Right now, one of the most soul-destroying things is traffic. It affects people in every part of the world. Most major cities in the world suffer from severe traffic issues. It takes away so much of your life, it's horrible. It's particularly horrible in LA. and Washington D.C. and most of the major American cities.
Right now we’ve got for terrestrial transport, planes, trains, automobiles and boats for getting around Earth, but what if there was a fifth mode? I was trying to think what would be the fastest way you could get from say LA to San Francisco or cities in between. We should really be thinking about something that is, particularly in California, let's just invent something new that's way better than anything else. If we are to have some new form of transporting in California I think it would be good to aspire to something that is cutting edge technology. I just want us to have a bad-assed transportation system.
I tried to think what are the attributes that you want in a new mode of transport? if you just say what would you ideally want in a transportation system? You'd say, OK, you'd want something that relative to existing modes of transportation is faster, costs half as much per ticket, can't crash, is immune to weather, and is like self-powering, with like solar panels or something like that. That would be a pretty good outcome.
What would do that? What's the fastest way, short of inventing teleportation, that you could do something like that? I came to the conclusion that there is something like that that could work and would be practical. It would be a fifth mode of transport, and I have a name for it which is called the Hyperloop.
Actually what inspired me was, I was stuck in L.A. Traffic and I was about an hour late for a talk. It took me an hour to go 3 miles. I don’t know who was in charge of the damn 405 construction but they’re a bloody idiot, and I hate them. It was the worst construction project I have ever witnessed in my life, I’ve cursed them daily.
I was thinking 'man there's got to be some better way to get around.' That’s the biggest issue with Southern California, traffic hell, it’s like which level of hell are you in, if you’re in hell.
I was reading about the California high-speed rail, and it was quite depressing. We got like a ‘Bullet Train’ that has the dubious distinction of being the slowest bullet train, and the most expensive per mile. The high-speed rail that was being proposed would actually be the slowest bullet train in the world, and the slowest per mile in the world. These are not the superlatives we are looking for. We're setting records at both of the wrong ends of the spectrum. It was going to cost like $60 billion or something to go from San Francisco to LA, and it's a really slow train. It's a little depressing. It’s like, damn, we're in California, we make super high-tech stuff. Why are we going to be spending--now the estimates are around $100 billion-- for something that will take two hours to go from LA to San Francisco? I'm like, I can get on a plane and do that in 45 minutes. It doesn't make much sense, and isn't there some better way to do it than that. What is the theoretically fastest way that you could get from LA to San Francisco?
Japan has some impressive trains that they implemented in the 80s. Then China implemented an even more advanced train. So it seems that in California we should try to say what can we do that's a step beyond that? Not from the standpoint of one upmanship, but rather from the standpoint that the future is going to be better. I'm not against high-speed rail or if we just did a high-speed rail that was say a step above the Shanghai line. The Shanghai line is state of the art in China, let’s just take it half a notch better than that. And make sure that we got a straight path from LA to San Francisco as well as the milk run, not just to have a fast train that's not even as fast as what Japan did in the 80s. I don't see what the point of that is.
The high-speed rail plan will saddle the California tax payers with a pretty significant amount of money, for something which isn't obviously compelling relative to a car or a plane, in terms of time it would take to complete the journey. California taxpayers are going to be on the hook to build something that is the slowest bullet train in the world at enormous cost. If you pay a high price you should have a great outcome. That should be the sensible thing, and that doesn't seem to be what is happening from what I can tell.
The idea that I had at first actually made no sense and wouldn't work, but I kind of shot my mouth off at an event and said 'yeah I've got this idea for a new form of transport that I think would be really cool.' I actually came up with an initial idea which turned out to be wrong and would not have worked. But I sort of shot my mouth off saying; I think we can do something that is probably 10% of the cost, and how would you like something that can never crash, it is immune to weather, goes like three or four times faster than the bullet train that's being built, it would go about the average speed of twice what an aircraft would do. You go from downtown LA to downtown San Francisco in under 30 minutes. It would cost you much less then an air ticket or any other mode of transport, because the fundamental energy cost is so much lower. I think we could actually make it self powering if you put solar panels on it, as you generate more power than you consume in the system, and there's a way to store the power, so that it would run 24/7 without using batteries. It was like a tube with an air-hockey table. It was just a low pressure tube with a pod in it that runs on air-bearings, on air skis, with an air compressor on the front that’s taking the high pressure air build up on the nose, and pumping it trough the air skis. It turned out that didn't work.
