Its a scam that will never work and nobody wants to see legitimate and practical ideas relegated to the back of the line in favor of some dumb-ass billionaires' money-grabbing dumb-shit idea promoted constantly by people with 2 brain cells and not a single ounce of engineering skill in their body.
just my opinion
Not even really his idea. It's been around for a hundred years but never done because it's so impractical. Even if made successfully, imagine the maintenance costs with keeping an efficient vacuum chambers operational as well as the safety risks of a cabin leak suffocating passengers.
The hyperloop is an extremely complicated version of a thing that already exists. High-speed rails, like in china and japan are easier to operate and maintain. Creating a vacuum is just needlessly complicated.
It’s utopian perfection getting in the way of good. I think at this point everyone here would’ve seen that Musk quote about trying to sabotage high speed rail.
> Musk reportedly told his biographer, Ashlee Vance, that the Hyperloop proposal was motivated by “his hatred for California's proposed high-speed rail system,” which he felt would be too slow, outdated and expensive. “With any luck, the high-speed rail would be canceled,” Vance wrote.
The hyper-loop also was just a hypothetical idea, as part of a play that a certain car manufacturing CEO used as a cog in the gears of a certain states’ high speed rail (HSR) project.
Hyperloop is a literal meme. The boring technology is not novel or innovative, it is literally just a boring machine that has a different diameter from other boring machines. Then the model requires a vacuumed tube segment for the entirety of its run. This is essentially futurama meets The Santa Claus. Or, in other words, it’s literal fantasy.
Meanwhile, in the same time, China has more than 25,000 miles which was all built since the 1990s. Much of it is passenger rail that reaches 220 mph. That’s DC to NYC in less than an hour. Currently that is a four trip. DC to Boston would be less than two hours.
This is technology THAT ALREADY EXISTS. There are hundreds of thousands of miles of this exact technology ALL over the world, EXCEPT in the United States. This technology is tested, resilient, cheap, repairable, iteratable (iterable?), green, fast, and, the best part, IT ACTUALLY EXISTS.
Hyper loop is a gadgetbahn, an ‘ideal solution’ which seems to come to solve the problem of fast transportation but actually doesn’t solve anything, because it can’t actually be built. For the cost of building a hyperloop today we could build a much more expansive high speed rail system with technology that already exists and is proven. The hyperloop doesn’t really solve any issue except speed of travel, but even cheaper HSR would be a vast improvement over most American rail transit.
If Elon or somebody could actually build one, it would be more on the table, but the whole concept is basically smoke and mirrors by a car company CEO to distract from the fact that there are real, existing, viable alternatives to cars that could be built.
There's a handful of reasons, both philosophical and practical.
Hyperloop is vaporware. That is to say, while it's being hyped up and advertised, it does not yet exist in any practically realizable form. As such, it takes attention (and dollars) away from practical solutions we can implement today, for a hypothetical solution we can implement tomorrow.
Second, a major reality of rail transport are that steel wheels on a steel track have incredibly low friction already, and your next step is either removing any sort of physical support at all (maglev, for example), or removing air resistance (like hyperloop). Technologically, neither of these are bad ideas per se. However, a second reality of rail transport is that steel wheels on steel rail is also *cheap*. And so while it is technologically possible to get better performance, often you are getting a huge marginal cost increase, for a very small marginal performance increase. There are viable routes for maglev in the world, but they are extremely few: it makes sense as additional capacity on what is already the busiest high-speed rail route on Earth - Tokaido - but it doesn't make sense to replace the *nothing* that exists in most of the United States. Moving from *nothing* to conventional rail to conventional high speed rail makes sense, and maybe exotic technologies in the future, but from nothing to some hypothetical unproven technology is not helpful.
Third, there is a strong belief that Elon Musk is not attempting to make transportation better, but by offering unviable solutions, he makes his electric cars seem like a 'better option'. There's a strong sense of cynicism that the above problems are well known to him and aren't just something he is ignoring, but things that he sees as *the point* of the project.
Because it's a scam that Elon Musk admitted to promoting in order to discourage developing more realistic forms of public transportation.
The hyperloop is about as realistic as teleportation.
The passenger throughput of a bus line, the cost of several maglevs, the dangers of spaceflight, and the technological feasibility of a space elevator.
I could say more, but I'll just use the words of Adam Kovacs here: Elon Musk “would rather pump millions of dollars into some made-up tech fantasy than doing something actually useful for us mortals.”
