Hyperloop | The Verge

The hyperloop lives on as a 1/12th scale model in Switzerland

2024-11-05T14:55:09-05:00

About a year ago, I wrote a story with the headline "The hyperloop is dead for real this time," based on the news that Hyperloop One, one of the biggest companies pursuing Elon Musk's dream of tube-based, 700mph travel, had shut down.

Well, I stand corrected. The hyperloop, in fact, lives on - as a 1/12th scale model in Switzerland.

Sure, this isn't exactly the full realization of Musk's 2013 white paper, in which he theorized that aerodynamic aluminum capsules filled with passengers or cargo could be propelled through a nearly airless tube at speeds of up to 760mph. These tubes, either raised on pylons or sunk beneath the earth, could be …

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The hyperloop is dead for real this time

2023-12-21T16:15:47-05:00

Hyperloop One, the futuristic transportation startup that promised to whisk us through nearly airless tubes at airline speeds, is shutting down, according to Bloomberg.

The company is selling off its assets, closing down its offices, and laying off employees. It will formally close at the end of the year, at which point all of its intellectual property will shift to its majority stakeholder, major Dubai port operator DP World. Whoever buys the test track in the Nevada desert will have one hell of a Slip 'N Slide if they want it.

Since its founding in 2014, the company raised around $450 million in venture capital funds and other investment …

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Elon Musk’s first Hyperloop tunnel in California is gone

2022-11-03T12:55:25-04:00

The Hyperloop tube hosted student competitions in 2018 and 2019. | Photo by Pauline Acalin for The Verge

Elon Musk's first prototype Hyperloop tunnel is no more. Bloomberg reports that the roughly one-mile-long white steel tunnel running along Jack Northrop Avenue near SpaceX headquarters in Hawthorne, California, has been removed and will be replaced with parking spaces for employees.

Perhaps you'll recall that before Musk assumed the mantle of free speech champion, he set out to circumvent "soul-destroying traffic" by building the Hyperloop, a theoretical system of tunnels that would revolutionize transportation. He also claimed to be able to dig tunnels faster and more efficiently than most current tunnel boring systems, which he rightly ar …

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Virgin Hyperloop switches focus from passengers to cargo as it lays off half its staff

2022-02-22T05:29:58-05:00

An experimental Virgin Hyperloop passenger transport pod on display in Washington, DC in 2021. | Photo by Matt McClain/The Washington Post via Getty Images

Virgin Hyperloop has laid off almost half its staff as the company switches its focus from transporting passengers to shifting freight. Cuts totaling 111 jobs were confirmed by Virgin Hyperloop to The Financial Times, which spoke to former employees at the company. They described the scale of the redundancies as "definitely not expected."

The US-based Virgin Hyperloop is one of the leading firms developing the eponymous technology - an updated version of a centuries-old idea to reduce the energy demands of trains by placing them in vacuum-sealed tubes where air resistance is minimal. The concept was resurrected in 2013 when Elon Musk publis …

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Virgin Hyperloop hits an important milestone: the first human passenger test

2020-11-08T21:01:00-05:00

Virgin Hyperloop announced that for the first time it has conducted a test of its ultra-fast transportation system with human passengers.

The test took place on Sunday afternoon at the company's DevLoop test track in the desert outside Las Vegas, Nevada. The first two passengers were Virgin Hyperloop's chief technology officer and co-founder, Josh Giegel, and head of passenger experience, Sara Luchian. After strapping into their seats in the company's gleaming white and red hyperloop pod, dubbed Pegasus, they were transferred into an airlock as the air inside the enclosed vacuum tube was removed. The pod then accelerated to a brisk 100 mile …

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Virgin Hyperloop selects West Virginia to test its futuristic transport system

2020-10-08T10:21:38-04:00

Virgin Hyperloop One announced its plan to build a $500 million certification center to advance its vision of the future of high-speed transportation in West Virginia. The state will serve as a locus for testing, developing, and validating the technology that underpins the still-theoretical hyperloop system.

There is no fully functional hyperloop in the world, and it has never been tested with human passengers. But the federal government has recently laid out the framework for regulating the hyperloop, giving hope to companies like Virgin Hyperloop One that it may eventually break ground on a full-sized operational hyperloop system. To do s …

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Tech’s transportation companies keep bending the knee to Saudi Arabia

2019-11-11T16:52:35-05:00

In an interview with Axios on HBO that aired November 10th, Uber CEO Dara Khosrowshahi called the murder of the journalist and US resident Jamal Khashoggi by Saudi Arabia "a serious mistake" - before quickly backtracking and admitting that it was his comments, and not Khashoggi's murder, that were the actual mistake. But Khosrowshahi's comments were not made in isolation. There is a pattern emerging of transportation companies with deep financial ties to Saudi Arabia being friendly to the regime in the face of international outcry.

It's bad enough right now for huge companies doing business in countries with oppressive regimes, as we've se …

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Virgin Hyperloop CEO ‘delighted’ to go to Davos in the Desert one year after Khashoggi murder

2019-10-28T13:53:57-04:00

Virgin Hyperloop One CEO Jay Walder is "delighted" to attend this year's Future Investment Initiative conference in Saudi Arabia this week, just one year after the government had Washington Post journalist Jamal Khashoggi brutally murdered, according to an official statement released Monday. The startup is one of 49 "global partners" Saudi Arabia announced for the conference, which is otherwise known as Davos in the Desert. The event starts later this week in the capital city of Riyadh.

Walder is a former head of New York City's Metropolitan Transportation Authority, and the former CEO of bike-share startup Motivate. He joined Virgin Hyperl …

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Reddit-born engineering group buys leftovers of failed hyperloop startup Arrivo

2019-10-17T15:06:42-04:00

Reddit-born hyperloop and engineering collective rLoop has bought the intellectual property of Arrivo, a fellow hyperloop startup that went out of business last December, The Verge has learned. rLoop co-founder Brent Lessard confirmed the sale, but he would not disclose how much the group paid.

Lessard said rLoop might try to revive some of the deals that Arrivo had been working on, like a test track outside of Denver, Colorado, and that it may hire back some of Arrivo's former employees. But, Lessard said, rLoop is still only in the "final stages" of assessing the progress Arrivo's employees had made toward developing a type of hyperloop t …

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Hyperloop project in India inches closer to reality

2019-07-31T14:28:53-04:00

There is no fully functional hyperloop in the world, but that could soon change, as officials in India have recently designated the ultra-fast, futuristic transportation system a "public infrastructure project" and will soon be taking bids on its construction.

There are still many hurdles to overcome, such as certifying the hyperloop as safe for human passengers. But Virgin Hyperloop One, one of the handful of companies working to turn Elon Musk's dream of supersonic travel through vacuum tubes a reality, is confident that its project in the western district of Maharashtra is all but a done deal.

There are still many hurdles to overcome

Off …

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