Death of Elon Musk’s hyperloop dream: Start-up behind high speed vacuum-tube system that was backed by Sir Richard Branson and would move levitating pods of people at speeds of up to 760mph will be shut down this week

The company behind Hyperloop, the transportation system dreamed up by Elon Musk, said it was closing its doors and laying off employees this week.

The goal of Hyperloop One was to commercialize Elon Musk’s idea, a system that aimed to propel capsules full of passengers at speeds of up to 760 miles per hour.

But by the end of the year the company will lay off all its workers and sell off its assets, reports say.

The company, founded on a white paper published by Elon Musk in 2012, failed to secure any contracts to install Hyperloop systems, despite significant but brief buzz surrounding what the Tesla CEO said at the time would be a “fifth project.” kind of transport.’

Musk said in his 2012 white paper that Hyperloop would be “the right solution for the specific case of pairs of high-traffic cities that are less than 1,500 km or 900 miles apart.”

At the time, he pitched the idea as an alternative to the $128 billion California was planning to spend on a high-speed rail system connecting San Francisco and Los Angeles.

Sir Richard Branson, founder of Virgin, backed the startup in 2017.

Hyperloop One was unveiled by Elon Musk in 2013, who then said it would be able to fly passengers 380 miles (610 km) from Los Angeles to San Francisco in 30 minutes.

The goal of Hyperloop One was to commercialize Elon Musk’s idea, a system that aimed to propel capsules full of passengers at speeds of up to 760 miles per hour.

“How is it possible that the home of Silicon Valley and the Jet Propulsion Laboratory, doing incredible things like indexing all the world’s knowledge and getting rovers to Mars, built a bullet train that is both one of the most expensive per mile and one of the slowest in the world “, he asked then.

Hyperloop One said the system would provide greater safety than passenger planes, lower construction and maintenance costs than high-speed trains, and energy consumption per person similar to a bicycle.

There were also plans to integrate the Hyperloop with autonomous cars that would be loaded into pods and driven to distant destinations.

“A self-driving Uber will be able to enter the hyperloop and come out the other side,” Nick Earl, senior vice president of global field operations, said in 2017.

“It’s like broadband internet for transportation,” with self-driving cars transporting goods or people in the real world, with packets of data quickly transferred from one point to another over the Internet, he argues.

In 2017, there were plans to create Hyperloops in the UK with four lines: London to Edinburgh, Liverpool to Hull, Glasgow to Cardiff or the “Northern Arc” through a number of northern cities.

The London-Edinburgh scheme was led by a team from the University of Edinburgh, which planned to follow the route through Birmingham and Manchester.

If chosen, this would mean traveling between the two capitals would take just 45 minutes, and traveling from London to Manchester would take just 18 minutes.

But in 2022, it has shifted its priority from transporting people to transporting goods.

Sir Branson pulled out after investing £65 million in the company in 2017.

Hyperloop One said the system would provide greater safety than passenger planes

Hyperloop One said the system’s construction and maintenance costs would be lower than high-speed trains and its energy consumption per person would be similar to that of a bicycle.

The change in priority comes as about 100 people lost their jobs and there will be another wave of layoffs later in the year.

It was also the year Sir Richard Branson, the founder of Virgin, pulled out after investing £65 million in the company in 2017.

Sir Richard said of his investment: “After visiting the Hyperloop One test site in Nevada and meeting its leadership team last summer, I am convinced that this revolutionary technology will transform transport as we know it and significantly reduce travel times.

“Virgin has been known for investing and building innovative companies for many years, and I look forward to making history together as we introduce the Hyperloop to the world as Virgin Hyperloop One.”