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Will America ever get a Hyperloop? The answer is: maybe. The dream of packing people into underground shuttles like sardines and then firing them through airless tunnels at untold speeds may seem bizarre (or even deeply undesirable) to people like you and me, but a cadre of scientists, corporations, and tech billionaires still think that it’s the future of travel for some reason.
This week, that dream came one step closer to becoming a reality. A company called Hardt Hyperloop announced a milestone in the testing of the weird new transportation system, the Associated Press has reported. The company, which has been testing its vehicle at the European Hyperloop Test Centre, said that it had successfully “levitated” its vessel and sent it hurtling through the centre’s 420-meter underground tube.
“So today, with the first successful test, we were able to levitate the vehicle, also turn on the guidance system and the propulsion system,” Marinus van der Meijs, the technology and engineering director at Hardt, told the AP.
However, the vessel, which developers would eventually like to see travel at speeds in excess of 435 miles per hour, did not go very fast. Van der Meijs said that, for the test, it had traveled at around 18 miles per hour, equivalent to a very slow train. No people were in the tube either, which means that all that really happened was that the tube moved successfully through the tunnel.
“To deliver Hyperloop as a mobility system, we have a very complicated puzzle which requires technology, which requires policy, which requires public-private collaboration, and that is what is needed most,” said Roel van de Pas, commercial director of Hardt.
Hyperloop development has struggled in the past. Hyperloop One (formerly Virgin Hyperloop), one of the major companies that backed efforts at the transport system’s development, shut down last December, after years of developing the technology. The company had suffered numerous financial setbacks in recent years.
It should be noted that while the western world has struggled with Hyperloop development, China already seems to have a functional one that is breaking speed records. It’s unclear why we suck so much more than our Asian competitor on this front, though if I had to guess, I’d wager that the “public-private collaboration” that van de Pas mentioned might actually be the problem. The western world’s development model relies on profit-driven companies that must adhere to the quite limiting incentives of the market (i.e., making money); China, meanwhile, built its train with government money.
Elon Musk is often credited with popularizing the idea of the hyperloop, even though he did not actually come up with the idea and admitted in one conversation that he never had any actual interest in developing it. Musk hasn’t said much about the hyperloop lately. No, the oligarch has been too busy turning Tesla into a robotaxi company, buying and destroying Twitter, helping Trump get re-elected President, and putting microchips in monkey brains, among lots of other stuff. He’s a busy guy—too busy, obviously, to seriously commit any time or effort to a problem as real as America’s transportation woes.
