Elon Musk, CEO of Tesla and SpaceX, is known for is innovation in the transportation industry. One of the first to to pioneer electric vehicles for consumer sale, as well as pushing boundaries with regards to space travel, Musk has seen great success with regards to futuristic technology which is driving a more sustainable and greener future. However, not all ideas have been successful, and Musk has had to roll back on some ideas.
Elon Musk’s Hyperloop: A loosing battle
In 2013, Musk published a paper on the Hyperloop Alpha. The paper outlined a proposed venture for travel in capsules using vacuum tubes. Theoretically, if such a venture could ever be successful, the capsules would be able to travel up to 1,200 km/h. This would drastically transform the transportation industry, and make travel easier and faster in ways never seen before.
However, over ten years since the paper was first published, the Hyperloop dream has been met with unsuccess after unsuccess. There have been multiple trials over the decade to get the project off the ground, however none have come anywhere close to getting a viable outcome, or even a start for that matter, for the proposed travel system.
At the end of 2023, after much fundraising and some initial hope, the company which was expected to carry out the first phase of the project, Hyperloop One, cancelled the project. Zeleros, a Spanish company which was also interested in pioneering the project as a competitor of Tesla, announced that they were refocusing their goals and were returning to focus on electrical engine solutions.
Musk receives criticism of the project
The project has previously received extensive criticism from others in the transportation industry. Carlo van de Weijer, director of Intelligent Mobility at the Technical University of Eindhoven, has been one of the most critical of the system: “It is a very complicated solution in search of a problem that does not exist. Putting money into hyperloop as a serious transportation system was a stupid idea from the beginning.”
When Musk first proposed the idea, there was some initial excitement at the project. However, continues Weijer, the idea had people jumping onto the band-wagon too early: “Many people may have thought ‘oh wow, we’ve missed the Tesla opportunity’, which had acquired enormous value, and they must have thought that they could get on board with that new idea. And they raised a lot of capital, because it was a very attractive technology. But they completely forgot that they were not solving any problem.”
Tesla continues to be a pioneer of electrical engine solutions
Despite the setback of the Hyperloop project, Tesla continues to dominate the electrical vehicle industry. While many other automobile companies have released their own electric and hybrid engine solutions technology, Tesla still remains the face of the industry. Other automobile companies, in an effort to compete, have looked at diversifying their alternative engine solutions range with investments in solutions such as hydrogen fuel-cell technology which also offers promising results towards a greener future.
As time goes on, it is becoming clearer that leaving the internal combustion engine behind is essential in order for the transportation industry to help the world achieve its climate goals. While there will need to be a bridging period, the dominance of the internal combustion engine on the world is not sustainable in the long run.
However, to convince consumers to accept other engine solutions, automobile companies need to collaborate with government to make these innovative technologies more accessible and realistic to use. Without extensive supporting infrastructure for these engines, consumers are not going to be convinced to give up the internal combustion engine.
