Death of Elon Musk’s hyperloop dream: Start-up behind high speed vacuum-tube system that was backed by Sir Richard Branson and would move levitating pods of people at speeds of up to 760mph will be shut down this week

The company behind the Hyperloop, the transportation system created by Elon Musk, has revealed that it is closing its doors and laying off its employees this week.

The goal of Hyperloop One was to commercialize an idea from Elon Musk, a system that aimed to propel pods full of passengers at speeds of up to 760 miles per hour.

But it will lay off all its employees and sell its assets by the end of the year, according to reports.

The company, based on a white paper published by Elon Musk in 2012, failed to get contracts to build Hyperloop systems, despite major but short-lived hype around what Tesla's CEO at the time said would be a “fifth ' would have been. means of transport.'

Musk said in his 2012 white paper that a hyperloop “would have been the right solution for the specific case of high-traffic city pairs that are less than about 900 miles apart.”

He pitched the idea at the time as an alternative to the $128 billion California would spend on a high-speed rail system connecting San Francisco and Los Angeles.

Hyperloop One was unveiled in 2013 by Elon Musk, who said at the time that it could take passengers the 380 miles (610 km) from LA to San Francisco in 30 minutes

The goal of Hyperloop One was to commercialize an idea from Elon Musk, a system that aimed to propel pods full of passengers at speeds of up to 770 miles per hour.

'How could it be that the home of Silicon Valley and the Jet Propulsion Laboratory – which are doing incredible things like indexing all the world's knowledge and putting rovers on Mars – would build a bullet train that would be both one of the most expensive per miles as one of the most expensive? of the slowest in the world,” he asked at the time.

Hyperloop One said the system would have offered better safety than passenger aircraft, lower construction and maintenance costs than high-speed trains, and energy consumption per person comparable to that of a bicycle.

There were also plans to integrate Hyperloop with autonomous cars, which would be loaded into pods to be transported to distant destinations.

“A self-driving Uber could go into the hyperloop and come out the other side,” Nick Earle, senior vice president of Global Field Operations, said in 2017.

“It's like broadband internet for transportation,” with self-driving vehicles transporting freight or people in a realistic variation on data packets delivered quickly from one point to another via the internet, he claimed.

There were plans to set up Hyperloops in the UK, with four lines, London to Edinburgh, Liverpool to Hull, Glasgow to Cardiff or a 'Northern Arc' through a series of northern cities, under consideration in 2017.

The London-Edinburgh plan was led by a team from the University of Edinburgh who planned to take the route via Birmingham and Manchester.

If selected, travel between the two capitals would have taken just 45 minutes, and the journey from London to Manchester would have taken just 18 minutes.

But by 2022, it had shifted its priority from transporting people to transporting freight.

Sir Branson stepped down after leading a £65 million investment in the company in 2017

Hyperloop One said the system would have offered better safety than passenger planes

Hyperloop One said the system would have had lower construction and maintenance costs than high-speed trains, and energy consumption per person would be comparable to that of a bicycle.

The change in priority led to about 100 people losing their jobs, and another round of layoffs followed later that year.

It was also the year that Sir Richard Branson, founder of Virgin, stepped down after leading a £65 million investment in the company in 2017.

Speaking about his investment, Sir Richard said: 'Having visited the Hyperloop One test site in Nevada last summer and meeting the leadership team, I am convinced that this ground-breaking technology will transform transport as we know it and dramatically reduce journey times.

“Virgin is known for investing in and creating innovative companies over the years, and I look forward to making history together as we bring Hyperloop to the world as Virgin Hyperloop One.”