This is a super rad start up that is going to revolutionize long distance travel and is zero emission as it’s fully electric AND proudly 
Not exactly Esk8 dev so I’m not sure how to categorize and tag but I thought this was worth sharing for those of us who are interested in the sustainability aspect of PEVs. Apologies @xsynatic and @longhairedboy but please amend as needed!
HOLY SHIT
‘TransPod recently received $550 million in financing and kicked off the next phase of an $18 billion US infrastructure project to build the TransPod Line between Calgary and Edmonton in Alberta, Canada. (It’ll reportedly get you to either city in just 45 minutes.)’
I live in one of those 2 cities!!! I live in the one further away from the mountains!!! PUMPED
Ya dude this is gonna be huge for AB. Hopefully the rest of the country and planet isn’t far behind 
Very cool. Looks like they’re focusing on hydrogen cells as their sustainable energy solution. I think that’s really underutilized fuel source…
Uh… No?
This seems like just another Hyperloop-based venture capital scam. We can all hope for the best (and I am) but I’m personally expecting the worst. Hyperloop is a terrible idea, and an infrastructural nightmare.
Relevant opinion piece with some useful data and (in my view) compelling reasoning:
Maglev is expensive as shit, thousand mile vacuum tubes are expensive as shit, hydrogen power is expensive as shit and/or relies directly on fossil fuels.
“Expensive” is synonymous with “energy intensive”, which means it’s not eco friendly. All that steel and concrete and vacuum pumping and TRON lighting has a substantial physical cost.
50 passengers is abysmal capacity by train standards, and 2 minute frequency is pushing it even for urban subway lines that move 20x slower, so the passengers/hour metric IRL might be too crap to be useful. EDIT: holy shit I just multiplied 50ppl x 30pods/hr and that’s 1.5k ppl/hr, same as a car highway on a good day. Bike paths max out at 5k/hr, bus lanes are 10k, train lines are 25k max. Even their super unrealistic projections make this the least capable form of mass transit yet devised.
Want to get the passenger capacity of uber with the speed of an airliner, the cost of a private helicopter, and the danger of an orbital spacecraft? Ride Fluxjet™.
Long term, the future of transport is either micromobility+rail, or Mad Max caravans roving the blasted corpse of civilization
Couldn’t have said it better myself.
High speed regular trains that run on time with a convenient ticket system is literally all we need. Air travel isn’t even that faster when you factor in the stupid security queues. Anyone who’s been to Japan can concur.
Yep, last time I travelled by air it was 4hrs flying, plus >4hrs combined of travelling from city center to airport + security + waiting + travelling from airport to city center. So an average speed of only ~250mph.
Some excellent counterpoints. Looking into the plan a bit further, one of the projects selling points is that they are claiming that their infrastructure costs will be in line with high speed rail:
Whether this holds to be true or not given the fact that similar infrastructure projects have not come anywhere close is a big unknown.
Re the hyperloop being built in a place like Cali, Canada has vast tracks of open land and wouldn’t suffer the same external pressures caused by trying to put this type of infrastructure in a densely populated area. The cost of operation would still be a major limiting factor and I think one of these transloop pods leaving every 2 mins is pretty obv pie in the sky.
I can’t help but draw a comparison between this line of thinking and all the (admitedly true) shit people said about Tesla when it was starting out. E.g. liion is not carbon neutral, production of these cars is carbon intensive, the cost of these cars will put it out of reach for the average consumer etc… trying to destroy the progress of the work.
Can I humbly propose that the march away from reliance on fossil fuels is not a straight line? Progress starts somewhere. In the case of Tesla, they have brought the cost of Electric Cars throughout the industry down through innovation and economy of scale making it accessible to just about anyone who can afford a combustion based car. More importantly, he has forever changed the narrative of what personal transportation looks like and forced the fossil fuel industry to take a MASSIVE step back in terms of influence in the auto industry.
Now I’m not one to drink the Musk Koolaid and a lot of what he says is kooky af and often downright reckless but he single-handedly broke the death grip the oil industry had on automobile tech which is laudable even given all of his other… ahem… quirks 
This I’m interested in. Got any info on why hyperloop tech is inherently dangerous aside from the obvious paper thin margin for error during construction and maintenance?
This is a hallmark of EVERY Hyperloop project. They ALL make this claim without anything to back it up. That’s part of the scam.
MagLev is, on average, 2x~4x more expensive per km than high speed rail (HSR). Hyperloop is, at the end of the day, MegLev in a vacuum tube. So why would that be 2x~4x cheaper than traditional MagLev which we have been building for decades? How could it be anywhere near the same price as HSR?
