Corona Daily 272: Hyperloop, the Fifth Mode of Transport

The world changed yesterday.

For the last hundred years, there has not been a new mode of transport. To sea, road, rail and air a fifth mode was added yesterday: Hyperloop. A man and a woman were the first human beings to take the test ride. They emerged safe and smiling.

Elon Musk, of Tesla fame, first talked about Hyperloop in 2012. Hyperloop is about building a hundreds-of-miles-long steel tube that looks like a circular tunnel. This can be above or below the ground. Passengers will sit inside a capsule and travel at hypersonic speed from the start point to the destination. Hyperloop is collision free and immune to weather. The steel tube is airless. The vacuum allows the capsule to glide smoothly. Like the bullet trains using magnetic levitation (Maglev trains in China and Japan), the capsules don’t touch anything. Friction and air resistance can be a problem for bullet trains. Those are removed in hyperloop. Musk described his dream product as a cross-breed between a Concorde, a railgun and an air hockey table.

In good traffic conditions, a car can cover the 560 km between Los Angeles and San Francisco in 6 hours, by bus or train in 10 hours. A flight with all security hassles takes 3 hours. Hyperloop will take 30 minutes. That is the vision.

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To Elon Musk’s credit, rather than protecting intellectual property, he has made it open, and has encouraged the brightest young brains to keep improving and innovating. So far, the Technical University of Munich (TUM Hyperloop) team has won all the competitions. In the latest, they managed to reach speeds of 288 miles (460 km) per hour. Yesterday’s test carrying the first human passengers was conducted at 100 miles (160 km) per hour. The projected speeds go up to 750 miles (1200 km)/ hour, faster than a flight.

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The first actual Hyperloop project is expected to run in India. In February 2018, Virgin Hyperloop, the American company marketing Hyperloop, signed an MOU with the Indian state of Maharashtra. The 150 km Hyperloop will connect Mumbai and Pune. 20 million residents in Greater Mumbai and 6 million in Pune region are expected to benefit. Instead of the 3 hours+ drive through pollution, traffic, toll booths; the capsuled passengers would whizz like bullets in 28 minutes.

The other high-speed project, India’s planned bullet train, has been politically inflammable. The Indo-Japanese initiative may or may not happen depending on India’s political landscape.

On the other hand, the Mumbai-Pune Hyperloop project is almost unknown. Today, in only the second live experiment, Tanay Manjrekar, an engineering graduate from Pune, will take the test ride in Las Vegas. But there is not a single word about this in the Indian media. Such non-publicity increases the prospects of Hyperloop actually happening. The expected start is 2029.

Several Indians, including government officials, were expected to ride the demonstration hyperloop in the USA, but the coronavirus pandemic has made that impossible.

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Of course, Hyperloop is not without its critics – particularly those who run airlines or rail companies can find several faults. Questions have been raised about the potential uncomfortable feeling of passengers. But then, people must have been terrified when they started flying in planes for the first time.

The greatest plus of Hyperloop is that it is clean. It doesn’t need fossils fuels like trains. It is energy efficient, can be run on solar as well, immune to weather variability, focuses on low density and high volume. Hyperloop is ideal for the post-pandemic, climate-changing world. Finally, we have something that looks like the twenty-first century mode of transport.

When the Mumbai-Pune Hyperloop begins, I won’t hesitate to travel on the first day.

Ravi