Hyperloop One’s Vision For Europe Comes Into Focus At Third Global Challenge Summit
“In the next ten years, we will see more changes in mobility than in the last 100 years.”
Now there’s a statement we couldn’t agree with more, and the words pack extra weight given the speaker: Dutch Minister for Infrastructure and the Environment Melanie Schultz van Haegen, who addressed European leaders and dignitaries on June 6 in Amsterdam at Hyperloop One’s Vision For Europe event. The minister knows what she’s talking about, having led the Dutch government’s efforts over the past eight years to revive its transportation sector and set new standards in autonomous vehicles and smart mobility. “Hyperloop could be a game changer,” said the Minister. “Fast, quiet, innovative, sustainable and, thanks to solar power, it could be the world’s only net positive, sustainable transportation.”
The Europe event was our third Global Challenge summit, following a standing-room-only Vision for India event in New Delhi in March, and a Vision for America event held in April in the US. You can watch the recorded livestream of the Amsterdam event below, followed by selected route maps.
The focus for the Vision For Europe event was to showcase the region’s nine semi-finalist routes in the Hyperloop One Global Challenge. The proposed high-speed corridors are in Germany, Estonia-Finland, Spain-Morocco, Corsica-Sardinia, The Netherlands, Poland, and three in the U.K.: Scotland to Wales, a Northern Arc route connecting Glasgow to Liverpool via Manchester, and a North-South Connector between London and Edinburgh. The routes, in aggregate, would connect more than 75 million people in 44 cities, spanning 5,000 kilometers. We’ll be following up in the next two weeks with profiles and videos of each of the routes.
Taken as a whole, the European and U.K. Global Challenge corridors advance the potential for Hyperloop to unify the European economy, increase the capacity of its strategic corridors, and offer next generation logistics to facilitate fast, reliable and clean movement of goods. In a panel discussion at the event, Risto Penttilä, CEO of the Finland Chamber of Commerce, talked up a Northern European “Circle Line” that would provide city-to-city connections in a loop touching Helsinki, the Baltics, Berlin, Copenhagen, Stockholm, and Oslo. You can read more about Risto’s vision for a Nordic Super Region here.
Speaking to a packed house at the Tobacco Theater in central Amsterdam, executives from Hyperloop One brought European policymakers up to speed on our technology and progress in the market. Hyperloop One is the only company in the world that has built a fully functional Hyperloop, the first new mode of transportation in more than 100 years. We see Europe as a high-potential market for Hyperloop, as its leaders embrace new ideas in transportation and commit to big infrastructure projects like no other region in the world.
We completed the last section of our 500m DevLoop test track in Nevada in April and are looking forward to our first public demonstration, Kitty Hawk, in the coming months, proving our technology works. The next step after that is to work with governments around the world, Europe included, to build a proof of operations facility where we can validate our system and win regulatory approvals.
At the Vision For Europe event, Minister Schultz van Haegen talked up the potential for building a Hyperloop proof of operations facility in the Netherlands, and called for new regulatory approaches that could streamline the process for approving innovative forms of transportation that don’t fit into existing categories. There’s a lot of work to do in the short-term, but our long-term vision remains the same: to one day connect Europe — and the world — with a more efficient, greener, on-demand and faster mode of travel.