I thought people would just not ask me about it in the future, but then they did. So it was like 'oh man, I'd better come up with something that actually DOES work. I set aside some time to actually write down some of the details. I wanted to make sure I didn't say something completely stupid. You know, it's funny, it's sort of kind of a combination of electric and aerospace. I was spending time with both the SpaceX aerodynamics team and the Tesla aerodynamics team, just to make sure that whatever I put out there really will work. After a couple of iterations I was able to come up with something where the physics hangs together. We actually only came to a solution that we thought would work maybe two days before the date that I published it. Some of the elements of that solution are fairly obvious, and some of them are not so obvious. Then the details, the devil's in the details, of actually making something like that work. I published the paper and said look if anyone wants to do this it's great, be my guest, because I have my plate full running Tesla and SpaceX. I'm kind of strung out on things that I'm already doing. So adding another thing-- it's like doesn't-- it's a lot.
I polished something before the end of the year, and I wanted to make sure I vet it with a few people within SpaceX and Tesla and maybe a few outside people and then just sorta put it out there as sort of just something that I think would be sensible and then ask people to add to it, and modify it, and maybe people have - I'm sure people have good ideas about making it better - and then try to come up with some sort of standard design that anyone can implement in the world. I think that'll be kind of cool. You know, sort of like an open source operating system, like an open source transport system. It'll be really neat. I think it genuinely would be a new mode of transport. I think one way to think of it is like it's.. it's kinda like a ground-based Concorde. If you could make something go as fast as a Concorde, on the ground, how would you do that? the basic thought behind it is to have something like a cross between a rail gun and a Concorde. I sort of like saying that because some people are going to be scared about that and some people will be like ‘yes, that's awesome.’ I'm appealing to the second group.
I just basically put it on the website and did 30 minutes of Q&A and then it just went bananas. Like it went super-viral. I wasn't actually expecting that to happen. I just wanted to do what I said I would do, which is write the paper.
I don't say we have to do the thing that I thought of. What we really intended to do with the Hyperloop was really to spur interest in new forms of transportation. And I think that probably the most valuable thing the Hyperloop paper has done is to spur thinking about new transportation systems. I'm starting to think that this is really going to happen. It's clear that the public and the world wants something new. I think it would be great to have any great new transport solutions, that gets people to their destination in a way that is safer, costs less, is more convenient.
Flying cars sound cool. Whenever you see sort of cities in some futuristic concept they always throw the flying car in there. I have thought a lot about it, and there are some people that I know that are working on personal transport devices if you will. I am debating should there be flying cars or shouldn't there be flying cars? I have two minds on that. I kinda like the idea of flying cars on the one hand but it may not be what people want, because if you have a huge number of cars and you have mechanical failures then I think you're sort of going to be vaguely wondering when there's a car landing on your head or house or what ever. And it would be susceptible to weather, that’s a concern. Then there's also a question of noise pollution, so there also is a challenge with flying cars in that they'll be quite noisy. The wind force generated will be very high they make a lot of wind. And to what degree does it affect the skyline, is it just buzzing full of cars? I'm in favor of flying things. Obviously, I do rockets, so I like things that fly. This is not some inherent bias against flying things. Let’s just say that if something's flying over your head, a whole bunch of flying cars going all over the place, that is not an anxiety-reducing situation. You don't think to yourself, "Well, I feel better about today." You're thinking, "Did they service their hubcap, or is it going to come off and guillotine me if they are flying past?”
Of course you would have to have a flying car where it would have to be on autopilot otherwise forget it. But even in an autopilot scenario, and even if you got redundant motors and blades, you have still gone from near zero chance of something falling on your head to something greater than that. On the other hand you would be able to go from one place to another faster, so I am not sure about the flying cars.
