Elon Musk’s failed project is finally being turned into a parking lot

news hardware Elon Musk’s failed project is finally being turned into a parking lot

Today, Billionaire Elon Musk is mostly talked about because of his takeover of Twitter and the consequences of this new investment. We can also cite the success of SpaceX and the continued evolution of Tesla’s cars.

But Elon Musk is a name that can also be linked to a whole host of other ideas that can go in all directions.like a futuristic armored vehicle that spends its time being carried around, a not very stable humanoid robot… and finally thehyperloop.

In 2012, Elon Musk released a white paper detailing one of his craziest plans: a train traveling faster than sound in a kind of tube connecting two cities. In theory, the means of transport would be able to reach them 1200km/hwhich would make the train capable connect San Francisco and Los Angeles in just 30 minutes, compared to 6 hours by car.

A Hyperloop prototype that will have been useless

While many private initiatives have chosen to adopt open access plans, Elon Musk decided to build a Hyperloop prototype himself. The location chosen for this tube by almost 1.6 km long is located in Hawthorne, California near SpaceX headquarters. After a project start in 2016, It was notably used in Hyperloop competitions in 2018 and 2019where students could test their miniature pod prototypes.

In 2019, the Warr pod won the Hyperloop Pod Competition II with a speed of 324 km/h.

In theory, this prototype was intended to serve as a demonstration site for Musk’s vision. But in practice, the billionaire has largely revised downwards his ambitions in recent years. He has also started another project related to traffic and transportation: the tunnels dug by The Boring Company to limit congestion in cities like Los Angeles and Las Vegas. Ironically, the latter is still under construction but still partially accessible, was used so much at CES in Las Vegas in January 2022 that it was bottled itself.

Hyperloop: The destroyed SpaceX prototype, quite an icon

Given this realization Not surprisingly, SpaceX’s Hyperloop prototype was recently completely destroyed. Small additional affront: this project originally dedicated to revolutionizing the transportation of people will be soon replaced with a parking lot intended for SpaceX employees’ cars. A return to basics that shows that such a sector cannot be transformed so easily. However, this can be assumed the decision was made quickly This has been announced by The Boring Company’s Twitter account since last April “extensive Hyperloop testing would begin later this year”.

In early 2022, another Hyperloop project, Virgin Hyperloop, decided to throw in the towel. Officially, there are still a handful of initiatives of this type in Canada and the United States, but it’s been a few years since it’s really been talked about. At this stage, the Hyperloop looks more like a Hyper-Miss.