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Hyperloop One to shut down

bloomberg.com

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Re: Hyperloop One to shut down

#301

Post by marcus_holmes »

Der_Einzige wrote: post #243
acdha wrote: post #230

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Yes, and we have generations of people trained to think that walking further than a hundred feet is an extreme workout to be avoided and that transit systems are full of criminals. It seems like that culture is headed for a cliff, however, as the cost of cars continues to increase (the average sale last year was a year’s median pay!), budgets for road infrastructure become tighter, and climate change becomes harder t…

The people of Singapore pay a minimum of 100K for the privilege of owning a bottom tier car and the demand for cars there is overwhelming and insatiable, despite the world class and extremely clean mass transit systems. The reality is that cars are freedom and still superior from a continence and comfort standpoint. Americans are insanely privileged to have cheap, powerful cars.

The Singapore thing is about status, not freedom.

For the last 15 years I've lived in various places around the world, and for all of them a private car is the most frustrating, least enabling method of transport available. Finding parking is a nightmare, traffic is a nightmare, having to concentrate on the idiots around me is a nightmare, not being able to drink when I go out is a nightmare, dealing with the mechanical problems of the vehicle itself is a nightmare, dealing with the bureaucracy of owning a car is a nightmare. This isn't what freedom looks like.

Most freeing? Riding a motorbike in Phnom Penh. Berlin's 5 different public transport systems. Walking everywhere in Bristol (UK). Mexico City's excellent underground.

Re: Hyperloop One to shut down

#303

Post by stephen_g »

diebeforei485 wrote: post #256

The original Hyperloop paper had a lot of gaps. How does the thing move in low speed until it's fast enough to have aerodynamic lift? Does it use wheels? I don't think the paper talked about it. You do need a good business model and a solid technical foundation. Hyperloop needs a lot of technical work still. Arguably this was also true of SpaceX in the early days, but Elon (and the team he assembled) could execute be…

It's not worth working on - the problems with it are insurmountable at any reasonable cost and verifying that could have been worked out just with engineering analysis and simulations...

It's a fun, futuristic idea, but just falls down when you start to think about the problems. Sure, they could be solved if we were willing to spend hundreds of times as much per kilometer as we do for high-speed rail (which is already really expensive), but that's not practical in the real world.

Re: Hyperloop One to shut down

#304

Post by roughly »

diebeforei485 wrote: post #256

The original Hyperloop paper had a lot of gaps. How does the thing move in low speed until it's fast enough to have aerodynamic lift? Does it use wheels? I don't think the paper talked about it. You do need a good business model and a solid technical foundation. Hyperloop needs a lot of technical work still. Arguably this was also true of SpaceX in the early days, but Elon (and the team he assembled) could execute be…

> The original Hyperloop paper had a lot of gaps.

That's because it wasn't intended to be a solution, it was intended to kill the high speed rail in California.

https://twitter.com/parismarx/status/1167410460125097990

Re: Hyperloop One to shut down

#305

Post by stephen_g »

diebeforei485 wrote: post #266
mynameisnoone wrote: post #189

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Apples and oranges false equivocation of vastly different engineering problems. The problem with vacuum trains is they aren't workable with current materials, are impractical, and are too damn expensive. https://youtu.be/RNFesa01llk

I didn't watch the entire 28 minute video, but I did watch the first part and the creator has a misconception that you share. It's key to understand that the Hyperloop concept uses low pressure (around 100 Pa), not a vacuum.

To anyone who works with vacuum systems, there is no "full vacuum", it's always some level of partial vacuum. The challenges are very similar, just the incredible amount of energy that would be required to pump down and maintain that partial vacuum such a huge volume would be slightly less massive.

Re: Hyperloop One to shut down

#306

Post by tjpnz »

chrisco255 wrote: post #102
_ea1k wrote: post #41

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I'm going to guess that he didn't expect it to work. He never invested significantly, and there must be a reason. The simplest reason seems to be that he expected it not to work, at least with current technology.

The tech is fine, right? It's the long game you have to play with regulators and state and local officials to get right of way to build the tracks or tubes in the first place. Under current regulations, it would take a decade of intense focus and politickin' to probably achieve a minimal viable example.

The white paper at the very least wasn't. It contradicts itself in multiple places and it seems the author has some misunderstandings around basic physics.

Re: Hyperloop One to shut down

#307

Post by stephen_g »

paulddraper wrote: post #11
vorticalbox wrote: post #7

Robert Goddard designed a vacuum train in the 1910s, why did Elon think it was going to work a century later?

Because the tech had advanced in 110 years? Apparently not, I suppose is your point.

There's no reason for it to advance - we have good alternatives, and there's no benefit that this kind of system brings that is worth the massive extra cost (which mostly can't be solved - it's the massive amount of material required for the vacuum chamber and the massive amount of energy required to pump down and maintain the pressure. High-speed rail would be extremely cheap in comparison).

Re: Hyperloop One to shut down

#308

Post by stephen_g »

wahern wrote: post #32
KerrAvon wrote: post #13

There is technology for fast rapid mass transit: high-speed rail. Technology was never the issue here. Political will to fund, approve right-of-way, and build it was always the problem, and Musk never even tried to address that part.

Hyperloop would have been built on pylons, theoretically mitigating the impact of a line cutting across farms or cities, which in the case of CAHSR has caused immeasurable political problems. I suspect the actual technology within the tube was never Musk's initial concern. Similar to his other industrial endeavors, I think the calculus with Hyperloop had more to do with the economics of being able to manufacture pylo…

High speed rail is often built along viaducts too - and it's expensive. There's no way it's cheaper to build a vacuum chamber on pylons than some rails...

Re: Hyperloop One to shut down

#309

Post by mynameisnoone »

enragedcacti wrote: post #275
mynameisnoone wrote: post #190

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Why risk your reputation on something high-risk or likely impossible if you can crowdsource others to waste their time and money to verify its continued infeasibility for you?

You can say what Elon should have done with Twitter all you want, were talking about hyperloop /s

Hahaha. There are many viable businesses productive people can generate, many times more than they can delve into. As such, there is never an absence of ideas, it's almost always a lack of concentrated, deliberate execution in a category that can iterate into a viable, sustainable business. I think it's also possible to posit sketchy ideas that haven't worked before and bribe or cajole people into trying them.

Re: Hyperloop One to shut down

#310

Post by klodolph »

Daz1 wrote: post #169
klodolph wrote: post #124

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The constant derailment is because the operators are chasing profit above safety. Make the trains as long as possible, run them as fast as possible. At some point derailment is inevitable, if you operate the trains that way.

That makes no sense. One derailment erases any profit that would be gained from ignoring safety.

You have to understand how profits in the rail sector work.

Making the system move faster translates directly to additional capacity. More capacity translates to more revenue. Think about it this way—if you increase the speed that a train moves by 10%, then you can make 10% more trips with the same system, in the same amount of time. You can keep doing this until profit you get from the additional capacity results is wiped out by the losses caused by accidents.

The largest rail freight company in the US has operating revenue of something like $25 billion, with margins around 50%. The recent derailment in Ohio cost an estimated $1 billion. By that math, you could increase the speed until every 4% speed increase would result in 1 derailment per year of that scale, or some combination of smaller derailments.

There are about 3 derailments per day in the US. (Note that this is a much lower figure than it was 20 or 50 years ago.)

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