Ding ding ding. The number of Hyperloop projects that actually have full-scale working prototypes are tiny. And of those, none of them have scaled up to begin production. Therefore, there’s essentially zero data about how much producing a km of Hyperloop will actually cost at scale. I see absolutely no reason to believe BS claims from companies who have nothing more than flashy renders and some science-y sounding marketing terms.
That’s a very fair point. The land acquisition process (which is oftentimes one of the most expensive parts of building any new railroad) would probably be easier/cheaper in Canada. However, without having your train pass through any densely populated areas, you are essentially limiting yourself to one stop at either end of the line, vastly limiting the usefulness of the entire line.
Is the Canadian government really willing to invest a completely unknown money in a rail line to connect two points slightly faster than a commercial jet? Can they reasonably expect enough traffic between those two points?
All of those points about Tesla are STILL true.
Liion is NOT carbon neutral, and it will be a very long time before it is. It’s also mined in oftentimes unethical conditions, exploiting labor in poor nations.
Production of Teslas is VERY carbon intensive. That’s true for every car, but especially for EV’s and smaller start-up manufacturers who don’t have the efficiency that comes with scale. Tesla is closing the gap on this one, but all these other start-up EV makers are fighting an uphill battle.
The cost of a Tesla is STILL out of reach for the average consumer. Even the “cheap” models (3 and Y) are still well out of the budget for the average US household. The simple reason for this is because ANY new car is out of the budget for the average US household.
Two thirds of car purchases every year in the US are used cars, and only one third are new. Most households, when they have to buy a car, can only afford to buy used. That means ICE cars for two reasons.
ICE cars make up the vast majority of the market, both new and used. It will be a very long time before there’s a steady supply of EVs entering the used market. Simple lack of availability means it’s just not an option for a lot of people.
Cost, again. Even when buying used, an EV is oftentimes STILL out of reach for the average household. They hold their value much better than an ICE car, and they are also in higher demand due to limited supply. That leads to a situation where folks are listing (and selling) their 3y/o used EV for it’s original MSRP. That’s not affordable for most households.
(Bonus point) The cost of owning an EV is not limited to the sticker price at the point of sale. There are lots of other “costs” which might not be measured directly in dollars, but which still put EV ownership out of reach for a ton of people. A great example is charging.
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If you dont own a home with a driveway, then EV charging becomes a burden. Most apartment complexes offer no solution for their renters to charge an EV overnight. Most workplaces have not (and may not want to) made accomodations for their workers charging at work.
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That’s the two biggest times in an EV’s life where it will be sitting idle, and therefore the best charging opportunities. If those two places (residence and workplace) dont offer charging, then an EV owner is forced to get really creative to charge their vehicle.
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DC fast charging is getting more common, but it’s still rare especially in less dense, less wealthy areas. So our perspective EV owner would have to potentially go pretty far out of their way to fast-charge, which is still going to take 30m~60m. That’s assuming there’s even a charging stall available for them when they arrive. This (and a bunch of other little things like this) adds to the “cost” of owning an EV, even if, on paper, the supercharging is cheaper than filling up an ICE car with gas.
Despite all the points I just made, I am firmly pro-EV. I want them adopted as fast as possible!
Those points are not reasons why EVs are worse than ICE cars, because they aren’t. ICE cars are undeniably worse on a large scale than EVs. Worse for the planet, of course, but also worse for the individual consumer. But we wont ever get mass adoption of EVs until we start solving these big issues and lowering the barrier to entry.
The unfortunate truth is that ICE cars are, right now, the only viable option for a ton of people. It’s the case for me, and i hate it. The barrier to entry is just too high, and it probably will be for a long time. Pointing out this fact is NOT “trying to destroy the progress of the work” (though I’m sure there are some who have used these issues disingenuously to discourage EV adoption).
In fact, pointing out these problems is the first step to solving them! As someone who the EV market currently does not serve, me being as loud as possible about the ways in which it falls short is one of the best ways I can move the needle. If the Elon Musks of the world are never forced to realize that their cars are unsuitable for anyone who, you know, doesn’t live in a single family dwelling (read: a shitload of people) then why/how would they ever address that issue?
Anyway, that was a long tanget about EVs, back to Hyperloop scams!
I absolutely agree with you here, however if we want to move away from fossil fuels as quickly and efficiently as possible (and I do) then we need to stop wasting our collective human effort (for the capitalists out there, read; “dollars”) on projects which are unproven sci-fi bullshit. They are soaking up VC, public funding (occasionally) and making big headlines for absolutely zero return. Progress in the wrong direction is not progress.
