The Hyperloop Whitepaper's Weirdest Number

So everybody and their mother has already written about the Hyperloop thing Musk dropped yesterday. I'm not going to walk you through the whole 57-page PDF, you've got a browser, go read it. What I keep chewing on isn't the tube or the air-bearing skis or any of the stuff people are freaking out about. Its the twenty bucks.

Twenty dollars. Thats the one-way ticket price he's floating for a trip from LA to the Bay Area, something like 35 minutes door to door at (he says) upwards of 760 mph. I sat there yesterday afternoon reading that number over and over waiting for the part where it made sense and it never really came.

Here's the thing that bugs me. The whole document spends pages justifying the $6 billion build cost by comparing it against the California high-speed rail project, which by the last revised estimate is sitting around $68 billion and won't even be finished until the 2020s. Fine, thats a fair target, everybody in this state has opinions about that rail project and most of them are not nice opinions. But going from "this is ten times cheaper than the thing everyone hates" to "therefore the ticket should cost about what a cheap flight costs" is a pretty big leap, and the paper sort of blows past it in a paragraph.

I've ridden Caltrain between San Francisco and Mountain View more times than I want to count, and slow doesn't begin to cover it. So believe me, I want this to be real. I want the twenty dollar ticket. I just don't buy the math yet, and I say that as someone who has read exactly one Elon Musk whitepaper in my life so take that with whatever grain of salt seems appropriate.

The part nobody's really talking about

What actually got me was the conference call. It went up at 11am Pacific yesterday, which meant I was sitting at my desk on the east coast trying to stream audio off a call-in service that kept cutting out every ninety seconds, refreshing a liveblog instead because that was actually working better than the primary source. Not exactly the future-of-transportation vibe you'd hope for.

And I get it, this is explicitly not a company, not a product, not something with a groundbreaking date. Musk has said flat out he doesn't have time to build it himself because he's busy with Tesla and SpaceX, and he's basically daring somebody else to run with it. Which is a very Musk move honestly — throw out a concept with real numbers attached, let the internet do six months of free engineering scrutiny on it, then see what sticks. I don't say that as a knock, it's actually kind of a smart way to source feedback on something this early. But it does mean everyone writing "IS THIS THE FUTURE OF TRAVEL" headlines this morning is covering a PDF, not a plan.

The tube-and-pod idea itself isn't even new, by the way, people have been kicking around vactrain and pneumatic tube transit concepts since the 1800s in various forms, and there was a Popular Science piece on almost this exact thing years back. What's different this time is that it's coming from somebody who has actually built rockets that land (well, tried to, results still pending on that one) and an electric car company that didn't die, so people are giving it way more credit than they'd give a random Berkeley professor with the same slide deck.

Anyway. I'll be curious in a year whether anyone's actually poured concrete on this, or if it just becomes one of those things people bring up at dinner parties forever without it going anywhere, like the hoverboard or the flying car. My money, for what it's worth, is on dinner party purgatory. Happy to be wrong.

One more thing before I close the laptop: if you do read the actual document, skip to the section on the pylons. Thats the part that made me sit up more than the speed numbers did. Building a structure that can absorb thermal expansion over 400 miles without the whole tube buckling in the California sun is, to me, the actually hard problem here, way harder than getting a pod to go fast in a low-pressure tube. Nobody's tweeting about the pylons though. Everybody wants to talk about how fast it goes.