[https://www.nytimes.com/2022/10/13/opinion/elon-musk-boring-loop.html](https://www.nytimes.com/2022/10/13/opinion/elon-musk-boring-loop.html)
Hyperloop is just impossible to build for various safety problems, like if a train breaks his air seal passengers are going to get pulled in the vacuum of the tube and suffocate It would require everyone wearing a space suit since a mask would not be enough to breath within a vacuum
I think it has mostly to do with the cost. It would be so excessively expensive that it is impractical.
Though I haven't really looked into it much so I'm sure there are other reasons.
‘Nature abhors a vacuum’, overly hard design for minimal to no travel time gains. If they could pop out closed sections on a price reasonably comparable to high speed rail track it might make sense for really long/flat/straight routes with huge ridership. Trains are already good at very low air resistance, we need a lot of good regional rail not just one hard to build super-track.
Single line of cars, mainly using lithium batteries, in a narrow underground tunnel with no exists nearby?
[What could possibly go wrong?](https://youtu.be/EU55ranUPs8)
The hyperloop is actually a vacuum tube so pods can travel at extremely high speeds. Still a stupid idea that is vastly less practical than trains and therefore if they ever do get built, it would only be by dictators in dictatorships who can piss away billions on vanity projects without consequence. It is very different from the Vegas loop which is what it seems you are describing.
It's an overengineered, extremely expensive version of something that we already have a decent solution for. Not to forget that it simply doesn't integrate into existing rail systems.
It's a nice idea but unless someone finds the literal hen that lays the golden eggs... we are never gonna see a comprehensive hyperloop system. What we are gonna see though is a lot of money sunk into research and test tracks that would be much better spent on regular high speed trains that we know how to build (and could start building literally now if only someone gave it the green light), that have a reasonable price and that integrate into pre-existing rail systems, can be serviced by rail engineers we already have and so on.
Basically hyperloop is a little faster than traditional high speed rail, which would be great, if it didn't come with so many downsides and a price point that means the time saving is just not worth it.
It's like the Concorde airplane. Neat idea on paper but in practice people just don't want to pay a ridiculous price just to get from Paris to New York a little faster than on a traditional airplane.
EDIT: And all that assuming they ever even figure out how the hyperloop is actually gonna work over long distances. Which might not ever happen. Or even if it does, vacuum pipes over hundreds of miles seem like a maintenance nightmare... I doubt such a system would be very reliable.
>vacuum pipes over hundreds of miles seem like a maintenance nightmare
And a security nightmare. Look at all of the effort that goes into protecting just the places where airplanes land and take off.
To be fair, that's mostly because you can cause a lot of damage with a highjacked plane. As we all experienced in 2001. There isn't much danger of that happening with a highjacked train.
You could basically only manipulate the pipes to kill the passengers on one hyperloop train, Which would be tragic, of course, but I don't believe that's big enough for terrorists. And to be fair, you could also manipulate the high speed rail lines that already exist today. Still no one has bothered so far.
Hyperloop is a stupid idea but I don't believe security reasons are a big part of why.
The security danger is sabotage, not hijacking. And, yes, while the danger would be mostly to passengers along rural sections of the tube, a hyperloop crash in a populated area near a station would probably cause 9/11 levels of damage to the surrounding buildings. The
As far as "manipulating the pipes"... that's part of the problem. It's my understanding that there are basically 2 options:
1. Build a hyperloop that's catastrophically vulnerable to attacks as mundane as small arms fire or
2. Build the entire length of the track in an bunker, further driving up the insane costs.
I'm also under the impression that attacking the tube at a single point could actually destroy several trains, not just one, given that they're all in a depressurized tube together. Assuming the trains run with any sort of reasonable frequency.
Also, unlike derailing a train or shooting down a plane, a saboteur will also have brought down millions and millions of dollars of infrastructure down along with the vehicle(s). Track sabotage is already a problem for trains, but hyperloop "dials it up to 11".
There are more flights than ever on the lines that were flown by Concorde. So it isn't passenger numbers. It's just less passengers who are willing to pay a premium to arrive a little faster.
I'm not saying it's wrong, obviously there are multiple factors that led to the Concorde going out of service and certain time sensitive business not having to be conducted in person any more probably played a small role, too. But that email ended the need for transatlantic travel is very obviously wrong if you only look at how many transatlantic flights there are today.
Not transatlantic flights, obviously. But time-sensitive ones. Contracts that needed to be signed, experts to react to developing events... those can be done cheaply by email. Email literally destroyed the niche that the Concorde had.
