I’ve posted several times about Elon Musk’s Hyperloop fast mass transit concept. Today he posted a couple of brief statements about plans to build a test track:
Will be building a Hyperloop test track for companies and student teams to test out their pods. Most likely in Texas.
Also thinking of having an annual student Hyperloop pod racer competition, like Formula SAE
See also:
- Elon Musk Hyperloop Test Track – Business Insider
- Elon Musk Boosts Hyperloop With Talk of Texas Test Track – NBC News.com
Update: Here is a transcript (courtesy Trent Waddington) of Elon’s remarks in Texas in which he briefly mentions the Hyperloop test track before switching to comments about Tesla.
Update 2: An article with more details about the test track : With a Hyperloop Test Track, Elon Musk Takes on the Critical Heavy Lifting -WIRED
If Musk does in fact build a test track, in Texas or elsewhere, it would be a huge help to the company that’s made more progress than anyone toward making the Hyperloop happen. The track isn’t the part of this endeavor that’s hard to engineer. “It’s a couple of tubes and a vacuum pump,” says Dirk Ahlborn, CEO of JumpStartFund, an El Segunda, California-based startup that is taking Musk up on his challenge to develop and build the Hyperloop. But, like most chunks of infrastructure, even in prototype sizes, it’s expensive.