Elon Musk’s Hyperloop: Do 760 mph While Sitting in a Tube

Next time you pull up to your bank's drive-thru, look at the vacuum tube funneling to the clerk's window. Now imagine you're deposited inside, comfortably reclined, and whisking at subsonic speeds across the California coast. This isn't a Honey, I Shrunk The Kids remake. Tesla CEO Elon Musk, the billionaire engineer behind the industry's most-advanced electric cars, released a white paper on what he calls the Hyperloop, a steel pipe elevated above Interstate 5 that he claims could whisk passengers from Los Angeles to San Francisco in 35 minutes. Musk's dream isn't terribly far-fetched. A 28-passenger tram, suspended within steel tubing by air bearings (like those used on air hockey tables) and powered by linear induction motors (used on trains), would travel up to 760 mph. Unlike the bank example, the Hyperloop tube isn't a closed vacuum—that, he says, would be prone to total failure from one tiny leak—but relies on a low-pressure atmosphere that Musk says would be one-sixth the pressure of what's experienced on Mars (his other company, SpaceX, is trying to fly there). Solar panels would power the linear induction motors, and the tram's on-board batteries would run a fan mounted at the front to disperse air and allow the tram to "float" within the tube, negating the need for more-expensive magnetic levitation systems. The tubing would be pre-fabricated steel and placed on earthquake-resistant pylons with integrated dampers that could be set to adjust to California's changing land. Oh, and it would cost passengers just $20 each way, and the state of California less than $6 billion, which, conveniently, is less than what the state is spending on a conventional high-speed train network. "How could it be that the home of Silicon Valley and [NASA's Jet Propulsion Laboratory]—doing incredible things like indexing all the world's knowledge and putting rovers on Mars—would build a bullet train that is both one of the most expensive per mile and one of the slowest in the world?" Musk wrote. Currently, Musk hasn't applied for patents but has invited other engineers to collaborate on the Hyperloop project, open-source style. While Musk really wants teleportation, "which would of course be awesome," he's convinced the Hyperloop would be safer and more efficient than flying or driving. For longer high-speed travel, he'd prefer supersonic commercial aircraft, which, of course, don't exist anymore. Instrumented Test: 2013 Tesla Model S Feature: The CAR and DRIVER Tech 50 Feature: Driving In a Fake Swedish Town As wild as this all sounds, consider Musk's namesake. In 1901, Nikola Tesla, after inventing the electric AC motor, was constructing a tower on Long Island to transmit electricity through the air. In the 1930s, he imagined a network of electric towers that could send concentrated "death beams" to destroy enemy aircraft. But while those ideas crumbled, Tesla's other grand plans—early concepts for today's radar and wireless-communication networks, plus a system that would allow vertical take-off and landing—would come to fruition. Unlike Tesla, Musk has a lot of money, and considering how far he's taken the Model S, we're not about to discount his Hyperloop just yet. from Car and Driver Blog http://blog.caranddriver.com

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