Elon Musk’s Hyperloop could be ready by the end of 2016
Have you ever popped cash into the pneumatic tubes at a bank drive-thru and thought, “Hey, why can’t I do that?”
You know, like George Jetson?
The Hyperloop, a new form of public transportation proposed by — who else? — Elon Musk promises to leverage similar principles to shave some serious time off your commute. Hyperloop will (hypothetically) use steel tubes filled with low air pressure to propel hovering aluminum pods through a frictionless environment at high speed via electric propulsion. Or that’s the idea, anyway.
According to Rob Lloyd, CEO of Hyperloop Technologies, that theory will be put to the test in the coming months, and if all goes well, his team will have a fully-working test loop ready by the end of 2016. The test model, if implemented, will allow passengers to depart in fully-automated, driverless pods traveling at speeds of up to 750 MPH every 10 seconds around a two-mile track near Las Vegas.
Lloyd and his firm envision the Hyperloop as a carbon-free mode of travel that will provide efficient point-to-point transportation and shipping at three times the speed and a fraction of the cost of existing high-speed rail systems.
Mr. Spacely approves.
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