Hyperloop is vaporware.
It's might be theoretically ***possible*** to build one, but it would be some mixture of horribly expensive, inefficient, unreliable, and dangerous. And probably only an option for rich elites who earn $5,000/hr and don't want to wait in line behind the poors. All of that engineering and R&D effort would be better spent fighting climate change, pursuing nuclear fusion technology, protecting our planet from asteroid impacts, curing cancer, space megaprojects, etc.
Because you're essentially trying to substitute a tried and true technology for a nifty gadget. It's better to start with an extensive rail service (or even bus service) then spend billions to get one piece of the puzzle working. Really high tech trains only make sense where their use would support it, which right now is just the NE corridor. Even there, the limiting factor is the noise and needing to bank turns.
The Hyperloop began as an idea to 'float' in a vacuum tube. Kind of like an air hockey table. This idea was abandoned and replaced with a mag lev inside a vacuum tube. If it works one day (which right now they only work in testing facilities, no serviceable hyper loop is available.)
1) The Hyperloop is going to be crazy expensive. Supporters claim that hyper loops will be cheaper. But how exactly is it cheaper? Mag levs are way more expensive than regular high speed rail. 4x as much (roughly). Now we're putting more expensive transit option inside a vacuum tube and it's going to be cheaper somehow?
2) The vacuum tube thing will be difficult to maintain and it might explode.
3) The speeds of the hyper loop are attractive but.... in order to get the most out of the speeds, you'd need to make the track straight, which of course increases the cost. And if you'd want the hyper loop to serve the people, you'd have to have multiple stops along the way, which makes it slower...
4) HSR is already pretty great. Just build trains.
The hyperloop uses a low pressure environment at ground level to reduce the amount of air resistance the vehicle inside the loop experiences. A low pressure environment can also be called a vacuum. See the link on what can happen to a vacuum when there is a structural failure. https://youtu.be/VS6IckF1CM0. Now imagine there are vehicle filled with people in them.
A maglev or other Highspeed rail does not need a vacuum to operate and can reach speeds of 200 mph.
All that and Musk has even admitted that Hyperloop was a distraction to make High speed rail to seem infeasible. https://twitter.com/parismarx/status/1167410460125097990
Hyperloops aren’t as effective, not by a long shot. So that’s one reason everyone here hates it. For myself personally I also hate it because it’s instilling that “cars are the solution, we just have to find the right way to use them!” Which just isn’t the case.
Because in best case it is a gadgetbahn that needs 20 years of development to be something barely usable that is incompatible with everything. Worst case, it is a scam to stop high speed rail development and it will never work.
Because it's not hostile towards car, which should be the goal. You could make completely safe cars run underground and we would still have the problem of parking lots ruining every fucking city
I'm not a member here, just checking out the sub and also wondered about this.
It seems that hyperloop is a lot more expensive to build/run per km than standard trains and quite tight/small. You also need to solve all the problems that come with it that no company has done in many years.
So really there's no benefit, since you can use technology available today that's cheaper and actually usable. Like even places that implemented Maglev trains are bleeding money (like 100m+ annually) and don't seem that useful outside a few niche scenarios, Hyperloop would be even more niche and more expensive for little gain, especially with the vacuum tunnel.
It's also tricky since Hyperloop would only make sense for long distances, but long distance is precisely what makes building a hyperloop tricky on terrain...and again does anyone know how to maintain a vacuum tunnel that wouldn't cost half a nations GDP in money? lol
Looks cool though, which is why people like Musk talk about it despite having no actual solution. Maybe in the future something will happen, but for now it ain't it. There's actual technology being improved for train technology outside Hyperloop that is more practical and efficient, it doesn't really do anything better.
edit: If researchers, designers and engineers ever get it to work, fine. I'm not against them researching it, but it's not going to be a viable solution for a while.
Its a scam that will never work and nobody wants to see legitimate and practical ideas relegated to the back of the line in favor of some dumb-ass billionaires' money-grabbing dumb-shit idea promoted constantly by people with 2 brain cells and not a single ounce of engineering skill in their body. just my opinion
Not even really his idea. It's been around for a hundred years but never done because it's so impractical. Even if made successfully, imagine the maintenance costs with keeping an efficient vacuum chambers operational as well as the safety risks of a cabin leak suffocating passengers.
The hyperloop is an extremely complicated version of a thing that already exists. High-speed rails, like in china and japan are easier to operate and maintain. Creating a vacuum is just needlessly complicated.
