Hyperloop! Hype-loop! Hype-y pipe! Horperdorper! *Heavy breathing noises*! HYPERLOOP!
(Old Timey 90s Video Game Music)
In 1870, New York City had its first underground transit system created nearly 30 years before the subway.
American inventor, Alfred Eli Beach created the Beach pneumatic transit system.
Tunneled and built in only 58 days, the Beach system carried over 400,000 passengers in its first year
along a 300-foot tube near City Hall and Broadway.
To the chagrin of the Democrat, Tammany Hall politicians lining their pockets from the horse-drawn omnibus companies,
the tunnel was actually built in secret and an opulent breath of fresh
air compared to the corruption and rotting horse manure above.
The stations had paintings, a fountain, even a goldfish tank; and the seats inside the pod were
plushly upholstered under zircon lighting.
Alfred Beach knew the city was hungry for more but had issues getting an allowance for bonds
from the Tammany controlled governor.
Because newspapers did their jobs back then and researched real corruption that problem was solved when the new Republican governor
came in and allowed funding.
The real problem however now came to power the extension of the system.
The 100 horsepower rotary motor built by the Roots blower company in Indiana (hooray Hoosiers!) was amazingly powerful for its time to get
the pod gliding at 10 miles per hour.
But this was unworkable and quite expensive for multiple motors.
The project was essentially dead but the financial panic of 1873 hammered the final nail in the coffin,
and funding for Alfred Beach's magic ride was not happening.
Thus the dream of pneumatic to transportation died that year...
...or so we THOUGHT!*
Fast forward to the year 2019 - close to 150 years later and tubes have been back in the news again!
The Hyperloop idea was officially introduced to the world back
in 2012 by serial entrepreneur and novice 420 connoisseur Elon Musk.
(Joe Rogan intensifies)
The infamous 58 page alpha document in 2013 was spurred by Musk's irritation at
the California high-speed Rail Authority for being slow and inefficient compared
to the rest of the world.
Right on the first page. Clear as crystal.
And so far, Musk has been correct on that.
The disastrous audit recently has showcased this, giving us another thing to thank California for.
Pictured: The Sage, Officer John McClane opines on the current, future, and forever - State of California. (Colorized, 1988)
This document has spawned a plethora of Hyperloop companies and competitions which we'll get into.
Leading us eventually to why the Hyperloop will ultimately fail.
(dun dun dunnnn!)
And it isn't really engineering related. Grab a seat and sit back for this wild ride
of company backstabbings, noose hangings, empty cans, and even an ax!
Enter Arrivo ... or rather exit as it is the first fatality of the dozen or so Hyperloop companies.
Arrivo was founded by Brogan Bam Brogan, and that name is the least bizarre of this.
A former engineer of Musk's SpaceX, Bam Brogan co-founded Hyperloop One, with brothers Shervin and Afshin Pishevar.
Bam Brogan accused Shervin for giving a raise to a PR rep he was hooking up with,
escalating to Afshin leaving a noose at Bam Brogan's desk.
Fun guys to work with!
Bam Brogan and some other employees staged a coup at the company, stole a few laptops,
and after a lawsuit, Bam Brogan and his Merry Bros of Brogan started their own Hyperloop company; Arrivo.
Planning to build what was essentially a regular maglev pod in Colorado,
Arrivo reported getting 1 billion dollars in funding from a Chinese firm, Genertec,
which turned out to be just a line of credit.
Regardless, the media eat it up.
(Fake news eating sounds)
Bam Brogan's circus act continued.
I mean, look at him!
He's got the whip, the mustache... just give him the hat!
Bam Brogan went "Bam Bam" Brogan in his office, apparently,
stabbing holes into the wall with an axe to let off steam!
With dried up funding, lack of direction, and an office makeover,
Arrivo had departo-d in a pretty horrifying experience!
This begs the question...
Are investors and politicians putting their transit hopes on an immature summer camp?
Let's turn to the top two Hyperloop companies; Virgin Hyperloop One and Hyperloop Transportation Technologies.
Virgin Hyperloop One.
Notice its name?
Yes, the same Richard Branson that invested into the Brightline express rail project
from Miami to Orlando is also in the Hyperloop business!
In 2014, it started plainly as Hyperloop One made by those best of buds...
Since then it's made headlines showcasing a sled on a maglev catapult hitting sand in 2016.
Putting said sled in a tube a year later to go 70 miles per hour...
And to their credit, two months later, a test of a full pod going about a 190 MPH in the 500 meter tube.
This was essentially good enough to start talks
and deals for building Hyperloops in between cities like Chicago to Pittsburgh.
