Hyperloop’s cool trick: how SNCF and local authorities were fooled by Elon Musk

Elon Musk is a genius, including mistaking a bladder for a lantern. For ten years, building on its dazzling success (Tesla, SpaceX), it has managed to get hundreds of people and startups to invest in the future of “revolutionary” very high-speed hyperloop trains (over 1000 km/h). ) moving in a tube partially under vacuum.

But Elon Musk’s aim was probably only to make people dream with money… from other people, that is to say through taxes and duties (SNCF invested 80 million euros in this beautiful madness in 2016, the metropolis of Toulouse 5.5 million, and Nouvelle -Aquitaine region, two million by the European Feder Fund).

A harsh return to reality

It all started in 2013, with the publication by Elon Musk of the famous Alpha Paper, a 52-page document. Open source In which the billionaire described his idea Exciting.

However, he and his collaborators focused on issues that were easy to solve, ignoring the significant technical hurdles. Profitability was also largely underestimated.

Elon Musk’s Alpha paper was more of a student project or a letter to Santa Claus than a solid techno-economic study.

Dreamers and smart people looking for subsidized projects, ignoring the impossibilities resulting from the laws of physics, which include passengers traveling in tubes under near-vacuum (one thousandth (one millibar) of atmospheric pressure on Earth, which is 1000 millibars) jump at the chance. jumped up .

The Hyperloop was supposed to be a durable, ultra-fast and efficient vehicle made of aluminum capsules through a magnetic levitation system in long, low-pressure tunnels. The exciting concept was to revolutionize the transportation industry.

However, it was conceived in 1891 by Jules Verne, who clearly sold dreams in his books, and the Swissmetro project, proposed in 1974 and abandoned in 2009, was similar to Elon Musk’s.

Logically, ten years and $450 million later, the initial enthusiasm has been overtaken by technical frustrations. Thousands of paper jobs have evaporated. The tunnel is still in the draft stage and the startup Hyperloop One, which promised to revolutionize transportation, officially died on December 31, 2023.

Total stop

This incredible industrial saga, which was expensive, has for a decade imagined a restricted audience who wanted dreams, not complex studies.

We then had to think differently, to be disruptive, to open our minds, to step out of our comfort zones, which physics mocked. And some of them found themselves facing a wall of reality that they wanted to cheerfully cross with the cry of “Technology is advancing, we’ll figure it out soon, be confident…”.

There are still some nice music animations on the screen and images, that is to say nothing.

Some people even today believe that this financial mismanagement was justified because the idea had potential, and it would have been a shame not to try it.

For other disenfranchised people, Hyperloop came too early… or too late, in an economic context unfavorable to the development of this technology. Reality and physics are hard to deal with.

It was predictable…and planned!

Of course, some will think that in hindsight, it is easy to say that money was wasted, that the project was foolish, and that it was predictable from the start because it is never possible to break free from the laws of physics. But the windfall effect of allowing the need to dream and create a money pump will be strongest, such as for the deviant development of wind turbines and other photovoltaic panels.

Unfortunately, public funding allows politicians to support a small world of time-bound people, thanks to the grants that are awarded. Then, when the dust settles, this little world of profiteers disintegrates, shuts down startups, and starts again elsewhere to sell dreams to naive people on another project well-packaged in beautiful animation.

Thus, some people build entire careers on nothingness, wind, anything, as long as there are subsidies and money to be had.

This Elon Musk project was probably only intended to torpedo the TGV in California to make it obsolete and endanger public and Californian transportation and better sell his Tesla cars.

In the end, the Hyperloop is a colossal flop, a hyper failure, a techno-intellectual scam. The Hyperloop scandal would have lasted another ten years and swallowed billions of euros, mainly public money.