[ketzo]

Bummer. Musk-hyped moonshot or not, I thought Hyperloop presented an incredibly exciting vision for the future of mass transit. Even if it was always going to be a long shot, it’s disappointing to be right.

Edit: replies saying "this never could have worked" are missing the point to a pretty hysterical degree.

You don't know that. No one knows that! Unless you are from the future or are a genius-level mechanical engineer in the specific problem domain of vacuum trains (who for some reason was not already employed by Hyperloop), you cannot say that with 100% confidence.

No matter how unlikely it might have seemed to you, it could have worked! And it's a bummer when extremely-cool-but-unlikely things don't work.

[tsimionescu]

It's a vision out of the 1800s [0], and one that is obviously never going to work. It's simply not possible/useful to create the necessary vacuum, and the requirement for near straight-line tracks is extraordinarily expensive.

[0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Vactrain

[jeffbee]

It wasn't a vision of mass anything, except maybe delusion. The nameplate capacity of hyperloop between SF and LA was 840 passengers per hour, which is basically zero. Whatever hyperloop was, it was never "mass transit".

[ulimn]

After watching the video of a traffic jam inside the 1-lane wide tunnel, I'm not sure I would dare to go into it. I immediately thought what would happen if a car crashed into the wall and it caught fire. Seemingly, it didn't have enough space to go around it.