Dallas to Houston, Miami to Orlando
and in countries like India and Saudi Arabia.
Their big break came when in late 2017, they announced a strategic partnership with none other than Richard Branson's Virgin Group
now amassing a total of around 300 million dollars over separate rounds of funding.
Then there's Hyperloop Transportation Technologies or HTT.
A year older than Hyperloop One, it was founded by Dirk Alborn, who crowdfunded it on his Jump Start Fund platform
Amassing close to 32 million dollars. (aka: vapor ware arbitrage)
But since then, there's really nothing impressive compared to the previous company.
Handshakes, photo ops, and pretty CGI. (Did I mention vaporware?)
The only thing to show for it physically, includes a carbon fiber material with sensors called...
"Vibranium™"
Literally trademarked!
A Morgan Freeman sound-alike hyping pipes on a truck,
Not God: "The Hyperloop..."
And, wait- what's this? An actual Hyperloop pod?
Alright guys, this is it.
We're re-branding.
American Hyperloop Club
I'm sure it's it's freaking awesome inside it's gonna be...!
(bubble pop sound) "...So the interior of the capsule isn't finished yet.
They didn't let any cameras inside. Currently, it's a black tunnel, it's waiting to be designed in the next step"
(Hyperloop sounds)
(REALITY CHECK!)
*sigh* Right...
Those are the top Hyperloop companies.
But what of the man who pushed the idea?
Elon Musk. What is his involvement?
In these companies, nothing. In fact, Musk and SpaceX have distanced themselves from
any business involvement with hyperloops, only hosting yearly competitions
in LA at the SpaceX headquarters test track.
This test track has had issues with depressurizing, that has delayed competitions for hours.
Some pretty slow top speeds and surrendering all your intellectual property to SpaceX. (yes, it is)
Credit has to be given though, to the University of Munich s' Work Group for Rocketry and Space Flight,
or WARR. Their latest scale model pod achieved a clean speed record of 284 MPH.
Considering everything else so far,
This has been the most impressive showing of the Hyperloop yet.
Yes, the student group was able to get done in a professional matter what multi-million dollar invested Hyperloop companies have not!
Points for us Millennials! (+50 points to Slytherin)
The main culprit for Hyper Hysteria isn't any of those companies however.
It's the main stream media. (or meteor)
When they aren't fear-mongering, hating on Millennials and memeing about avocado toast for the millionth time,
and still seriously reporting on dossiers that could have been fabricated by 4chan,
(Confused Media Shilling on 4Chinz)
Whenever infrastructure comes up 9 out of 10 it's a chorus of Hyperloop.
They don't even report on that well!
The latest example on Elon Musk's boring company project,
Essentially a Tesla Model X moving through a small tunnel with rave lights,
was reported as the Hyperloop by multiple sources.
Look at this! Even USA Today!
What did the editor try to get her grand kids for Christmas? (or Hanakkuh, or Kwanaza)
A Sony Gamebox 3DS?
Out of laziness, ignorance ,and a way to appease their ad revenue,
the media has refused to ask tough questions on what is at this point a maglev project.
Maglevs already exists. The most notable has been in service
since 2004 between Pudong Airport and Shanghai that has carried millions of passengers
at 270 miles per hour.
Why haven't we seen a Hyperloop pod do something simple like,
I don't know, take a corner?
Better yet why haven't we seen an actual pod at all?
Skyway, a Russian company and despite being joked on for years,
has actually made a working multimodal system and showcased a complete pod at InnoTrans 2018.
During the same time,
the media celebrated the empty can.
It's honestly despicable.
So it's up to us, the American Rail Club to do the job that the media should be doing;
research and informing.
The real reason why the Hyperloop will eventually fail is sheer economics.
As amass transit system your main goal is to safely carry as many passengers as possible
from point A to point B while making revenue.
The max capacity for a 28 passenger capsule Hyperloop system is 1,120 passengers per hour.
An Airbus A320NEO, the most popular narrow-body for this generation, can carry about 206 per plane.
At 12 takeoffs per hour that's about 2470 passengers.
One Japanese N700A Shinkansen can take 1323 passengers.
And during rush hour the system can move more than 17,200 passengers one-way.
Hyperloop, even as a concept, cannot match anything that exists right now.
there's a reason why China can attribute about 13% of productivity growth to its enormous
bullet train network it keeps banking on,
even while entertaining the Hyperloop for the time being.
(bell ringing in Intellectual Propety Theft-a-nese)
The next economic issue is product.
Hyperloop's idea is to take rail vehicles to the next level,
particularly maglev,
deviating away from the air skis first envisioned by Musk.
