Elon Musk announced on Thursday, Jan. 15, that he will build a test track that will help speed up the arrival of his vision of future transportation, a high-speed pod propped up on air cushions traveling at speeds of 800 miles per hour inside a vacuum tube.
The Tesla and SpaceX CEO took to Twitter to say the test track will be constructed for companies and teams of students who want to test their pods. He also said that it will be built in Texas, where there is presumably plenty of flat land to build the test track.
Will be building a Hyperloop test track for companies and student teams to test out their pods. Most likely in Texas.
— Elon Musk (@elonmusk) January 15, 2015
Speaking at the annual Texas Transportation Forum hosted by the Texas Department of Transportation, Musk confirmed his earlier tweet, saying that the test track will be "something that's maybe on the order of a five-mile loop."
Musk first floated the idea of a near-supersonic transportation system in August 2013, when he, along with a group of SpaceX engineers, released to the public a 57-page concept paper. The billionaire and visionary, known for making his own fortune mobile payments in the first dot-com boom when he co-founded PayPal, envisions the first commercial Hyperloop track to go the 400-mile stretch from San Francisco to Los Angeles in less than an hour.
A fully commercial Hyperloop system, however, is still several years from reality, as regulatory hoops and technological hurdles exist to be overcome. Musk himself says the single stretch of tube from San Francisco to Los Angeles would require $10 billion to construct. The amount does not even include the capsule-like pods that will be transporting people between the two cities.
By comparison, California is spending $70 billion on a high-speed rail project that delivers only a fraction of the speed that can be achieved by the Hyperloop. These aren't two directly comparable projects, though. California's train system will be covering more than dozen cities, while the first Hyperloop system, if it ever comes to fruition, will shuttle people to and from only two cities.
So who would test their pods on Musk's five-mile test track? Hyperloop Transportation Technologies, a group of about a hundred engineers from around the world, have come together via the JumpStartFund crowdsourcing platform to pitch together their ideas for a working Hyperloop system in exchange for potential equity. The group has also partnered with a team of students from the University of California, Los Angeles SupraStudio design and architecture program to create the design for the pods and stations and map out possible routes around the country.
Musk's announcement comes amid what seems to be a PR assault in Texas as the Tesla CEO tries to convince the state legislature to allow the electric car manufacturer to sell its vehicles directly to consumers. He said the current laws, which require automakers to sell their cars through a dealership, are "un-Texan."
"The law currently says in order to sell a car in Texas you have to sell through a franchise dealer," Musk said. "This exists only for alcohol and cars, which is weird."
Musk also said Texas is a potential candidate to host a Tesla gigafactory in the future, a venture that could bring in huge economic benefits for the state.
A Tesla spokesperson said that Musk's comments about the Hyperloop test track and the gigafactory were not made in relation to the dealership talks and were part of a "wide-ranging discussion in Austin, Texas about Texas matters."