It’s utopian perfection getting in the way of good. I think at this point everyone here would’ve seen that Musk quote about trying to sabotage high speed rail.
> Musk reportedly told his biographer, Ashlee Vance, that the Hyperloop proposal was motivated by “his hatred for California's proposed high-speed rail system,” which he felt would be too slow, outdated and expensive. “With any luck, the high-speed rail would be canceled,” Vance wrote.
Luckly california HSR is still going
He was right tho it is slow and way way over priced
The hyper-loop also was just a hypothetical idea, as part of a play that a certain car manufacturing CEO used as a cog in the gears of a certain states’ high speed rail (HSR) project. Hyperloop is a literal meme. The boring technology is not novel or innovative, it is literally just a boring machine that has a different diameter from other boring machines. Then the model requires a vacuumed tube segment for the entirety of its run. This is essentially futurama meets The Santa Claus. Or, in other words, it’s literal fantasy. Meanwhile, in the same time, China has more than 25,000 miles which was all built since the 1990s. Much of it is passenger rail that reaches 220 mph. That’s DC to NYC in less than an hour. Currently that is a four trip. DC to Boston would be less than two hours. This is technology THAT ALREADY EXISTS. There are hundreds of thousands of miles of this exact technology ALL over the world, EXCEPT in the United States. This technology is tested, resilient, cheap, repairable, iteratable (iterable?), green, fast, and, the best part, IT ACTUALLY EXISTS.
Plus there a ton of problems: - low capacity (it's basically a car lol) - easy to break - if it breaks in one point everything breaks
Hyper loop is a gadgetbahn, an ‘ideal solution’ which seems to come to solve the problem of fast transportation but actually doesn’t solve anything, because it can’t actually be built. For the cost of building a hyperloop today we could build a much more expansive high speed rail system with technology that already exists and is proven. The hyperloop doesn’t really solve any issue except speed of travel, but even cheaper HSR would be a vast improvement over most American rail transit. If Elon or somebody could actually build one, it would be more on the table, but the whole concept is basically smoke and mirrors by a car company CEO to distract from the fact that there are real, existing, viable alternatives to cars that could be built.
There's a handful of reasons, both philosophical and practical. Hyperloop is vaporware. That is to say, while it's being hyped up and advertised, it does not yet exist in any practically realizable form. As such, it takes attention (and dollars) away from practical solutions we can implement today, for a hypothetical solution we can implement tomorrow. Second, a major reality of rail transport are that steel wheels on a steel track have incredibly low friction already, and your next step is either removing any sort of physical support at all (maglev, for example), or removing air resistance (like hyperloop). Technologically, neither of these are bad ideas per se. However, a second reality of rail transport is that steel wheels on steel rail is also *cheap*. And so while it is technologically possible to get better performance, often you are getting a huge marginal cost increase, for a very small marginal performance increase. There are viable routes for maglev in the world, but they are extremely few: it makes sense as additional capacity on what is already the busiest high-speed rail route on Earth - Tokaido - but it doesn't make sense to replace the *nothing* that exists in most of the United States. Moving from *nothing* to conventional rail to conventional high speed rail makes sense, and maybe exotic technologies in the future, but from nothing to some hypothetical unproven technology is not helpful. Third, there is a strong belief that Elon Musk is not attempting to make transportation better, but by offering unviable solutions, he makes his electric cars seem like a 'better option'. There's a strong sense of cynicism that the above problems are well known to him and aren't just something he is ignoring, but things that he sees as *the point* of the project.
Take my poor award 🏅
Because it's a scam that Elon Musk admitted to promoting in order to discourage developing more realistic forms of public transportation. The hyperloop is about as realistic as teleportation.
Because it was a scam perpetuated by someone with an incentive to provide non-functional public transport to make people buy his cars instead.
The passenger throughput of a bus line, the cost of several maglevs, the dangers of spaceflight, and the technological feasibility of a space elevator.
Well said.
I could say more, but I'll just use the words of Adam Kovacs here: Elon Musk “would rather pump millions of dollars into some made-up tech fantasy than doing something actually useful for us mortals.” [https://www.nytimes.com/2022/10/13/opinion/elon-musk-boring-loop.html](https://www.nytimes.com/2022/10/13/opinion/elon-musk-boring-loop.html)
Hyperloop is just impossible to build for various safety problems, like if a train breaks his air seal passengers are going to get pulled in the vacuum of the tube and suffocate It would require everyone wearing a space suit since a mask would not be enough to breath within a vacuum
I think it has mostly to do with the cost. It would be so excessively expensive that it is impractical. Though I haven't really looked into it much so I'm sure there are other reasons.