I think actually if you eliminate the choke points in cities then there is really not that much traffic outside of the choke points. If you look at sort of in suburban streets the traffic doesn't choke things. It's really on the highways and major arteries, since the cities grew way bigger than the major arteries.
The ideal long distance transportation mechanism is a supersonic vertical take off and landing electric jet. Where something like a Hyperloop works best would be for distances of maybe about 500 miles, but probably not more than a 1000. That’s because if you compare it to supersonic air transport, in order to go really fast with the plane you have to climb pretty high, because the atmosphere looks like molasses when you're going really fast. So for distances under 500 miles you spend all your time ascending and descending, and don't really get an opportunity to spend time in cruise.
So there’s a special case of cities which have a lot of travel between them below the 500 miles of distance, where I think the Hyperloop would be useful, because once the distances get long the amount of time an aircraft takes to ascend and land, which is mostly what it is on a 500 mile trip, that percentage declines. So then it’s better to just use aircraft.
I thought it was really disappointing when the Concorde was taking out of commission, and there was no supersonic transport available. Of course the 787 has had some issues. But the thing is, the 787 even in the best case scenario is only a slightly better version of the 777, and it's like, OK, not that exciting.
I came up with the name Hyperloop, I guess it was sort of a loop, you know. You go back and forth in a loop I thought. As it got more and more sophisticated, you should be able go to hypersonic velocity. It’s sort of hyper-sonic velocity tube.
Honestly I think it’s a lot easier than people think. Yes, there’s math, but it’s really not that hard. It’s really, I swear it’s not that hard. I think it's certainly feasible. I think it is definitely definitely doable. I think the economics would be a lot less than the high-speed rail, because the cost of the tube per mile would be significantly less. It's basically just a tube. The paper that I published had all the math behind it and multiple outside entities had gone through and confirmed that it's correct. It's mostly getting the right-of-way and approvals, not the technology. It's really pretty straightforward. It's just a tube and a pod with an air compressor on the front and air bearings beneath. It's very, very straightforward.
It's very important that the cost of the tube be minimized. You want the tube to be as low-cost as possible. If you do anything that requires action on the tube side it's going to make the tube expensive. If you use air-bearings that's really cheap, and ultimately you could go trans-sonic in the tube, and trans-sonic on wheels would probably be questionable.
Also I think we want to introduce ideas for how the track should be built. Like how do you do a multi-hundred km track, and make the thing work. Because we want to bring this to fruition, and show people that something new and great can happen and it doesn't have to be the same old thing.
I hope someone does it, because it doesn't seem like our mass transportation is getting better, it seems to be kinda getting worse.
We don't have any specific plans to back Hyperloop companies. Right now we're just trying to, in general, support the idea and support innovative thought in transport. It's possible we would back a team, but we're trying not to favorite one organization over another; we're trying to be as neutral as possible, and just generally be helpful. I think if the companies that are trying to make it happen now, if for whatever reason that doesn't work out, then I think I might do something myself in the future. I don't want to sort of front run them and say like here’s this free idea and then go and do it myself, that would not be nice.
Yeah, so we've been sort of puttering around with the Hyperloop stuff for a while. We built a Hyperloop test track adjacent to SpaceX, just for a student competition, to encourage innovative ideas in transport. It actually ended up being the biggest vacuum chamber in the world after the Large Hadron Collider, by volume. It was quite fun to do that, but it was kind of a hobby thing, and then we've built a little pusher car to push the student pods. We’re going to try seeing how fast we can make the pusher go if it's not pushing something. We’re cautiously optimistic we'll be able to be faster than the world's fastest bullet train even in a .8-mile stretch. Yeah, I mean, it's either going to smash into tiny pieces or go quite fast.
I think if you were to do something like a DC-to-New York Hyperloop, I think you'd probably want to go underground the entire way, because it's a high-density area. You're going under a lot of buildings and houses, and if you go deep enough, you cannot detect the tunnel. And looking at tunneling technology, it turns out that in order to seal against the water table, you've got to typically design a tunnel wall to be good to about five or six atmospheres. To go to vacuum is only one atmosphere, or near-vacuum. So it sort of turns out that automatically, if you build a tunnel that is good enough to resist the water table, it is automatically capable of holding vacuum. So something like Hyperloop could compete well in that arena, because you instantly enter a low-pressure environment.
