Transportation allows us to move very fast, everywhere.
But, imagine, you just hop on a capsule or a train
and you can go from San Francisco to L.A. in 30 minutes.
The Hyperloop combines all of the advantages
of all of our current modes of transport that we know today.
It's on demand, it's direct, it's energy efficient, it's emission free.
It would shrink distances between cities, between countries,
between continents in a way that has never been done before.
What people might not realize today, is that this new mode of transportation
will have an impact in their daily lives.
There hasn't been any revolution in the transportation system
in over 100 years and it's happening as we speak.
Here we are in the laboratory of EPFLoop.
This lab is part of the School of Electrical Engineering.
Everything that you see here is always moving because people
are coming, making prototypes, testing.
One of the most interesting props that comes from the 80s
is this levitating plate. Basically here there are coils
inside the structure
and the magnetic field is created by these coils.
And if we start basically the motor of this coil,
you can see that it's levitating.
We can use these systems in a bigger scale.
And that's also where the Hyperloop enters in the equation.
The Hyperloop is a new mode of transportation
that would carry passengers or cargo.
They would be loaded into the Hyperloop pod,
which would then accelerate via electric propulsion
in a low pressure vacuum tube.
The pod is fully autonomous.
It's also protected from weather hazards and is clean
in the sense that it has no direct carbon emissions.
It's kind of having an airplane without wings,
similar as a flying train.
As we speak today in the U.S., there are projects that are
being concretely developed and that aim to connect major cities.
One example would be L.A. to San Francisco in about 30 to 40 minutes.
You can actually connect the East Coast to the West Coast
in a little under five hours.
Right now the train system in the U.S. is not at its best
and having something that is as simple as taking the train, hop on a pod
can revolutionize their future of transportation
in the same way that mobile phone revolutionized the way we connect.
If we want to look at the impact that it would have on our economy today,
we can take for example, cargo transportation.
There is a study that says that the e-commerce will be worth around
four trillion U.S. dollars in the next two years and a Hyperloop
enabled cargo transport would really make it
possible to transport goods at the speed of flight and that the cost
of trucking.
It would be very easy for everybody to take it
because it will be something like another train, just faster.
Way faster!
We get our inspiration from a project that started out in 1974
and then was undertook by a team of professors right here at EPFL.
In fact, right here in this lab,
that is called the project Swissmetro.
They estimated that by the time that the regulatory push would be
socially accepted around 2020, and well, here we are two years away from the
post deadline and we see companies such as Virgin Hyperloop announcing
that they would like to have fully functional, full-scale Hyperloops
by mid 2020.
I guess they were quite--
-Precise. -Yeah, precise in their forecasts.
I mean it's only 30-40 years ago, right?
But we're also facing the same types of congestions on the roads, airports
ports.
The Swissmetro is really anchored in our project's DNA
and in this school's DNA.
Having such a pioneering project
that was developed right here on campus
is a huge advantage for us in order to really develop further
our project and accelerate the future of transportation
known as the Hyperloop today.
There was not that global reception as now with Elon Musk.
and, probably that's also the reason why it didn't have
enough traction to get there.
Back in 2013, Elon Musk published his white paper on Hyperloop Alpha.
And there was this general wave of excitement
around this promising new technology.
Two years later, they decided to expand this research contest to universities.
The idea is to make it possible for students and young engineers
around the world to really contribute to the development of the open source
knowledge around the Hyperloop and make it more challenging
seeing as it's a competition.
The Hyperloop competition is the objective of creating the fastest pod
inside the tube that is located at SpaceX headquarters in Hawthorne, California.
We go through different steps of validation along the entire process
to make sure that the quality of the engineering that we are
sending as reference to SpaceX is top notch,
and that our prototype is safe and is
worthy of entering the SpaceX vacuum tube.
And so, slowly you start developing like these willingness to create something new.
And then in January, we received the news that we were
actually invited to go L.A.
So everybody was super pump and we said, okay, let's go, let's do this.
At the competition we finished third.
Third in the world is a very good score.
And so, now people are starting to hear about us and even better they're
excited to hear about the project and even try to help
if they can.
Three, two, one!
This is a science fair organized by EPFL.
This is the same pod that we took to California, but has been
traveling, I don't know, many thousands of kilometers.
I'm excited because it's the first time that we actually have a direct
interaction with the public.
We have been always working in our lab and then going to California
and things we're moving so fast that we didn't have time
to show everybody what we were doing.
Safety is really the number one priority when it comes to designing
the Hyperloop.
Demonstrating that it's technologically feasible
is one step but still you need to make sure that the people are ready
for this kind of technology.
At the beginning you're a fan of the project, then you became
supporter of the project.
At this point I feel like I'm kind of obsessed with the project.
There are a lot of factors that you have to take into account
that are not directly related to the technology itself that you're developing.
There's a lot of work that comes from developing go hand-in-hand with
the government and regulatory entities, a legal framework that
would make it safe and scalable really to implement this technology.
In the case of Swissmetro,
the project was kind of too far ahead in its time and there wasn't
really an actual demand for this way of transportation.
There needs to be some kind of social acceptance.
You need to feel comfortable walking into the Hyperloop,
trusting this technology to get you from point A to Point B,
kind of by the speed of light.
The possibility of make the distance between two different places
so short that you can just jump on the Hyperloop and then in 20 minutes
you are across the country,
it's amazing and it's a very inspiring opportunity.
Imagine a world in the future that is smaller, greener and connects people
in a way that we've never witnessed before.