When will the Hyperloop arrive?

Hawthorne test track

Musk hasn’t yet given a date when we can expect to see Hyperloop up and running, he’s merely announced that it will be made.

A one-mile test track built by SpaceX adjacent to Hawthorne, its California headquarters, has been built, and the first successful trial has been carried out. Hyperloop One plans to send an 8.5-metre long pod down a set of tracks in Nevada. In May 2017, a pod levitated on a separate test track in Nevada for 5.3-seconds and reached 70mph.

The first trial using one of the 8.7-metre passenger pods has now been carried out too. The pod travelled along the 500-metre test track, and reached a speed of 192mph before safely coming to a complete stop.

LA to San Francisco

Planning documents currently propose a route between LA and San Francisco, a 354-mile journey, that would cost around $6 billion in construction. This is based on a passenger-only model, whereas one that can also transport vehicles would be $7.5 billion. This extra expenditure would be worth it since more people could use the system, offering potentially larger returns.

Shervin Pishevar, co-founder and chairman of Hyperloop Technologies, aims to shuttle passengers and cargo in high-speed pods that are smaller than most planes and trains and designed to depart as often as every 10 seconds. He recently told CNBC: “Hyperloop will be operational, somewhere in the world, by 2020.”

New York to DC

Must tweeted in July 2017 that his Boring Company tunnel project has received “verbal [government] approval” to build a Hyperloop that would connect the cities of New York City, Philadelphia, Baltimore, and Washington, DC. He also tweeted more details about the project. The new Hyperloop would only take 29 minutes to travel between New York City and DC, Musk claimed.

It would feature “up to a dozen or more” access points via elevator in each city. Keep in mind Musk released his Hyperloop concept as an open-source white paper in 2013. As a result, Hyperloop Transportation Technologies is looking into a setup that would link Slovakia, Austria and Hungary. This is the same company that plans to create the five-mile test loop in California by 2018.

Musk has continually talked about his agitation with surface-level transportation. His tunnel project, dubbed the Boring Company, which began as a joke, is Musk’s attempt at digging more efficiently. He’s working on tunnel-boring machines than can both dig and reinforce tunnels, simultaneously. He also recently announced the completion of the first section of tunnel under Los Angeles.

Back to the “verbal govt approval”: apparently, Musk’s Boring Company will dig up the tunnel used for the New York-to-DC route. We’ve contacted the US Department of Transportation for more information. But based on Musk’s tweets, we know work on the New York-to-DC Hyperloop will happen alongside the LA tunnel that’s already in progress.

How much will Hyperloop cost?

According to Hyperloop Transportation Technologies CEO Dirk Ahlborn, the cost of a ticket should be around $30 mark to get a passenger from LA to San Francisco. That, he says, should allow the company to pay back its initial costs in eight years.

Whether this will actually be the price of a ticket remains to be seen.