That being the case, it's already INFERIOR TECHNOLOGY.
Das rite!
Planet Earth, meet the Hyperloop killer.
The Superconducting Maglev.
Japan has invested over 50 years and billions of dollars, that can seat over 1,000 passengers maximum per train
and reaching speeds of 375 MPH, with more room to grow,
as the 27 mile test track in Yamanashi extends to eventually connect Tokyo to Nagoya in 2027.
If you can't wait till then it will be open for the public to ride just next year
for the 2020 Summer Olympics.
The SCMaglev has gone faster and faster
theoretically able to reach 400 even 500 MPH
and if it does, the Hyperloop has zero possibility of competing with it for mass transportation.
Japan isn't investing in Hyperloop.
But, China and rail industry companies like Talgo Deutsche Bahn, SNCF and even, Siemens,
have varying levels of involvement and investment for what I theorize are two different reasons.
Milking the media,
and picking up the scraps of
maglev research from the eventual Hypercorpse.
for investors like Richard Branson it's most likely a diversification move.
The only winning move is to play both Hyperloop and express rail.
Coincidentally both planning Miami to Orlando with the latter already building.
It's uncertain how much Virgin has invested in as both the SEC filing for Brightline hasn't
been filled and they're keeping mum what portion they are of Hyperloop One's
eighty-five million dollar round of funding.
The next failure is land acquisition.
It's been seriously tough for companies like Texas Central Railway
and even Brightline that already owns the land to get usage permission.
You can't Robert Moses your way through farmland using trickery and state force anymore in America.
Hyperloop is a different animal from high-speed rail.
And knowing its turning radius is quite large, whilst not even evolved to turning yet,
we had to rely on simulation from a channel called MATLAB,
to get a good idea of what land it needs.
It's a massive amount of tunneling, swooping in and out of mountains for California's alpine geography,
passing over highways and vineyards, IE Hyperexpensive,
and leaves little room for error.
That error brings us to the next eventual Hyperfailure.
Safety.
In an open train, exiting out an emergency is rather simple.
In an airplane - let's hope we don't have to remember where the life vests are.
In a Hyperloop, we're unsure.
The most info we have is an FAQ on Hyperloop One, that contradicts itself.
In a catastrophic event, let's say thermal expansion, a tornado, or an earthquake
cracks the tube - you're going to have a rushing wall of air into a system that
had close to none! (sound of the bones of crushed families in the Hyperloop)
If the pods have emergency exits according to Hyperloop One,
and the steel is supposed to be tough enough to withstand immense pressure changes,
How do you get out through the thick steel before becoming a human pancake?!
Passengers aren't Wolverine, and let's be serious.
This deserves more than an FAQ! (and rave lights)
Safety was a number-one concern for the Shinkansen.
And since 1964 and 10 billion passengers later,
Zero have died in earthquake prone Japan.
The Hyperloop has one thing going though...
You can't divide by the number of its current passengers.
The last and biggest business blunder
will be energy costs.
Surprising, as the Hyperloop touts itself as less expensive than even rail.
But like Alfred Beach, once the cart isn't in front of the horse,
reality hits like a rush of air.
Sustaining a near vacuum of several miles long is costly.
It also takes a while to evacuate all that air.
Contradicting itself again, Hyperloop One makes the claim that only
parts of the system will require power, whilst the entire track is a linear motor for maglev operations.
While existing maglev systems are reaching speeds in excess of 300 MPH,
Hyperloop is having trouble doing just that,
while now adding hundreds of vacuum pumps along the tube.
It's that one trick electric companies love!
And no, solar panels cannot power the entire system.
There's other questions the media should be asking.
Why do the pots need to be aerodynamic in a near evacuated system?
What happened to the fans in the front?
Or the air skis?
Why are some of these tests still on wheels?
Why should we consider INFERIOR TECHNOLOGY?
This isn't to eviscerate the Hyperloop, but to bring the discussion back to Earth.
Which is why this video needs to be shared to politicians, the media, Facebook, Reddit, Twitter, and your friends.
There is a place for the Hyperloop.
Musk has envisioned getting humanity to Mars.
and for that environment a system, a system like the Hyperloop makes sense.
Like Alfred Beach's plan, the Hyperloop is headed for serious trouble.
And it's distracting us from real solutions already out there
to fix our transportation woes on this planet.
We're entering an age of hydrogen powered trains, super conductivity even faster
bullet trains and artificial intelligence
The future is already bright!
So stay on track and stay on board!
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you have to do is comment below.
"What's your nickname for the Hyperloop?"
One lucky winner will receive a free t-shirt!
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Thank you for watching! next stop
Next stop;
The future!