☰
According to the latest news, Hyperloop One will shut down as of the start of 2024. What’s going to happen to the Hyperloop in Las Vegas?
Hyperloop is a futuristic transportation technology that proposes to use magnetic levitation to send pod-packed passengers through vacuum tubes at speeds of up to 600 miles an hour. The frictionless travel is touted as nearly silent, with many trips, especially short hops, twice as fast as commercial airlines and four times faster than high-speed trains.
Using the 250-mile trip between Los Angeles and Las Vegas as an example, Hyperloop would complete the trip in 20 minutes or so and Hyperloop One intended for vehicles to depart every 30 seconds with passengers paying $20 one-way.
The Los Angeles-based company was founded in 2014 and managed to raise nearly a half-billion dollars, most coming from the United Arab Emirates, a major shipping company, and British billionaire Richard Branson of Virgin Airlines fame.
A short 500-meter test (tube) track, called Hypertube, was built near Las Vegas in 2016 at a site called DevLoop. It hosted four student competitions, where student-built pods reached speeds of up to 288 miles per hour. Hyperloop ran 400 unoccupied tests, then set the world record for running the first full-scale human test when Virgin executives occupied the XP-2 two-seat vehicle and made the short trip in 2020. (You can see several photos of the tube and vehicle and a schematic here.)
Anyway, in 10 years, Hyperloop One didn't land any contracts to build the system and went out of business (amid some scandal with company executives) in late December.
Now, what does that have to do with Las Vegas? Other than the DevLoop site closing down, nothing. The Las Vegas Loop, the Boring Company's subterranean transportation system that uses four- and five-seat Teslas to shuttle passengers under the Las Vegas Convention Center and under the Strip to connect to Resorts World, isn't related to Hyperloop One.