[lgrebe]

This is about VIRGIN Hyperloop by Richard Bransons Virgin Brand conglomerate. Not to be confused with Elon Musks Boring Company.

FTA:

> Virgin Hyperloop was founded as Hyperloop Technologies in 2014, stemming from Tesla CEO Elon Musk's idea of a high-speed passenger pod transport. It changed its name when Richard Branson joined the board of directors in 2017.

[tsimionescu]

Boring company has abandoned any idea of a hyper loop a long time ago, right? Did they ever even associate with it (outside the branding of their Vegas mini tunnel)?

[kjksf]

Yes and no.

Yes, because they no longer plan to use the original design proposed by Musk (pods in vacuum in tubes installed on the ground).

No because long term they still plan to do hyper loop but the latest iteration of the idea is electric cars driving really fast in under-pressurized underground tunnel.

See https://www.boringcompany.com/hyperloop

That being said, Boring Company is still in very early stages.

They made significant progress (built Las Vegas tunnel and are in building more of it; created prufrock-1 i.e. v1 of boring machine designed by Boring Company).

The hyperloop is something they want to do and most likely can do. The limiting factor is more permitting and politics (for example: they had a deal to do a long tunnel in Chicago with one mayor and then the next mayor said it's stupid and scrapped it).

[tsimionescu]

Well, the Vegas loop is just a short, expensive, small tunnel that took a very very long time to build (more than 1 year per mile) in a straight line with all permitting sorted out, so I'm not sure what it proves except incompetence.

Look at some Swiss alpine tunnels or the underwater Channel tunnel if you want to see advanced tunnel boring technology.

Edit: to give exact numbers: boring for LVCC Loop started on November 15 2019, and the tunnels opened to the public in April 2021, 1.5 years later for 1.7 miles (2.7km) of tunnel. In contrast, boring for the Channel tunnel started in June 1988, and the tunnels were opened to freight trains in June 1994 - 6 years for 50 km (31 miles) of much larger undersea tunnels, which allow transport up to 160km/h in real use (200 km/h being the highest designed speed). That's 5.2 miles per year, versus TBC's 1.1 miles per year, comparing like with like.

[panick21_]

That's an absurd comparison. The actual tunnel was build far faster. The eventual opening had a lot to do with other factors including covid. Convention centers were not exactly in high demand. Doing everything around the actual tunnel took longer. Its also the literally first project ever done by a start up company so of course its not perfect.

And if its so amazingly expensive as you claim, why was the only commercial competitor 2x as expensive?

The investment for the kind of things like the Channel tunnel or the Base tunnel in Switzerland are 100x that of a Boring company tunnel. Those are incredibly expensive dedicated machines, years of planning beforehand.

Boring company is trying to innovate on small tunnel machines and make them more operationally efficient. Moving to electric powered drills, vertical launch and other practical improvements. Those kinds of things you could actually operate and launch in a lot a lot of places.

The amount of hate that get thrown because a company wants to improve a technology is just incredible. So we shouldn't try to improve some machine because potentially in another country they already some technology? Apparently the commercial machines that TBC bought to start with clearly didn't have many of those features they wanted on a machine of the size they wanted. So clearly the technology didn't actually exist.

So I guess that means the US will also never do Li-Ion battery as Koreans already have better technology. So why try to innovate. SpaceX doing Falcon 1, why Arianespace already has Vega. What's the point?

As long as the company is not somehow using massive government funds and they have paying costumers, what is the problem?

[tsimionescu]

> That's an absurd comparison. The actual tunnel was build far faster.

So was the Channel tunnel. It takes quite a bit of time after physically digging the tunnel until you can actually open it to the public.

> And if its so amazingly expensive as you claim, why was the only commercial competitor 2x as expensive?

Perhaps because other tunnels left space for potentially saving someone from the tunnel in case of an emergency?

Hopefully this never comes to pass, but it seems very hard to believe there is any chance to escape in case of a tunnel fire.

