The last time we heard that an eccentric wealthy inventor was about to revolutionize travel, what actually appeared was the Segway scooter, which mostly just made life easier for mall cops. But with Elon Musk’s success at PayPal and Tesla, it’s a good idea to take him seriously when he claims to have come up with a revolutionary new mode of travel called the Hyperloop. This week, he revealed the details. As I already told you, it’s inspired by those air-powered canisters you see shooting back and forth at the bank drive-through. Passengers would get into a capsule that would travel on a cushion of air and magnets in a frictionless tube at up to 800 miles per hour. That’s four times faster than high-speed rail, fast enough to go from L.A. to San Francisco in half an hour. One thing Musk hadn’t revealed until now: he envisions it being big enough to carry you cars like a ferry boat. Just drive in, and zip across the country. By the way, Musk is just the idea man. He’d like someone else to develop a prototype to find out if the Hyperloop would actually work. So if you’ve got a spare $10 billion lying around, you could spend it on this. But people would probably think you’re hyper loopy.
Posted on: Fri, 16 Aug 2013 06:00:01 +0000
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