Elisha Vermani 
New Delhi: Union railways minister Ashwini Vaishnaw on Sunday (March 16) announced that the hyperloop project being developed at Institute of Technology (IIT) Madras will be Asia’s longest (410 m) and will go on to become the world’s longest such tube after an additional 50 m are added at a later stage.
What Vaishnaw didn’t mention is that the development of ‘hyperloop’ technology has been attempted and abandoned several times globally due its infeasibility and astronomic costs associated with it. Companies have either shut down or shifted focus after fatal accidents.
What is a hyperloop?
In 2013, tech billionaire Elon Musk announced that he was going to solve the problem of “soul-destroying traffic”. He proposed sending pods, carrying people or cargo, down windowless metal tubes in near-vacuum conditions using magnetic levitation.
To this end, he built a one-mile-long white steel tunnel – a prototype of Hyperloop Alpha – near SpaceX headquarters in Hawthorne, California. They held competitions, inviting participants to test the speeds their pods could achieve. In 2022, the tunnel was removed to make way for parking spaces for SpaceX employees. But his was not the only company to fail.
While Musk popularised the technology with his 2013 white paper on Hyperloop, the concept was not invented by him, as many believe.
In Invention and Innovation: A Brief History of Hype and Failure, Canadian scientist Vaclav Smil, while referring to Musk’s 2013 whitepaper, writes that the basic concept for a fifth mode of transportation has been around for more than 200 years. So far, not a single such transportation system has been completed, he adds.
The historical record shows that there is nothing new about any of these ideas, that the basic concept for the fifth mode of transportation has been around for more than 200 years, and that during the intervening time various patents were filed, several detailed proposals were made, and some models and mock-ups of specific components were built. And yet not a single (near) vacuum- or low-pressure-tube, super-fast transportation project (be it for people or goods, or both) has been completed and put into operation, not even a trial short-distance link encompassing all of the design’s basic components.
Predating Musk’s 2013 proposal, Smil refers to the first commercial projects that used the maglev (magnetic levitation) system – the Pudong-Shanghai line in 2004, Japan’s Linimo line in 2005 and three more short and relatively low-speed connections coming in South Korea and China in 2016 and 2017 respectively. “Construction continues on the first long-distance maglev link, Japan’s Chuo shinkansen between Tokyo and Osaka, but completion has been repeatedly postponed, now into the late 2020s,” he writes.
Other companies that have attempted hyperloop projects
Hyperloop One, which announced one of the most ambitious projects that proposed the use of this technology, was launched in 2014. In 2020, it conducted its first – and only – test with human passengers. The track was 500 m long and the pod carried two passengers. The speed they achieved, 175 km/h, was seven times short of the original promise and less than what trains have been travelling at since the 1960s. The company, after several rounds of fundraising and investments, shut operations in December 2023.
Another company, Hyperloop TT, is building several prototypes of the frictionless tube transport system. None near completion.
In 2017, it entered an agreement with the city council of Toulouse to build a 320-metre test track. By 2022, the track had been dismantled, the site fallen into disuse and the company evicted by the city council.
In 2018, the company began working with the Abu Dhabi Department of Municipal Affairs and Transportation. A 10 km track was proposed between Abu Dhabi and Dubai. The project deadline came and went in 2023 and the track is yet to be functional.
In the same year, Hyperloop TT also proposed the US’s first interstate hyperloop system connecting Cleveland to Chicago and expanded it to include Pittsburgh in 2019. As of 2023, the project was “on track” to be completed by the end of 2020s.
“These years have come and gone, and we are no closer to even a convincing full-scale prototype demonstration, to say nothing about a single completed and truly reliable, safe, and profitable commercial link between two cities. No hyperloop line, on pylons or in tunnels, was in operation by early 2022, and the forecasts of earliest completion dates have shifted to the late 2020s,” Smil writes.
Are hyperloops really better than other modes of transport?
Aside from the fact that they don’t exist, hyperloops conceptually too have several operational problems. In 2022, a worldwide survey by the International Maglev Board showed that the concept “underestimates operational and safety complexity, along with costs (for both infrastructure and operations)”. Catastrophic decompression, the discomfort of hurtling down a metal tube, all while maintaining near-vacuum conditions through several kms of a track are just the first few.
“None of the system’s often repeated advantages in comparison with high-speed rail — the absence of wheels (moving on air cushion or magnetically levitated), much faster operating speeds, significantly reduced energy use, lower construction costs — has been tested on even a single commercial project, and all such claims, until proven otherwise, remain in the category of wishful thinking,” Smil writes.
Musk never actually wanted to develop the technology
Musk’s disdain for public transport is well known. He has called transit a “pain in the ass” and suggested it was filled with serial killers. He also proposed elaborate tunnel systems to “solve” the problem of traffic congestions while simultaneously peddling car culture – the thing that causes it.
His proposal for hyperloops was an extension of his opposition to public transport. According to Ashlee Vance, who wrote Musk’s biography titled Tesla, SpaceX, and the Quest for a Fantastic Future, Musk proposed hyperloops only to counter California’s plans to develop a high-speed railways system.
“Musk told me that the idea originated out of his hatred for California’s proposed high-speed rail system. … He insisted the Hyperloop would cost about $6 billion to $10 billion, go faster than a plane, and let people drive their cars onto a pod and drive out into a new city. At the time, it seemed that Musk had dished out the Hyperloop proposal just to make the public and legislators rethink the high-speed train. He didn’t actually intend to build the thing. … With any luck, the high-speed rail would be canceled. Musk said as much to me during a series of e-mails and phone calls leading up to the announcement,” Vance wrote.
The $6 billion was also debunked by experts who put the actual figure at around $100 million.
All of this raises important questions. Does India have the time and money to invest in a technology that has been misleadingly projected as being “around the corner” for decades now? And should this be India’s priority, taking away attention and an investment of Rs 8.34 crore from an overburdened railways, which is calling for many of its own problems to be solved in the immediate term?