What problems does the Hyperloop actually claim to solve? What problems has it been proven to actually solve in the real world? Do any of those outweigh the massive cost of building a huge, inflexible, completely separate and single use infrastructure with no proven working prototypes at scale and no concept of what installation and upkeep will cost?
I say no. Hyperloop is a waste of time for anyone who wants a green future. It’s a scam designed to eat up venture capital.
Definitely worth sharing, this is incredible. There just isn’t a catagory for this kind of stuff. I think there should be though. I’ll give it some thought.
lol of course they are. If they said it would cost 5x as much and have a fraction of the capacity people would not be nearly as hyped.
yes. this. But honestly it gets even worse. At least maglev has been done before. These fluxjet guys are claiming to be drawing from a “new field of physics” and are trying to make something that goes nearly 2x as fast as conventional maglev which is already a bit under 2x as fast as most HSR. And they are claiming the same project will be cost competitive with a HSR setup? …
If Koenigsegg came out tommorow and said their next car would break 300mph and come in at the cost of a bmw i8, would you be inclined to believe them?
Also, I agree with Duck’s other points
Fun fact: Almost every field of physics is actually pretty old. The only real “new” one is quantum computing and everything else has been around for a considerable amount of time. While getting my Bachelor’s in Physics that was the only field ever considered to be new, and even that can be considered under the field of quantum mechanics which is not new at all.
Little excerpt from Wikipedia because I don’t remember stuff like dates:
These early attempts to understand microscopic phenomena, now known as the “old quantum theory”, led to the full development of quantum mechanics in the mid-1920s
Also when I say quantum computing is new, I mean that relative to everything else in physics. In reality, the concept of it has been around for while. Another Wiki quote because dates are hard
Quantum computing began in 1980 when physicist Paul Benioff proposed a quantum mechanical model of the Turing machine.
Anything else that non-physics people called new was either already well established (but not well known to the public) or just an existing field putting out something that could be its own specialty.
Yes. I don’t think I communicated this well, but my point was more along the lines of they are obviously just BSing to build hype
I am agreeing with and just further pointing out how their claim is BS. Also it is just annoying to see when people make that type of claim because throughout my entire course work our professors made it very clear that we wouldn’t be discovering anything ground breaking or new.
Any new discoveries made are very small overall and just clarify things we already know but to a more accurate level.
ie obviously they are not reinventing physics, but if whatever they are claiming to be able to do appears sophisticated enough to the average person that they would believe a claim, the thing in question like has a “wow this really is the future” quality to it, and that tends to be very expensive
Sure you can, it’s a common fallacy that renewables don’t affect climate change because they were built with fossil energy. Ofc a renewable energy system has to be in place before you can make more equipment with renewable energy.
My point was not that the project shouldn’t be attempted due to the cost of development being passed on to end users, or the idea that it must be constructed with our current fossil energy system. My objection was that it uses large amounts of energy, period.
The uncomfortable fact is that the world is running out of cheap energy, the price of energy being fairly directly related to how much energy it takes to extract further energy. This is a concept called Energy Return On Investment. It’s also running out of cheap minerals, which is related to how concentrated the ores of those minerals are, since lower concentrations require more grinding and whatnot to separate the valuable stuff. We are running out of these things because the planet’s total reserves of them are finite, and we went for the highest EROI materials first, leaving the lower EROI stuff behind.
Here’s a source for those claims (warning: long). Whether or not you believe the specifics of this particular paper, the sheer scale of the mismatch between what we have and what we want, coupled with the fact that recycling of materials has a far from perfect recovery rate and requires more energy than obtaining raw materials, paints a pretty fucking bleak picture of how the future could turn out.
The economy needs cheap energy and materials to even maintain its current size, let alone grow. And so as the overhead cost of obtaining both of those things inevitably increases over time, the scale of global industry will at some point start to shrink.
And that’s not even touching on the human and economic costs of climate change, that I don’t need to repeat. Given that we have a finite amount of time to set up the world in a way that can halt and cope with climate change, and the fact that we have a finite amount of energy and materials with which to do so, spending shitloads of energy and materials on a physically implausible plaything for rich people is the absolute worst possible fucking move.
The best move we could be making is to rebuild all of the more mundane parts of our transportation infrastructure and living areas, so that we become less dependent on energy in general. But very few people actually want to save the world with zoning policy and public transit, so that might be an even bigger pipe dream than the vacuum tube scams.
Yeah I was just thinking about high speed collisions with debris or the tunnel wall, as well as the hazard of cabin depressurization in a vacuum tube.
