Suddenly, Hyperloop One, the star company of the "hyperloop", announced that it was about to go out of business, laid off most of its employees, and ended it completely on December 31.
For a while, Musk became the focus of the topic again, and two different voices appeared: Musk's dream of reshaping transportation was shattered or Musk's failed lie.
This company has always been tied to Musk, in fact, it is neither run nor invested by Musk, and the reason behind it is that the entire concept of "hyperloop" was proposed by Musk:
Operated in a vacuum duct with an expected top speed of 800 miles per hour.
Converted to 1,287 kilometers per hour, the railway from Beijing to Shanghai is 1,318 kilometers long, and it runs in just over an hour.
Hyperloop One was the first batch to be established after Musk released his idea into a white paper, and it is also the most high-profile participant.
They successfully tested it in 2017, attracting investment from the founder of commercial space company Virgin Galactic, raising a total of $450 million since its inception, which is a smash hit.
Now it has come to an embarrassing step:
The Los Angeles office was closed, and the remaining assets such as test tracks and machines were sold in an attempt to sell all the most critical intellectual property to investors.
Musk does not intend to realize the idea
Like Musk's grand vision of colonizing Mars, clean energy, and brain-computer interfaces, the hyperloop is also very disruptive.
In a 2013 white paper, it was described as the "fifth mode of transportation" after cars, trains, planes, and ships:
Safe, fast, low-cost, more convenient, not affected by the weather, energy self-sufficient, nothing else around the line can interfere with its operation, not even earthquakes......
The entire idea, including the technical details of the pipes, carriages, propulsion system, safety and reliability design, was made public.
One interpretation is that Musk was busy with Tesla and SpaceX at the time, and he made the idea public and let other aspirants promote innovation.
But Ashley Vance, author of Musk's biography "Iron Man of Silicon Valley," put forward a different view, arguing that Musk did not really want to build a hyperloop, but to oppose the normal high-speed rail that California was planning to build at the time.
There is a detail in this book that is often overlooked:
In an interview, Musk told me that his idea stemmed from his disgust with California's proposed high-speed rail system.
"The $60 billion high-speed bullet train they're planning to build in California is the most expensive and slowest train per mile in the world," he said, "and they're setting a record in the wrong way." ”
The phrase "the highest cost per mile but the slowest speed" was proposed by Musk at the D11 conference held by the Wall Street Journal that year, and has been repeated on many occasions since then.
In contrast, Musk insists that his hyperloop costs between $6 billion ~ $10 billion, which is faster than an airplane.
Paris Marx, a well-known technology journalist, believes that the California high-speed rail plan at that time was contrary to Musk's interests as an automaker, and there is no evidence that Musk supports improving public transportation.
For example, at the 2017 NIPS (now NeurIPS) conference, Musk publicly stated that "public transport is painful, it's terrible".
On his Twitter account, he also complains about things like "traffic is driving me crazy".
His own tunneling company, The Boring Comany, has one key difference from the original Hyperloop design: Tesla cars are running in the tunnels, not purpose-built trains.
For Musk's vision of a cost as low as $6 billion, it was quickly pointed out that it was simply unrealistic.
Dan Sperling of the University of California, Davis, thinks the underestimate is at least 10-20 times, and the actual value could be as high as $100 billion.
The argument was that the oil pipeline was seven times narrower than the hyperloop pipeline, costing $5 million to $6 million per mile at the time.
And the hyperloop pipeline cannot change direction abruptly like an oil pipeline and must be built to a higher standard than any pipeline.
Economists also analyzed from a business point of view, if the construction cost is 100 billion US dollars, the design capacity to transport 840 passengers per hour, the one-way ticket price is set at 1,000 US dollars to have a return on investment.
Even if it were technically possible, it didn't make any sense economically.
But none of this has stopped entrepreneurs and investors around the world from reinventing mobility.
From 2013 to 2015, a series of companies such as HyperloopTT and Transpod were established one after another.
Among them, Hyperloop One, founded by Musk's engineers, has attracted huge investment and has become a representative of the entire industry.
It has been established for nearly 10 years, and not a single contract has been received
Hyperloop One was founded in June 2014 by CTO and co-founder Brogan Brangan, a former engineer at SpaceX.
