Hyperloop lays off half of its employees as it pivots away from passenger travel
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Re: Hyperloop lays off half of its employees as it pivots away from passenger travel
#2Bummer. Musk-hyped moonshot or not, I thought Hyperloop presented an incredibly exciting vision for the future of mass transit. Even if it was always going to be a long shot, it’s disappointing to be right.
Edit: replies saying "this never could have worked" are missing the point to a pretty hysterical degree.
You don't know that. No one knows that! Unless you are from the future or are a genius-level mechanical engineer in the specific problem domain of vacuum trains (who for some reason was not already employed by Hyperloop), you cannot say that with 100% confidence.
No matter how unlikely it might have seemed to you, it could have worked! And it's a bummer when extremely-cool-but-unlikely things don't work.
Re: Hyperloop lays off half of its employees as it pivots away from passenger travel
#3This is about VIRGIN Hyperloop by Richard Bransons Virgin Brand conglomerate.
Not to be confused with Elon Musks Boring Company.
FTA:
> Virgin Hyperloop was founded as Hyperloop Technologies in 2014, stemming from Tesla CEO Elon Musk's idea of a high-speed passenger pod transport. It changed its name when Richard Branson joined the board of directors in 2017.
Re: Hyperloop lays off half of its employees as it pivots away from passenger travel
#4I find it quite surprising that they only fired half and not all of them. How can this conceptual vacuum tube pod system that has been shown to be incredibly inefficient and prohibitively expensive still have some kind of business model?
To be honest I thought this whole idea got scrapped 5+ years ago.
Re: Hyperloop lays off half of its employees as it pivots away from passenger travel
#5There are a lot of reasons standard rail in the US is cargo centric. Profit and a much easier customer service case are big ones. Also, sending cargo in a new transportation system is much easier and less lawsuit prone than people.
An old story in the US since the post office basically made airplane travel viable via postal contracts.
Re: Hyperloop lays off half of its employees as it pivots away from passenger travel
#6I still don't understand why there is any interest in this concept, either for freight or passenger transport, over a regular train.
Re: Hyperloop lays off half of its employees as it pivots away from passenger travel
#7Now it sounds like a doomed idea, basically just pneumatic tubes at a larger scale, but I remember how fresh it sounded a few years back.
Re: Hyperloop lays off half of its employees as it pivots away from passenger travel
#8Basically returning to Pneumatic tubes but probably way less elegant and over-engineered
Re: Hyperloop lays off half of its employees as it pivots away from passenger travel
#9This is about VIRGIN Hyperloop by Richard Bransons Virgin Brand conglomerate. Not to be confused with Elon Musks Boring Company. FTA: > Virgin Hyperloop was founded as Hyperloop Technologies in 2014, stemming from Tesla CEO Elon Musk's idea of a high-speed passenger pod transport. It changed its name when Richard Branson joined the board of directors in 2017.
Boring company has abandoned any idea of a hyper loop a long time ago, right? Did they ever even associate with it (outside the branding of their Vegas mini tunnel)?
Re: Hyperloop lays off half of its employees as it pivots away from passenger travel
#10This is about VIRGIN Hyperloop by Richard Bransons Virgin Brand conglomerate. Not to be confused with Elon Musks Boring Company. FTA: > Virgin Hyperloop was founded as Hyperloop Technologies in 2014, stemming from Tesla CEO Elon Musk's idea of a high-speed passenger pod transport. It changed its name when Richard Branson joined the board of directors in 2017.
Wait, is the Boring Company still pursuing commercial transport via hyperloop?