2024-01-28 16:07:30
Published on January 28, 2024
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Elon Musk is a genius, including mistaking bladders for lanterns. For ten years, building on its dazzling success (Tesla, SpaceX), it has achieved the feat of getting hundreds of people and startups to invest in the future of the “revolutionary” very high-speed hyperloop train ( more than 1000 km/h) circulating in a tube partially under vacuum.
But Elon Musk’s objective was perhaps only to make people dream with money… from others, that is to say ours through taxes and duties (the SNCF also investi 80 million euros in this beautiful madness in 2016, the metropolis of Toulouse 5.5 million, and Nouvelle-Aquitaine regiontwo million through the European Feder fund).
A harsh return to reality
It all started in 2013, with the publication by Elon Musk of the famous Alpha Paper, a 52-page document open source in which the billionaire described his idea exciting.
However, he and his collaborators had focused on points that were easy to resolve, while ignoring significant technical obstacles. Profitability was also largely underestimated.
Elon Musk’s Alpha Paper was more of a student project or a letter to Santa Claus than a solid technical-economic study.
Dreamers and smart people looking for subsidized projects jumped at the opportunity, ignoring the impossibilities resulting from the laws of physics, including circulating passengers in a tube almost under vacuum (one thousandth (one millibar) of the pressure atmospheric on Earth which is 1000 millibars).
The hyperloop was supposed to be a durable, ultra-fast and efficient vehicle made of aluminum capsules held aloft by a magnetic levitation system in long, low-pressure tunnels. The attractive concept was to profoundly transform the transport industry.
However, it had already been imagined by Jules Verne in 1891 who clearly sold dreams in his books, and the Swissmetro project, proposed in 1974 and abandoned in 2009, also already resembled that of Elon Musk.
Logically, ten years and 450 million dollars later, the initial enthusiasm has outlived the technical disappointments. The thousands of jobs touted on paper have evaporated. The tunnels are still in the draft stage and the Hyperloop One startup, which promised to revolutionize transportation, officially died on December 31, 2023.
Total shutdown
This incredible industrial saga, which was expensive, has for a decade fantasized a restricted audience who want dreams, and not complicated studies.
We then had to think differently, be disruptive, open our minds, get out of our comfort zone, something that physics makes fun of. And some of them found themselves in the face of the wall of reality that they wanted to cheerfully cross with the cry of “technology is progressing, we will find it soon, have confidence…”.
There are still some pretty music animations on screen and images, that is to say nothing.
Some people still believe today that this financial mismanagement was justified because the idea had potential, and that it would have been a shame not to try.
For other incorrigible people, the hyperloop simply emerged too early… or too late, in an economic context unfavorable to the development of this technology. It is difficult to face reality and physics.
It was predictable…and planned!
Of course, some will think that in hindsight, it is easy to say now that the money was squandered, that this project was stupidity, and that it was predictable from the start because it is never possible to free from the laws of physics. But the need to dream and the windfall effect allowing the creation of money pumps will have been the strongest, just as for the aberrant development of wind turbines and other photovoltaic panels.
Unfortunately, public funds also allow politicians to support a small world of obliged people for a certain time, thanks to subsidies granted. Then, when the dust settles, this little world of profiteers disperses, closes the startups, and starts once more elsewhere to sell dreams to the naive on another project well packaged in beautiful animation.
Thus, some people make an entire career on emptiness, wind, nothing, as long as there are subsidies and money to be had.
This Elon Musk project was perhaps intended solely to torpedo the TGV in California by making it look old-fashioned in order to endanger public and Californian transport, and to better sell its Tesla cars.
In the end, this hyperloop is a huge flop, a hyper failure, a technical-intellectual scam. The hyperloop scam will still have lasted… ten years and swallowed up hundreds of millions of euros, mainly public money.
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