71–80 of 322 posts
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Agreed. > She says the pipes could come up on state-owned land beside motorways or (where they exist) railways. No time or planning should go into surface hyperloops. These things belong underground. 100x better.
Say what? That’s crazy talk. Underground would be many times more expensive, and has much worse failure modes. What happens if the train loses power?
This is evergreen when talking about Hyperloop: http://www.cat-bus.com/2017/12/gadgetbahn/ The problems with building this have nothing to do with technology but with right-of-way, investment, and politics. If those factors were solved, we'd already have high-speed rail in places where Hyperloop has been proposed. The fact that we don't says that Hyperloop is unlikely to be feasible as well.
That "Gadgetbahn" article is great, but I do have one criticism. From the article: "If the idea is viable and the people behind it are competent, it should have attracted private investment, as there should be a potential to make profit selling the technology. After all, the proposal has been around for 23 years." High speed rail on a large scale is really something that has to come from the government. While there a…
TGV and Shinkansen go really far! But what makes people in France or Japan take the train a lot is much more around local trains that are just going at normal speeds.
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Say what? That’s crazy talk. Underground would be many times more expensive, and has much worse failure modes. What happens if the train loses power?
Didn't Musk's "Boring Company" solve the problem of underground boring cost ?
Can someone explain me how Hyperloop is supposed to work? There are so many things wrong with it. - Hyperloop is a vactrain, a century old idea, and to this day, despite numerous attempts, nothing came close to a working prototype, let alone something production-ready. - By contrast, high-speed trains carries millions of passengers every day in many parts of the world. They are safe, comfortable, and commercially via…
> So for me it just a daring publicity stunt (a borderline scam IMHO), something that Elon Musk is also known to be good at. I think this is a very unfair and cynical way of looking at it. How it is a scam? He said, he thinks its a good idea and he released basically a little concept whitepaper on what his ideas are. He has never attempted to make any money from it, and he clearly just thinks its a good idea and that…
That's a blatant lie.
https://www.engadget.com/2019-07-25-elon-musk-raises-120-mil...
https://www.reuters.com/article/us-boring-company-fundraisin....
3.5 years on my prediction holds well: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=13811365
With any new technology, the likelihood of failure is high but the expected value is positive. As Nat Friedman (CEO of GitHub) said: "Pessimists sound smart. Optimists make money."
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> Its important to not that GM, Ford and Fiat-Chrysler received far, far, far more resources in the 2008-2012 timeframe and most of that has unlike Tesla not been payed back Most has not been paid back? What figures are you using for this? My understanding is that the bailout was ~$80bn, but the final cost to the government was approximately $9bn. When people complain about Tesla being taxpayer funded, they're genera…
But EV incentives are not Tesla-specific. Anyone with a valid product can avail of them. If you attribute EV incentives to Tesla, you must attribute the costs of the wars in the Middle East to the (ICE) auto companies.
My post should be read as: the position I think GP is taking is different to what you're responding to, but either way it's bullshit.
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Ok, so how is this cheaper than high-speed rail in a tunnel? It seems to me that hyperloop is high speed rail with the addition of a vacuum, which gets you higher speed. The additional requirement of a giant vacuum tube should make the system cost more, not less. Personally, I’m rooting for Elon Musk to figure out how to make tunnels cheaply with the Boring Company, so we can take that tech and use it to build a bunc…
It uses a much smaller tunnel.
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By comparison, China builds above ground high speed rail for about $15M/mile.
Without paying US prevailing market wages to the contractors. Also, all the materials used on the Hawaii rail line have to be shipped in - literally, adding expense.
