short of two hours today it'll probably take you two hours driving as well in average traffic conditions net result is those three city regions remain three separate entities liverpool manchester leeds there's very little commuting traffic between those urban areas hyperloop absolutely changes that from the ground up liverpool to manchester is a five or six minute journey manchester to leeds is also a five or six minute journey what that effectively does is create a single super city economy in this vision the hyperloop acts a little more like a highway where pods have fixed destinations and don't need to stop along the way meaning you can travel on a hyperloop network from say liverpool to leeds while the pod behind you travels from liverpool to manchester and if that metro hyperloop network is connected to other networks from the same location you could travel from liverpool to paris or liverpool to amsterdam all without making a single stop for passengers for business for leisure that is utterly transformational for high value freight and logistics it's equally transformational but critically if you do a hyperloop network at scale you begin to deliver massively significant carbon savings too a multi-regional hyperloop network could become a replacement for both short-haul passenger and cargo flights and traditional ground transportation both of which are significant carbon producers one hyperloop connected distribution hub perhaps at an airport that is predominantly used for international air freight replacing maybe 10 12 15 distributed road hubs it takes a lot of polluting and inefficient truck haulage off the roads that itself means roads gain extra capacity hyperloops will still need to use electricity to both move pods and maintain the near vacuum environment in the tube proponents of the technology believe that this can be done by using renewable sources including a combination of solar panels and battery technology that could be used along the hyperloop itself but even with all multipliers of time and carbon emission savings that a hyperloop network may provide the investment capital required to actually build such a network becomes even more economically and politically daunting committing doesn't mean spending billions on day one committing means how do we phase it [Music] one company in the netherlands is working to develop that technology and perhaps more importantly the international coalition needed to make the hyperloop network a reality so we are here in europe's first full-scale hybrid test facility where we can already prove every conceptual technology of the hyperloop this is tim howder a co-founder and ceo of heart hyperloop headquartered in the city of delft and while this testing tube might not seem as large as others inside is a key technology to create the on and off-ramp type infrastructure of a hyperloop network that is a lane switch that's something we can already test here you can actually see it here that the track is diverging from one track into two that makes it possible to eventually split up the icloud track in two sections and in that sense you can create a complete high blood network that in the end will make it possible to travel for example over over a whole continent and take europe for example with the same ease as you can now travel with a metro in a city the nice thing about this magnetic levitation system that we have developed is that there's absolutely zero moving components in the track so for example if you have to do a lane switch all you do is that the tube basically splits up and statically the tracks also split up and whenever the vehicle enters a switch it either pulls itself to the right with its magnets or pulls itself to the left with its magnets lane switching on traditional rail requires the physical movement of the rail even modern magnetic levitation tracks use lane switching techniques in order to transfer trains from one track to another and this is a very crucial element because this is the thing that limits the capacity and in the end the usefulness of the real network because the moment that a track is switching that means that at that moment you are creating an unsafe environment for the trains behind it so you need a lot of space between trains in a hyperloop because you have no moving components in the track all the vehicles can be much closer to each other you can achieve a very high frequency and basically have vehicles moving and merging in and out of the network very much like a highway for now though hart's physical testing has been limited by the size of their tube because the test track is only 30 meters long they haven't tested this lane switch at speeds greater than 20 kilometers per hour however the company is working to build a new test site where it plans to increase that testing speed to 300 kilometers per hour we're now in a phase where we have proven most of the most important technologies in the test facilities that we already have and we have also demonstrated the viability and the feasibility of a network if you look at all the top systems that it consists of most of those are proven systems already demonstrated in lab conditions so we don't really believe that the technology itself is going to be the biggest challenge because for all hyperloop companies out there actually building a hyperloop system requires more than just a good product we're talking about the safety aspects we're talking about integration into the environment we're talking about the social aspects do people feel comfortable traveling in such a system so it's about all these different aspects and the complexity is really getting all the different stakeholders that are relevant and that the needs to contribute to bring this to market to get them all following the same roadmap in order to help build this coalition of private and public interest in hyperloop development heart in 2018 partnered with other hyperloop companies from europe and canada the goal was to define establish and standardize the framework to regulate hyperloop systems right now we are working with all the hyperloop developers together in setting up the first let's say a structure for the for starting the standards drafting one of the most important goals for heart is interoperability which is essentially making sure the different systems can communicate with each other interoperability is so important because what we want to achieve is actually have this seamless travel experience so you don't want to end up for example going from madrid to paris and then switching because you need to use a different technology to get for example to amsterdam the idea being that as companies around europe create the first commercial hyperloop tracks between individual cities one day those can all be connected to a larger network everyone that believes that hyperloop is a future transport system also realizes that there is a need to have this network because that's where a hyperloop thrives hyperloop is such a huge project it's definitely not something that that you can do in your own or as a single company so you need to do it with a lot of other companies you need to have the governments i think in that sense the biggest challenge that we've encountered is to really get all the required parties together to take the steps in development and in commercial implementation [Music] heart's next plan is to build the european hyperloop center an open testing facility which will include a 2.6 kilometer test track and the company hopes to test travel speeds there at up to 700 kilometers per hour virgin hyperloop is also racing to construct the first commercial hyperloop route with projects in various states of development in india saudi arabia and the united states recently the company announced plans to build a hyperloop certification center in west virginia which will include a six mile long test track proving the technology here will be crucial if hyperloop networks can find a home among infrastructure investments that the biden administration hopes to make the idea that there's multiple hyperloop companies i think is a redeeming aspect in the business people really want to see something happen so having multiple people move forward is is good for that i was struck when josh and zara rode the pod two or three of the major outlets used the phrase we now have a new mode of transport and although all of that technology had existed before those two human beings rode it yeah it was the moment at which those two human beings traveled that short distance down the tube that in popular imagination hyperloop became a mode of transport the metaphor i use with my team is that you know the wright brothers were first but none of us fly on wright brothers airlines anymore if you don't continue to innovate you're not going to be around and so we'll continue to be at the forefront of building our blue back in 2013 elon had an idea i think the difference now in 2021 is some brilliant engineers have spent real time grinding out the details and i thoroughly expect the next three to five years to be decisive you

Channel: Bloomberg Quicktake

Views: 3,316,585

Keywords: News, bloomberg, quicktake, business, bloomberg quicktake, quicktake originals, bloomberg quicktake by bloomberg, documentary, mini documentary, mini doc, doc, us news, world news, finance, science, elon musk, hyperloop, virgin hyperloop, transportation, cars, future transportation, green, europe, India, USA, West virginia

Id: QScaLhDVacg

Length: 19min 22sec (1162 seconds)

Published: Thu May 20 2021

Reddit Comments

[u/_snoopbob]

10 minutes between liverpool and manchester seems insane. and the interchange to leeds seems revolutionary. only problem is im stuck in the usa where going from city to city will leave you stranded since theres no transit once you get to your next destination