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Virgin Hyperloop One Shows Off New Futuristic Travel Pod (cnet.com)
An anonymous reader quotes a report from CNET: It's an interesting time for Virgin Hyperloop One, which saw one of its board members arrested on fraud and embezzlement charges in Russia last week and three other high-profile directors departing the board, according to Bloomberg. But that hasn't stopped the futuristic-transport startup from showing off its latest pod prototype, first for the Crown Prince of Saudi Arabia and now for the rest of us via the video above. The charges faced by Russian billionaire and board member Ziyavudin Magomedov are reportedly unrelated to Virgin Hyperloop One, and he is appealing the arrest. The video from Virgin above appears to show a full-size pod prototype on an enclosed test track at the company's test facility in Nevada. How fast it's going is hard to say. So far we've seen the company achieve speeds of 240 miles per hour in tests, or roughly a third of the speed it hopes to eventually achieve.
Perhaps someone here can educate me in case I am mistaken. From what I have seen from CGI videos and presentations, the hyperloop seems to be an incredibly impracticable idea.
All the videos show cars driving onto some kind of platform for sled, then lowering down on an elevator and taking off down the tube? How can anyone possibly think that would work?
Are there 50 lanes in the tube so lowering elevators don't block the traffic flow?
Is the elevator in a side tube that connects to the main tube?
Best case, a car could drive on the sled, get oriented, drop down the elevator, launch the sled and the elevator goes back up in let's say, 1 minute. Likely way more.. but let's be optimistic.
They want to put this system in heavily populated areas, which means a lot of users.
So, 60 cars for one elevator on a given morning would be reasonable. Though, the on-ramp to the 405 near to where I lived in SoCal supported many hundreds a day.
So, if you have a line of 60 cars, the guy at the end needs to wait an hour before he can get in the tube. Then, he needs to wait likely far more than an hour inside the tube waiting for his turn at an elevator.
It seems like a comically stupid idea and vastly slower than just driving on a surface road.