I'm actually quite a big fan of tunnels. Tunnels are so under-appreciated. Something that I do think would help a lot in cities is tunnels. I think this is going to sound somewhat trivial or silly, but I’ve been saying this for many years now, but I think that the solution to urban congestion is a network of tunnels under cities. We got this fundamental flaw with cities that you got office buildings and apartment buildings and duplexes, and they are operating on three dimensions. But then you go to the streets and suddenly you're two-dimensional. The fundamental problem is that we build cities in 3D. You’ve got these tall buildings with lots of people on each floor, but then you've got roads which are 2D, you have a road network that is one level. That obviously just doesn't work.
Then people generally want to go in and out of those buildings at the exact same time. So then you get the traffic jams, you’re guaranteed to have gridlock. But you can go 3D, if you have tunnels, and you can have many tunnels crisscrossing each other with maybe a few meters vertical distance between them, and completely get rid of traffic problems. It's my understanding that Hong Kong is actually in the process of building some tunnels; I was very pleased to hear that, that really is the solution for solving traffic in major cities. If you had tunnels in cities, you would massively alleviate congestion. And it would always work even if the weather was bad. I think this is really a simple and obvious idea, and I wish people would do it. I don’t mean a 2D plane of tunnels, I mean tunnels that go many levels deep.
A key rebuttal to the tunnels is that if you add one layer of tunnels that will simply alleviate congestion, it will get used up, and then you'll be back where you started, back with congestion. But you can go to any arbitrary number of tunnels, any number of levels. There's no real limit to how many levels of tunnel you can have. You can always go deeper than you can go up. The deepest mines are much deeper than the tallest buildings are tall, so you can alleviate any arbitrary level of urban congestion with a 3D tunnel network. This is a very important point, you could have a network of tunnels that has 20, 30, 40, 50 levels; as many levels as you want really, and so you can overcome the congestion situation in any city in the world, and completely fix the congestion problem in high density cities.
I think we really need to have transport go 3D, we need to go 3D up or 3D down. If we go 3D up with flying cars, we got a lot of challenges with noise and potentially things falling on peoples heads.
I tweeted a lot about the Boring Company, which is basically a hobby. I wouldn’t even call that a real company at this point. We bought some secondhand machinery, and we’re digging a tunnel. The tunnel starts right across from SpaceX HQ. We're trying to dig a hole under LA, and this is to create the beginning of what will hopefully be a 3D network of tunnels to alleviate congestion. It's kind of puttering along, but it's making good progress. It’s got like 3 people, some interns, and like some part-time people. We are making pretty good progress for all that, but that’s like a fun thing to do, where there’s like no pressure, everyone thinks it’s gonna fail, it’s like oke it can only go up from there. Sort of the grown worthy joke that I make about tunnels is that they have low expectations, low expectations are great... There’s no way to go but down.... I can keep going. Oddly enough it’s like a low stress activity, because everyone expects it to fail. The Boring Company is like 2% of my time.
Sometimes people think, well, it's going to be pretty annoying to have a tunnel dug under my house. But if that tunnel is dug more than about three or four tunnel diameters beneath your house, you will not be able to detect it being dug at all. In fact, if you're able to detect the tunnel being dug, whatever device you are using, you can get a lot of money for that device from the Israeli military, who is trying to detect tunnels from Hamas, and from the US Customs and Border patrol that try and detect drug tunnels.The reality is that earth is incredibly good at absorbing vibrations, and once the tunnel depth is below a certain level, it is undetectable. Maybe if you have a very sensitive seismic instrument, you might be able to detect it.
Tunnels are great, it’s just a hole in the ground, it’s not that hard. The challenge is just figuring out how do you build tunnels quickly and at low cost and with high safety. If tunneling technology can be improved to the point where you can build tunnels, fast, cheap, and safe, then that would completely get rid of any traffic situations in cities, and that’s why I think it’s an important technology.
To give you an example, the LA subway extension, which is I think a two-and-a-half mile extension was just completed for two billion dollars. It’s roughly a billion dollars a mile to do the subway extension in LA, and this is not the highest utility subway in the world.
