Taking the Hyperloop Seriously

Sometimes tech sounds too good to be true, and that is certainly the case with the Hyperloop: Ultrafast, clean, efficient and convenient. So what’s the catch?

Imagine traveling the length of the United Kingdom — from London to Edinburgh, 400-plus miles — in under an hour. A journey from Los Angeles to San Francisco would take less than 30 minutes (five hours less than the average drive between the two cities). Your journey would be safe and comfortable, your carbon footprint almost non-existent.

Passengers and cargo would be loaded into a pod, which accelerates gradually via electric propulsion through a low-pressure tube. The pod quickly lifts above the track using magnetic levitation and glides at airline speeds for long distances due to ultra-low aerodynamic drag.

You could board directly from your office in London, shoot down a tunnel to join the main network, and after around 50 minutes traveling at speeds of anything between 600 and 1200 kilometres per hour (roughly 370–745mph) in a vacuum tube, arrive at your meeting in Edinburgh before heading back in the afternoon.

Such is the promise of perhaps today’s most buzzed about transportation innovation: the Hyperloop.

Today, of course, this all sounds rather far-fetched, especially to someone used to spending over an hour on the 60-mile…