In 2017, due to the investment of Richard Branson, the founder of Virgin Galactic, the company also took the name "Virgin", and changed its name to "Virgin Hyperloop One".
In terms of technological progress, Hyperloop One announced in July 2017 that it had successfully completed the world's first full-system hyperloop test in a vacuum environment.
The test was carried out privately in the desert using the company's test track "DevLoop", which has a total length of 500 meters, a diameter of 3.3 meters, a propulsion section of 300 meters in length, and a proprietary suspension system.
The first phase of the test was said to have coasted in a vacuum for a total of 5.3 seconds at a speed of about 112 km/h.
In the second stage, the Hyperloop One achieved a glide ride of 10.6 seconds and a top speed of about 310 km/h, with a peak acceleration of 1.48 Gs, which is equivalent to accelerating from 0 to almost 100 km/h in 1.85 seconds.
After this round of testing, Hyperloop One also made a bold statement:
In 2020, the hyperloop will be put into operation around the world.
It was also the year that Virgin invested in Hyperloop One, with an unknown amount of money.
The cumulative investment of $450 million in Hyperloop One was largely provided by him and DP World, a shipping company based in the United Arab Emirates.
The next big step was in 2020, when it was announced that the first manned test had finally been conducted after more than 400 unmanned tests, but at a speed of only 172 km/h, well below the original promise, seven times lower.
Just when the original global dream was far away, in February last year, Hyperloop One abruptly changed its direction to focus on freight instead.
At the same time, more than 100 employees, about half of the original staff, were laid off, and almost all the executives and founders left.
It was around this time that the collapse began.
In November of the same year, Hyperloop One lost Virgin support and the company reverted to its original name.
In April this year, Hyperloop One was revealed to have merged with a shell company, and the shareholders of the shell company became the sole owners of Hyperloop One.
And then there's what we saw at the beginning.
This time, Musk's dream of a hyperloop was truly shattered.
So, what's wrong with Hyperloop One?
Judging from the previous progress, Hyperloop One has basically failed to complete the technical implementation as planned.
It is understood that this company has never won a construction contract in the nearly ten years since its establishment.
This kind of only getting out also makes the company face the problem of shortage of funds.
According to The Verge, Virgin founder Richard Branson helped the company secure $50 million in new investments from two existing investors, one of which was to "meet wage obligations."
Not only that, but before the collapse of the company, executives were in trouble.
The original CTO and co-creator, Brogan BamBrogan, was hastily ousted before the company changed its name to Virgin (he had discovered a noose on his chair while at work) and then backhanded a lawsuit against the company.
Another co-creator resigned after being accused of sexual harassment, and a director was arrested in a foreign country on charges of fraud and embezzlement, but allegedly unrelated to Hyperloop One.
Of course, we don't know exactly which straw finally crushed the company.
The current state of hyperloop entrepreneurship
Although Hyperloop One has failed to realize the dream of hyperloop after years of hard work, this concept still makes many people "fascinated" -
There is much more to it than that.
However, none of them are going well or are still in the starting stage.
Hyperloop Transportation Technologies (HyperloopTT), also founded in the United States in 2013, has raised far less than Hyperloop One, and is still building prototypes, and plans to merge and go public fell through earlier this year.
The Hardt Hyperloop from the Netherlands will not be tested until 2024.
Swisspod Technologies from Switzerland (founded by two SpaceX engineers) also crowdfunded 500,000 euros (less than 4 million yuan) for R&D and early production verification last year.
In addition, the most noteworthy thing is that Arrivo, a competitor company that Hyperloop One co-creator Brogan Brogan quickly established after being fired, has long since disbanded.
One More Thing
With the first dream shattering of Musk's hyperloop concept, it can't help but make people think of his tunnel company.
How's it going?
It's also hard to put into words.
It is understood that as of November this year, The Boring Company had only dug a total of 2.4 miles (about 3.8km) in seven years.
You know, the original ambition was to build 1 mile a week, and the plan was far behind.
In addition, the original plan was to run the autonomous driving service in the tunnel, but now the driver is responsible for transporting passengers, and the speed is less than 64 km/h, which is far from the scheduled 240 km/h.