New Hyperloop Test Track?
After months of silence on the company's Hyperloop plans, Elon Musk's Boring Company issued a quick announcement over their social media that simply read "Full-scale Hyperloop Testing has begun."
The post included two pictures, each showing us the barest glimpse of what looks like a sealable Loop-style tube - like the Loop systems in Las Vegas - as well as a Tesla Model 3 just inside the door.
This came as a little bit of a surprise for TBC and SpaceX critics, who have been saying for years that the Hyperloop project had been shelved - a theory that seemed to be correct when the company's previous small-scale test tunnel in Hawthorne, California was torn down just last week.
And while this seems to have had more to do with the Hawthorne town council wanting SpaceX to remove a piece of equipment that seemed to only be gathering dust - nobody had really heard anything about Hyperloop since April of this year, when the Boring Company hinted that full-scale testing would be happening this year.
And that's fair enough. The Tunnel at Hawthorne hadn't seen much action since a student competition in 2019, and it had taken up a whole lane of a busy street.
But apparently, The Boring Company had been busy digging and preparing a full scale testing tunnel in Bastrop, Texas.
The Hyperloop is a public transit project that has been a dream of CEO Elon Musk's since way back in 2013 when he published a concept paper about it.
It envisions a train or pod system in an enclosed and low-pressure environment - lowering the friction from air and achieving incredible speeds - up to 600 plus miles per hour if the website is to be believed.
The concept is very similar to the Japanese bullet trains. Magnetic levitation can allow those vehicles to reach about 200 mile per hour. The Hyperloop iterates on that concept by enclosing the train, and creating a weak vacuum seal. Even a small reduction in air pressure is enough to boost speeds.
The original concepts for this type of system proposed a perfect, or near-vacuum, for maximum effect - but Musk very correctly pointed out in his paper that supporting that sort of system over long stretches is nearly impossible.
Musk's idea was to work the concept using a much lighter vacuum seal, and easily sourced commercial air pumps which could overcome the inevitable leaks.
This - plus his energy products - would build a system that was mostly self-sustaining so he could offer quick, reliable transportation at a fraction the cost of current train systems.
This is - to put it mildly - a difficult concept to design and engineer. Elon's already got hugely complicated projects he's working on at the moment - ranging from designing vehicles to push us away from fossil fuels, to literal rocket science.
So when reports came in that SpaceX was finally pulling down its Hyperloop test tunnel, it seemed like Musk had finally realised he had too much on his plate, and that if anything had to be cut, it would have to be Hyperloop.
But then, on November 4th, we get the post from the Boring Company's socials. Let's take another look at that.
Admittedly it's not much, but from the pictures alone we can see that this appears to be a Boring Company, Loop-style tunnel. From the Tesla Model 3 pictured just inside, we can see that it is indeed a full-sized tunnel - at least for a standard Loop system.
We also see a sliding door on a sturdy-looking rig. It's hard to know just from the picture, but it is a possibility that this door could seal the system - it doesn't take much for a negative pressure area to form a useable seal.
Which would have to be the point of this tunnel. As this drone flyover from twitter user Chap Ambrose shows, the tunnel is only about 500 feet long - not nearly long enough for speed tests. If this tunnel is for Hyperloop testing - as The Boring Company says it is - then it must be there to test the full-scale depresressurization of their tunnels.
The Model 3 is a weird touch though. It's clear this tunnel is based on the current Loop design, which is meant to work with Tesla vehicles. But Hyperloop concepts were much closer to using trains or automated pods, so what's this car doing here?
Now this could be as simple as Tesla proving the scale of the tunnel with something we're all familiar with. Or they could be using the Model 3 to test the effects of depressurization in the tunnel - after all, it's not like they don't have access to some cars for promotional or testing purposes.
But considering the radio-silence on the Hyperloop project, it's hard not to see the use of the Model 3 here as hinting to some change in functionality. Of course the problem with doing that, is that it's pure speculation. The Model 3 could be a hint that Hyperloop is now going to be some sort of hybrid transportation system now, just as much as it could just be a show of scale.
As always, the best course of action is to wait and see where this is going. Hyperloop is an important project that has implications for way more than just Elon's companies. Cheap, fast public transportation is something North America is severely lacking in; so it's just good to see work happening on this front again.