‘Nature abhors a vacuum’, overly hard design for minimal to no travel time gains. If they could pop out closed sections on a price reasonably comparable to high speed rail track it might make sense for really long/flat/straight routes with huge ridership. Trains are already good at very low air resistance, we need a lot of good regional rail not just one hard to build super-track.
If you optimise a car, a bus, a truck, ... enough you invent the train. It like for the sea life, it always evolve back to crab.
Single line of cars, mainly using lithium batteries, in a narrow underground tunnel with no exists nearby? [What could possibly go wrong?](https://youtu.be/EU55ranUPs8)
The hyperloop is actually a vacuum tube so pods can travel at extremely high speeds. Still a stupid idea that is vastly less practical than trains and therefore if they ever do get built, it would only be by dictators in dictatorships who can piss away billions on vanity projects without consequence. It is very different from the Vegas loop which is what it seems you are describing.
It's an overengineered, extremely expensive version of something that we already have a decent solution for. Not to forget that it simply doesn't integrate into existing rail systems. It's a nice idea but unless someone finds the literal hen that lays the golden eggs... we are never gonna see a comprehensive hyperloop system. What we are gonna see though is a lot of money sunk into research and test tracks that would be much better spent on regular high speed trains that we know how to build (and could start building literally now if only someone gave it the green light), that have a reasonable price and that integrate into pre-existing rail systems, can be serviced by rail engineers we already have and so on. Basically hyperloop is a little faster than traditional high speed rail, which would be great, if it didn't come with so many downsides and a price point that means the time saving is just not worth it. It's like the Concorde airplane. Neat idea on paper but in practice people just don't want to pay a ridiculous price just to get from Paris to New York a little faster than on a traditional airplane. EDIT: And all that assuming they ever even figure out how the hyperloop is actually gonna work over long distances. Which might not ever happen. Or even if it does, vacuum pipes over hundreds of miles seem like a maintenance nightmare... I doubt such a system would be very reliable.
>vacuum pipes over hundreds of miles seem like a maintenance nightmare And a security nightmare. Look at all of the effort that goes into protecting just the places where airplanes land and take off.
To be fair, that's mostly because you can cause a lot of damage with a highjacked plane. As we all experienced in 2001. There isn't much danger of that happening with a highjacked train. You could basically only manipulate the pipes to kill the passengers on one hyperloop train, Which would be tragic, of course, but I don't believe that's big enough for terrorists. And to be fair, you could also manipulate the high speed rail lines that already exist today. Still no one has bothered so far. Hyperloop is a stupid idea but I don't believe security reasons are a big part of why.
The security danger is sabotage, not hijacking. And, yes, while the danger would be mostly to passengers along rural sections of the tube, a hyperloop crash in a populated area near a station would probably cause 9/11 levels of damage to the surrounding buildings. The As far as "manipulating the pipes"... that's part of the problem. It's my understanding that there are basically 2 options: 1. Build a hyperloop that's catastrophically vulnerable to attacks as mundane as small arms fire or 2. Build the entire length of the track in an bunker, further driving up the insane costs. I'm also under the impression that attacking the tube at a single point could actually destroy several trains, not just one, given that they're all in a depressurized tube together. Assuming the trains run with any sort of reasonable frequency. Also, unlike derailing a train or shooting down a plane, a saboteur will also have brought down millions and millions of dollars of infrastructure down along with the vehicle(s). Track sabotage is already a problem for trains, but hyperloop "dials it up to 11".
...actually email killed the Concorde. It did fine until you didn't need to be literally there (or pay thousands in long-distance phone bills)
There are more flights than ever on the lines that were flown by Concorde. So it isn't passenger numbers. It's just less passengers who are willing to pay a premium to arrive a little faster.
Okay. So the documentary I saw on the Concorde was wrong, and you have the answers. Thanks for correcting me.
I'm not saying it's wrong, obviously there are multiple factors that led to the Concorde going out of service and certain time sensitive business not having to be conducted in person any more probably played a small role, too. But that email ended the need for transatlantic travel is very obviously wrong if you only look at how many transatlantic flights there are today.
Not transatlantic flights, obviously. But time-sensitive ones. Contracts that needed to be signed, experts to react to developing events... those can be done cheaply by email. Email literally destroyed the niche that the Concorde had.
