Elon Musk’s prototype Hyperloop tunnel, which hosted student competitions in 2018 and 2019, has been turned into a parking lot.
You may not remember that before Musk took on the mantle of freedom of speech, he intended to bypass “moving traffic” by building Hyperloop, a tunnel system that will revolutionize transportation. The billionaire claimed that his company would be able to dig tunnels faster and more efficiently than most modern drilling systems, which he rightly claimed were labor intensive and expensive. Musk assured that he could reduce the travel time from San Francisco to Los Angeles to 30 minutes.
A white steel tunnel, about 1.5 km long, was built along Jack Northrop Avenue near the SpaceX headquarters in Hawthorne, California. It was supposed to become a prototype for future objects, but it was recently dismantled. Precision Construction Services was one of the contractors who installed the pipe, and earlier this year, company owner Eric Wright was informed of the site’s demolition.
Bloomberg reported that “no trace of the Hyperloop pipe remains.” (Probably the underground test tunnel Musk debuted in 2018 remains.)
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The elevated tube was the centerpiece of the 2018 Hyperloop module launch competition at high speeds, when dozens of student teams from around the world tested…SpaceX’s future parking lot.
The next year, the event was repeated, and the third race, as promised by Musk, was to be held in a “10-kilometer vacuum tunnel.”
Next year’s@Hyperloop competition will be in a 10km vacuum tunnel with a curve
— Elon Musk (@elonmusk) July 22, 2019
After a few years, Musk’s Hyperloop ambitions waned . His proposal for an underground transit system with modules moving by magnetic levitation at speeds up to hundreds of miles per hour was replaced with tunnels designed for Tesla cars.
The remaining Hyperloop startups were closed or transferred to other directions – for example, the American company Virgin Hyperloop reduced almost half of its staff as part of a business restructuring and refocused from passenger to freight traffic .
Meanwhile, Musk’s The Boring Company has been working on a tunnel system under Las Vegas for several years, while the company’s efforts to drill tunnels in Chicago, Los Angeles, and the Northeast Corridor have failed.
Source: The Verge