> The amount of hate that get thrown because a company wants to improve a technology is just incredible.

It's the other way around. They're just a tunnel boring company, but are constantly being hailed as some futuristic transportation solution. They're particularly a company that seems to bet on reducing costs (all the way down to European levels as far as I understand, American tunnel boring prices are apparently hugely inflated) beyond anything else, such as comfort, speed and most importantly safety.

[panick21_]

> So was the Channel tunnel. It takes quite a bit of time after physically digging the tunnel until you can actually open it to the public.

Then you are not comparing tunnel boring machines anymore. And even so, its a totally different type of project on a totally different type of scale with totally different classes of machines.

> Perhaps because other tunnels left space for potentially saving someone from the tunnel in case of an emergency?

A tunnel of that length simply doesn't need a emergency escape. The route is small enough that it is far below the required length for emergency escape.Emergency escapes are not magic.

Do you also want emergency escapes in a 20m tunnel? How about 100m? How many emergency escapes do you as a tunnel safety specialist recommend. And why is the official regulation about that so wrong? Can you show me the research paper that you are basing those conclusion on?

> Hopefully this never comes to pass, but it seems very hard to believe there is any chance to escape in case of a tunnel fire.

Nonsense. Each pod has its own power, propulsion and air filtration system. Its not like a subway that if it stands still everything stands still. If for some unknown reasons there is a pod with a fire. Then all the other pods on either side of the fire will just drive away from the fire.

Even if you are stuck in a pod, its unlikely the fire would jump from one to the next car and the pod air filtration system would mean you could be fine for hours even if for some reason you couldn't simply drive away.

> It's the other way around. They're just a tunnel boring company, but are constantly being hailed as some futuristic transportation solution.

They literally are doing an end-to-end integrated system. They want to build their own boring machines and offer full transportation solutions. Its LITERALLY both. No matter if you like it or not.

> They're particularly a company that seems to bet on reducing costs (all the way down to European levels as far as I understand, American tunnel boring prices are apparently hugely inflated)

If European companies have such magical power in tunnel boring, why don't they bid on contracts in the US?

> beyond anything else, such as comfort, speed and most importantly safety.

So an EV motor on a pod can not possible be fast more comfortable then a rail based system? That is just nonsense assertion. Its never the engine that limit the speed on any such systems.

And you have provide literally no evidence other then your assertions about safety. Yes, in longer tunnels emergency exists will have to exists of course and they will follow those regulation when the build longer tunnels.

And the pod based systems has many advantages in terms of safety.

While EV can take fire, a battery fire really only happens at high speed collisions and even then mostly the fire is pretty slow to develop. Lots of high speed BEV crashes allow the occupant to leave the car before the fire actually starts to really go.

And such crashes are incredibly unlikely as tunnels are 1-direction only. Fire in BEV are far more likely from side impacts. If one pod breaks hard and another pod crashes into it, they will both have large crumble zones.

And even if you think further, next generation batteries and BEV architectures will be considerable safer. Switching to much safer LFP base pods is a certainty. And even then there is significant safety improvements in the form of next generation separators in the pipeline.

[panick21_]

Boring company never had anything to do with Hyperloop. The Hyperloop concept was just a Bluepaper released by Musk. It was only years after that Musk started talking about tunnels and the Loop system.

Probably at some point Boring company would like to be able to make tunnels long enough that it would make sense to with something more high speed then a normal EV can do. But that is not their focus.

[softwarebeware]

Wait, is the Boring Company still pursuing commercial transport via hyperloop?

[kjksf]

Yes and no.

Yes: https://www.boringcompany.com/hyperloop

No because it's a different system than what Musk originally proposed. Virgin Hyperloop was building Musk's original idea.

What Boring Company calls a hyperloop now is a long-distance tunnel, possibly under partial vacuum, with electric cars driving really fast (600+ miles per hour).

[Ekaros]

No, they do low occupancy cars in a tunnel... Combining all of the worst things...