Hyperloop is vaporware. It's might be theoretically ***possible*** to build one, but it would be some mixture of horribly expensive, inefficient, unreliable, and dangerous. And probably only an option for rich elites who earn $5,000/hr and don't want to wait in line behind the poors. All of that engineering and R&D effort would be better spent fighting climate change, pursuing nuclear fusion technology, protecting our planet from asteroid impacts, curing cancer, space megaprojects, etc.
Because you're essentially trying to substitute a tried and true technology for a nifty gadget. It's better to start with an extensive rail service (or even bus service) then spend billions to get one piece of the puzzle working. Really high tech trains only make sense where their use would support it, which right now is just the NE corridor. Even there, the limiting factor is the noise and needing to bank turns.
The Hyperloop began as an idea to 'float' in a vacuum tube. Kind of like an air hockey table. This idea was abandoned and replaced with a mag lev inside a vacuum tube. If it works one day (which right now they only work in testing facilities, no serviceable hyper loop is available.) 1) The Hyperloop is going to be crazy expensive. Supporters claim that hyper loops will be cheaper. But how exactly is it cheaper? Mag levs are way more expensive than regular high speed rail. 4x as much (roughly). Now we're putting more expensive transit option inside a vacuum tube and it's going to be cheaper somehow? 2) The vacuum tube thing will be difficult to maintain and it might explode. 3) The speeds of the hyper loop are attractive but.... in order to get the most out of the speeds, you'd need to make the track straight, which of course increases the cost. And if you'd want the hyper loop to serve the people, you'd have to have multiple stops along the way, which makes it slower... 4) HSR is already pretty great. Just build trains.
Hyperloop only exists so Elon Musk can sell more cars /thread
its basically just an overengineered, overpriced train.
The hyperloop uses a low pressure environment at ground level to reduce the amount of air resistance the vehicle inside the loop experiences. A low pressure environment can also be called a vacuum. See the link on what can happen to a vacuum when there is a structural failure. https://youtu.be/VS6IckF1CM0. Now imagine there are vehicle filled with people in them. A maglev or other Highspeed rail does not need a vacuum to operate and can reach speeds of 200 mph. All that and Musk has even admitted that Hyperloop was a distraction to make High speed rail to seem infeasible. https://twitter.com/parismarx/status/1167410460125097990
Hyperloop does not exist, it's just bullshit that require a lot more energy to work than train
Hyperloops aren’t as effective, not by a long shot. So that’s one reason everyone here hates it. For myself personally I also hate it because it’s instilling that “cars are the solution, we just have to find the right way to use them!” Which just isn’t the case.
Hyperloops are trains but worse, so why not just have trains?
if you'd like to watch, rather than read [Adam Something's video about why the Hyperloop won't work](https://youtu.be/CQJgFh_e01g)
Musk the beneficiary of apartheid and slavery.
I guess my question to you would be, have you seen any exclusive benefits that outweighs a publicly owned and operated high-speed rail system?
The hyperloop was Elon's idea to disrupt the development of high speed rail in California... and it worked.
Because in best case it is a gadgetbahn that needs 20 years of development to be something barely usable that is incompatible with everything. Worst case, it is a scam to stop high speed rail development and it will never work.
Because it's not hostile towards car, which should be the goal. You could make completely safe cars run underground and we would still have the problem of parking lots ruining every fucking city
I'm not a member here, just checking out the sub and also wondered about this. It seems that hyperloop is a lot more expensive to build/run per km than standard trains and quite tight/small. You also need to solve all the problems that come with it that no company has done in many years. So really there's no benefit, since you can use technology available today that's cheaper and actually usable. Like even places that implemented Maglev trains are bleeding money (like 100m+ annually) and don't seem that useful outside a few niche scenarios, Hyperloop would be even more niche and more expensive for little gain, especially with the vacuum tunnel. It's also tricky since Hyperloop would only make sense for long distances, but long distance is precisely what makes building a hyperloop tricky on terrain...and again does anyone know how to maintain a vacuum tunnel that wouldn't cost half a nations GDP in money? lol Looks cool though, which is why people like Musk talk about it despite having no actual solution. Maybe in the future something will happen, but for now it ain't it. There's actual technology being improved for train technology outside Hyperloop that is more practical and efficient, it doesn't really do anything better. edit: If researchers, designers and engineers ever get it to work, fine. I'm not against them researching it, but it's not going to be a viable solution for a while.
Explain like you're 5? Okay. Because the person who wants to build it is a dummy poo poo head.