The Hyperloop was always a scam

stopthatgirl7@kbin.social to Technology@lemmy.world – 806 points – The Hyperloop was always a scam
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It's time to be honest about Musk's vacuum tube to nowhere

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I have to admit I was kind of impressed seeing the way two scams worked together: the Hyperloop, and the Loop. People genuinely thought they were related projects because of the name and, I guess, the tunnels. So the Hyperloop made the Loop sound more exciting than it really was, and the Loop made it seem like there was progress towards the Hyperloop.

Of course, in reality, the Loop is just a shitty cab tunnel designed to financially and physically block local mass transit projects, while the Hyperloop is just bullshit vaporware designed to financially and politically block intercity mass transit projects.

Even though I thought the tunnel thing and the train thing were both either vaporware or useless, I have to admit that this fooled me, I am one of your people who thought they were related

I’m so dumb that even after I read their comment, I still thought they were related until your admission made me reread their comment.

As a Vegas dweller, I'm particularly pissed at this whole thing because we're CONSTANTLY hearing "Well there's lots of subterranean caves and stuff, so a subway or underground structures (away from the scorching heat) would be unfeasible."

...but here we are with a stupid freaking Tesla-pipe that could have had rail cars...

Clearly the city planning here is just one big investor rug-pull on the residents. After this "Loop", "The Sphere" and their compulsive need to put like 5 more mega stadiums in the middle of the city in the middle of the desert.

And all working-class residents get out of all this is clogged freeways and $300 nosebleed tickets from Ticketmaster.

Yeah. I also thought that the tunnels were too small for a subway (because one of The Boring Company's "innovations" is to drive costs down by digging smaller, shittier, and more dangerous tunnels using existing technology). However, there are subways in London that have even slightly smaller tunnels. You could absolutely lay down some tracks in there and have a functional subway. Giving it to Tesla to run a taxi lane for who knows how long was just a choice.

Also, from what I found out, the Loop is going to continue to fuck over the residents, because the expansions are going to have WAY higher fares. I think right now, the Loop is $4.50 for a day pass. As a point of comparison, a New York subway ticket is $2.90, so one round trip would be more expensive than a day pass. That makes the Loop sound great! ...until you realize the prices are kept artificially low to make it seem that way. Future plans for Loop service would cost upwards of $12 a ride outside of the convention center and resorts.

Also, as an aside, something I don't think gets brought up enough is that the Loop proves that Tesla's self-driving cars are a scam. Even on a close course, indoors, built to whatever specs Tesla could possibly want, the cars need human drivers.

This comment is sufficiently cynical that it must be on the right track

har

Dunno, I think it's an idea and definitely a good one but not all ideas need to be built right here, right now

Don't forget the "Hyperloop" in Las Vegas, which is just a tunnel where Teslas are driving people around. IMO that's the stupidest and the least efficient use of this tunnel.

The cars are not even self-driving, and mind you this is a closed system and easier to implement self-driving. So far with his self-driving copium, and robo taxis bullshit.

That's more about Elon hating mass public transportation. Probably because it involves being close to poor people.

Don't forget the "Hyperloop" in Las Vegas, which is just a tunnel where Teslas are driving people around.

Isn't that The Loop, not a Hyperloop?

whatever it is, its a human barbecue waiting to happen with how tight and coffinlike the tunnel is from what i've seen of videos.

Yeah he was supposedly building a hyperloop but we got cars in tunnel instead and our dumb ass politicians took our tax money to pay for it

Why do you still like him after he has shown who he really is? The quality of his products?

this is a closed system and easier to implement self-driving

Lol, they tried and it didn't work well, even in a closed system. There was a whistleblower among the drivers a while ago. They were officially in the cars just to keep an eye of things but in reality they had to take over constantly, and they all had contracts that tried to keep them from talking about it. Oh yeah and they got scripts they had to follow if passengers asked questions about Musk or the project. 😄

Edit: here's some articles:

https://techcrunch.com/2021/07/28/read-the-script-every-driver-for-elon-musks-las-vegas-loop-must-learn/

https://www.businessinsider.com/elon-musk-tunnels-boring-company-tesla-drivers-las-vegas-techcrunch-2021-7?op=1

Don't forget the "Hyperloop" in Las Vegas

Isn't that literally what they're talking about in the article?

No, the news here is that Richard Branson’s Hyperloop One company is shutting down. I don't believe that is related to the Loop (not Hyperloop) project in Las Vegas.

Hyoerloop is not a scam just because The con man proposed it with the intent of stopping a high speed rail road project.

It's a scam also because:

  • the idea is not his. It's 100 years old and has been tackled by other before him.
  • it's impossible to be build from the technical point of view.
  • even if you do manage to miraculously built it it won't be economically feasible.
  • in the lasts years it's starting to be obvious that if it's backed by Musk it's a scam in some degree, shape or form. (see also Solar Cities, Tesla, The Loop and the Boring company, etc.)