It’s quite difficult to dig tunnels normally. I think we need to have at least a tenfold improvement in the cost per mile of tunneling. There’s a couple of key things that are important in having a 3D tunnel network we're attempting. First of all, you have to be able to integrate the entrance and exit of the tunnel seamlessly into the fabric of the city. By having an elevator, and sort of a car skate that's on an elevator, you can integrate the entrance and exits to the tunnel network just by using two parking spaces. The car gets on a skate, there’s no speed limit. We’re designing this to be able to operate at 200 kilometers an hour, or about 130 miles per hour. You should be able to get from, say, Westwood to LAX in six minutes — five, six minutes. I think there's no real length limit. You could dig as much as you want.
Actually, if you just do two things, you can get to approximately an order of magnitude improvement, and I think you can go beyond that. The first thing to do is to cut the tunnel diameter by a factor of two or more. A single road lane tunnel according to regulations has to be 26 feet, maybe 28 feet in diameter to allow for crashes and emergency vehicles and sufficient ventilation for combustion engine cars. But if you shrink that diameter to what we're attempting, which is 12 feet, which is plenty to get an electric skate through, you drop the diameter by a factor of two and the cross-sectional area by a factor of four. The tunneling cost scales with the cross-sectional area. That’s roughly a half-order of magnitude improvement right there.
Tunneling machines currently tunnel for half the time, then they stop, the rest of the time is putting in reinforcements for the tunnel wall. So if you design the machine instead to do continuous tunneling and reinforcing, that will give you a factor of two improvement. Combine that and that's a factor of eight.
Also these machines are far from being at their power or thermal limits, so you can jack up the power to the machine substantially. I think you can get at least a factor of two, maybe a factor of four or five improvement on top of that. I think there's a fairly straightforward series of steps to get somewhere in excess of an order of magnitude improvement in the cost per mile. Our target actually is — we've got a pet snail called Gary, this is from Gary the snail from ‘SpongeBob SquarePants’ Gary is currently capable of going 14 times faster than a tunnel-boring machine. We want to beat Gary. He's not a patient little fellow, and that will be victory. Victory is beating the snail.
If you think about the future, you want a future that's better than the past, and so if we had something like the Hyperloop, I think that would be like cool. You'd look forward to the day that was working. If something like that even was only in one place, from LA to San Francisco, or New York to DC or something like that, then it would be cool enough that it would be like a tourist attraction. It would be like a ride or something. It would actually feel maybe like the Space Mountain ride at Disney World. The G-load would actually be less, so if you can handle Space Mountain at Disneyland you should be able to handle the Hyperloop. It will feel super smooth because it would use air-skis like an air hockey table with the air jets on the pod side as opposed to the tube side. It just would be smooth as glass.
Even if some of the initial assumptions didn't work out, the economics didn't work out quite as one expected, it would be cool enough that like, I want to journey to that place just to ride on that thing. That would be pretty cool. And that's I think how if you come with a new technology it should feel like that. If you told it to an objective person, would they look forward to the day that that thing became available. It would be pretty exciting to do something like that. I'm just keen on seeing it happen somewhere. It's exciting and inspiring to think about new forms of transportation or new technologies that make people's life better. Wherever they happen, I think it's great. As soon as it happens somewhere and people see it really works out I think it'll quickly spread throughout the world.
The thing that's really going to convince people is if they can take a ride in it. Wherever it's built, it needs to be something that gets used a lot. Where ideally the economics prove out and people like riding it. Wherever that's done I think those are the important criteria for it to expand more broadly and be used widely throughout the world.
We did run simulations at SpaceX and Tesla, I actually don't think it's particularly, the engineering that it would work is actually pretty obvious. The larger issues are political, and political support to do something like that.
We really want this to be an evolutionary path to a real system, real Hyperloops that could be deployed around the world, and used by millions of people. Even if ultimately what gets built is something that's quite different from what I wrote about in the paper, I think that would still be great. You know, if we're making people's lives better, getting them to places conveniently with more safety and faster. I really like that idea that you could live in one city and work in another city, and you can move fast enough that you can actually do that. It frees people up. Just gives people more freedom.