Look! Up in the sky! It’s a bird! It’s a plane! It’s a hyperloop!
Entrepreneur Elon Musk announced Thursday that he wants to build a “test track” for his idea for a futuristic high-speed transportation system called the Hyperloop, adding that Texas is “the leading candidate” to host the track.
Musk’s Hyperloop concept involves transporting passengers via pods in above-ground tubes that move as fast as 800 mph. The system quickly proved to be a polarizing concept when Musk introduced the idea in 2013, with some praising it as visionary and others deriding it as wildly impractical.
“In order to kind of help things along, we’re going to create a Hyperloop test track,” Musk told Texas Tribune CEO and Editor-in-Chief Evan Smith during an interview at the Texas Transportation Forum, an annual conference hosted by the Texas Department of Transportation. “Something that’s maybe on the order of a five-mile loop.”
Musk’s talk was part of a public relations blitz Thursday in Austin, as the Tesla Motors CEO hopes to persuade the Texas Legislature to allow Tesla to sell cars directly to Texans and circumvent the state’s requirements that cars be sold through dealerships. After his transportation forum interview, he spoke to a crowd of supporters gathered at the Texas Capitol.
During Thursday’s interview, Musk said the facility would be privately funded and not require the kind of incentives that his private space firm, SpaceX, received to develop a test facility in Texas.
“We’re not asking for any money from the state,” Musk said.
The idea for the test facility is apparently in the very early stages as Musk said that “it sounded good last night after a couple of drinks.” He explained that he envisioned the track as allowing for “teams of students” and companies interesting in developing the Hyperloop concept to test out different pod systems.
See this Ars Technica story, which links to and summarizes this overview document of hyperloops from Tesla. The basic idea was to build a better high-speed transportation system between San Francisco and LA, but the Houston/Dallas/San Antonio triangle would work for it as well. Assuming it’s feasible, of course, which Lord only knows. But hey, I wouldn’t mind a test track being built here. From skimming the doc, I suspect that anyone who is currently freaking out over the Texas Central High Speed Railway proposals would also freak out over this. We’re a long way off from that being a practical concern, and who knows, maybe the test track will prove it to be a bust. You have to admit, Elon Musk thinks big. Texas Politics, Dallas Transportation, Ars Technica, The Verge, and Swamplot have more.