No it's that it hasn't been executed properly yet, as for whether it's an actual scam is another issue

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The moment he proposed it, but was not interested in implementing it and let others use that idea, was a clear sign that he himself didn't believe in it.

That's an interesting concept. After the shit he's pulled with twitter, and in general, I now wonder if he was genuinely dumb enough to believe the hyperloop would be economically viable, and deferred because he had 5 young projects in flight... but he's also too egomaniacal to defer a project he believed in, so maybe it was a scam from day one, because he is a con artist.

During the peak of his fame I always thought this was a money laundering scheme from Musk. Only recently I've learned about the (not so much) theory that it was all an effort to screw with high speed train.

Going to run a turbofan in a vacuum chamber for propulsion and use air bearings to float on the surface. Like any of it ever made sense from day one. Fever dreams of an idiot.

I fully believe the accusations that Musk only proposed the Hyperloop to derail the California High Speed Rail project because an actual high speed rail service poses a serious threat to his car sales. The entire point was to overpromise and deliver absolutely nothing while sucking funds away from projects that actually stand a chance of replacing cars.

i don't think it would have done anything to his car sales. you still need a car everywhere in california outside maybe half the bay area

Good point, but in the long term, a successful large scale transit project can and will sway opinions and cause other transit projects to crop up nearby. In the mind of a car exec it's probably best to nip it in the bud in case more people get a taste of what car-free ground transportation can do and start getting ideas about transit expansions in their cities, and it's not like he's shy about his vehemently anti-transit stance in general either.

california cities outside the bay are spread out as fuck and the infrastructure is planned around car ownership. it would be a very long time before people would start going carless.

But his car sales are shit. And compared to the sales of all the major manufacturing is a pitance. Not saying its not the reason he did it but he's such a little wanna be fuck boy I couldn't help butpoints out how shit he is. What a mammas boy the soon to be Enron is.

Yes, putting as much effort into actually making Tesla better would have paid off more in the short and long haul.

Now he's a punchline instead.

The hyperloop was my wake up call that he wasn't a good person, it felt like every reporter became dumb overnight to buy what he was saying.

If you are ever in LA, you should take a drive around SpaceX campus and see the "Hyperloop prototype" they built outside(don't get out of the car, Hawthorne is a run down industrial zone and not the safest place)

There is nothing that shatters the illusion of Musk's genius faster than seeing that sad, short gas pipeline looking thing on an run down street next to their overflowing employee garage.

The underlying idea https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Vactrain has been tried many times, but its simply too expensive and fragile for real-world use. A single earthquake can cripple it.

Important to say, tried many times AFTER being conceived over 100 years ago.

I feel like if the structure was above the earth, somewhere in the air between two points up in the sky it might be more interesting vs helicopters and airplanes but on earth, one big crack and it's goners

i mean news flash and shit, but you can't make a good product at this point under capitalism. there isn't a single product on the market, in any category, that is not a scam. Enshittification won capitalism and the game is over.

IDK man my toaster oven works pretty well

Are you TIRED of having to buy a new toaster oven every ten years? Try Toastee, we'll send a new toaster to you every month so you never have to wonder if you're going to have a working toaster oven! Only 169.99 per month.

Nah you can always make new things that aren't toasters lol just harder to be more imaginative

I would go into such extremes. Just on top of my head Brother printers are nice, cheap, and do the job well.

I thought the initial scaled down tests showed it was a dumb idea from the start but the company ran for 5 years or more saying “we’re working on this idea that we’ve already proved is shit and won’t work.”

Now they’re telling us it doesn’t work

Folks be thinking air resistance doesnt exist

There wasn't going to be any air resistance. They were just going to build a vacuum chamber 1000 times larger than the biggest one ever engineered, then contain it in a thin metal tube snaking hundreds of miles across the heat of the California desert. So simple. /s

Good thing California is geological stable, otherwise it would never have worked.... /s

Right, that was the whole point. I think folks arent appreciating air resistance. The ISS is an example of what vehicles are capable of without it. Speeds incomparable to anything on earth, with little fuel usage. Its the largest source of inefficiency in travel. And the engineering science of reducing it is wholesale a scam for people.

The ISS travels at a constant speed in relation to the earth. People have to get on and off a train

Yes, acceleration is a thing, but trains a)reach a top speed and spend a lot of fuel maintaining it, and b)reaches much, much lower top speeds, with any effort to increase it requiring exponentially more fuel to reach and maintain. Air resistance is an absurdly important factor to travel efficiency.

I think a better example is airplanes. You run at high altitudes to increase efficiency due to reduced atmosphere.

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The idea isn't crazy. Shithead Musk didn't come up with the idea, it's been floating around for a hundred years or more. It's just society isn't there yet, technology wise.

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