In his overview, Musk again speculates that such a feat is possible, but would probably not be a successful business model. Leading up to Monday’s announcement, Musk had talked of a similar system being able to transport people from New York to Los Angeles in 45 minutes.
Passengers would be able to get on or off at several stations along the way, and a larger system might be able to transport cars as well as passengers. Sealed capsules carrying 28 passengers each would leave from stations in Los Angeles and San Francisco up to every 30 seconds during peak hours. He envisions the tube itself being built above ground, roughly following California’s Interstate 5 highway. Musk said building a Hyperloop system would cost “under $6 billion,” a bargain compared to the “several tens of billion proposed for the track of the California rail project.” “How could it be that the home of Silicon Valley and JPL (NASA’s Jet Propulsion Laboratory) – doing incredible things like indexing all the world’s knowledge and putting rovers on Mars – would build a bullet train that is both one of the most expensive per mile and one of the slowest in the world?” “When the California ‘high speed’ rail was approved, I was quite disappointed, as I know many others were too,” Musk wrote in his overview of Hyperloop plans. But the project has been set back by myriad issues, and the train, according to Musk’s calculations, would average only 164 mph. In California, billions of federal dollars have been pledged for high-speed rail, and voters approved $9 billion in bonds for a bullet train between San Diego and San Francisco.
Musk has said he was inspired to promote Hyperloop, in part, by seeing plans in California for high-speed trains that, in his mind, don’t reach their full potential. Bullet trains like that one operate on a frictionless magnetic-levitation system, but Musk believes such technology would be too expensive for Hyperloop. But its top operating speed is 268 mph, meaning it would take just under an hour and 20 minutes to make the same trip. By contrast, the train believed to be the world’s fastest – China’s Shangai Maglev Train, has been recorded at a top speed of 311 mph.