All aboard the Hyperloop: commuting faster than the speed of sound

An entrepreneur hoping to realise Elon Musk's dream of a super-fast transportation system, which would allow travellers to get from San Francisco to Los Angeles in 35 minutes or less, says it may not cost passengers a penny to use.

Outlining his vision for the Hyperloop at the Pioneers Festival in Vienna last week, Dirk Ahlborn says that while he hopes the system will make it to Europe at some point, it's more likely to be built in the Middle East and Asia first.

Hyperloop Transportation Technologies (HTT), the company Mr Ahlborn heads, is seeking to build the world's first fully functional Hyperloop system in Quay Valley, California. The $16 billion test project, which covers five miles, is to get underway early next year and be completed by 2018.

Ahlborn says the transportation system, which would allow users to travel faster than the speed of sound by shooting them through low-pressure tubes, might sound like something from the future but that the experience would feel similar to travelling via a plane.

“We’re building it in a way that everyone will be familiar with it. It won’t look weird or futuristic,” he said.

Promising that the project would revolutionise the way people commute, Ahlborn says he could envisage people using the system in the same way they might use the subway, with people taking multiple trips a day.

Ahlborn says he is amazed there has been no real progress in terms of rail travel in recent years and that he wanted to reinvent transportation.

“The rail industry is a dinosaur. Nothing has happened, and the industry is still the same as it was when the Chinese were laying tracks in the US in the 1880s,” he says.

The way people live

Ahlborn also says that while his pricing consultants have been suggesting the cost of a journey should be double that of an airline ticket, he was resisting the idea.

“I really strongly believe that if we create a network that is free during off-peak times and charge maybe a little during peak times, it will change the way people will live. I think you have to find other ways to monetise this than just charging customers for it,” he says.

In an interview with The Irish Times, Ahlborn says he is hoping the general public might come up with suggestions on how the system could be run at low or no cost.

“I personally do believe there are ways to monetise this in a different way than ticketing and by mentioning it as a call to action we want to have input from other people,” he says.

Business model

Given that HTT began as an offshoot of JumpStartFund, an online crowd-sourcing platform for entrepreneurial projects that Ahlborn co-founded and still heads, it’s no surprise to hear him calling on others to help them find a solution to the problem of monetising the system.

“We need to find a business model that makes us more money than from ticketing because that is too limited, “ he says.

“In many cases we’ll have passengers’ attention for say up to 40 minutes so there must be a way we can monetise things within that timeframe. There have been some ideas put forward already, such as having people play games and the more they play, the more the price goes down.

“There’s also a suggestion that we could sell kinetic energy created by the system and from the people using it. We haven’t found the answer yet but by throwing it out there we want to get feedback and hopefully a solution.”

While Ahlborn expects Hyperloop to be rolled out across the US first, he envisages it eventually becoming ubiquitous across the world.

“Europe of course is on the list. Legislative burdens are there, so I personally see the first Hyperloops [outside the US] more in the Middle East and Asia where we have contacts and where they are more aggressive in terms of these kind of projects,” he says.

Alternative to air travel

Hyperloop might also be a viable alternative to air travel, but Mr Ahlborn says that while it might be possible to run it over water, it’s not something he’s interested in.

“It’s not in our plans right now. You add a lot of complications if you do it, so it’s not something we’re thinking about at present. We see the Hyperloop as like a metro that connects cities that are far apart and that’s a gamechanger in itself,” he says.

"Obviously if you could go on the back of an existing system, such as using the channel Channel Tunnel to connect France and the UK, that could be something, but we're looking at this as a land-based travel system."

While HTT is not officially affiliated to Elon Musk, the inventor has encouraged others to put his ideas into practice. Ahlborn says that like Musk, he expects the Hyperloop project to succeed, despite the odds.

“I’m an entrepreneur. We don’t look at failures, we learn from them,” he says.

“Entrepreneurs need to tackle big problems, not just develop the next app that makes a billion dollars. There were once people like the Carnegie family who thought big, but unfortunately today you get WhatsApp, which is awesome but is not solving problems.”