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Interview - Virgin Hyperloop
THE DECADE OF HYPERLOOP
By Daniel Baksi
As part of the Collision 2021 conference, Sustainable Business Magazine spoke to Josh Giegel, Co-Founder of Virgin Hyperloop, about design simplicity, the importance of safety, and Hyperloop’s revolutionary potential.
In 2013, when Elon Musk and SpaceX
issued a white paper about “a new form of transport”, Josh Giegel was listening. Known as “Hyperloop Alpha”, the paper proposed the construction a series of sealed tubes with low air pressure, designed to transport people and objects at the speeds of a modern aeroplane. Then part of the writing crew at Space X, Mr. Giegel launched his own company the following year under the name Hyperloop Technologies. Its goal was to achieve something than no one had thought possible: reinventing a concept that had remained relatively untouched for the past 100 years.
Fast forward to 2021, the company has rebranded as Virgin Hyperloop, and is now working to bring the concept to its full potential. “Our goal is to build a paradigm shifting transportation system,” says Mr. Giegel. “We want something seamless for the end user, that moves at high speed, reduces the transit time very substantially for passengers, or for cargo, to get wherever they need to go – and to do that using technology from this century.”
DUMB ROADS
Underpinning Hyperloop is a concept grounded in simplicity. “What we’re proposing is a smart car and a dumb road,” says Mr. Giegel. “The premise is that a Model T from 100 years ago could drive on the same road as a Model 3 today. When building infrastructure, you need to be able to create a system that’s still relevant 40, 50, even 100 years from now.”
“To achieve that, we’re focussing on a simple tube, from which most of the air has been taken out,” explains Mr. Giegel. “That allows us to travel at the equivalent of roughly 50 kilometres of altitude – or the speed of an aircraft – for roughly 10 times less drag. Inside the tube, we’ll then have vehicles in the form of pods which can be upgraded over time, leveraging battery improvements as they develop year over year. We’ll form these pods into convoys, resembling a train car, but without mechanical coupling. The end experience we want for our passengers we want them to show
up to a portal – which is what we’re calling station – waiting no more than a couple of minutes for a pod, which will close, before travelling directly to your destination at high speed, rather than stopping at each place along the route.”
BENDING THE RULES
Sustainability sits at the heart of the Virgin Hyperloop project. “The engineer’s responsibility is to give people new ideas, opportunities, and forms of connectivity that let people live the way they want to live, but in a way that doesn’t destroy the world around them,” says Mr. Giegel. “That’s the huge push we’re now seeing in the post-COVID era. It’s about building new infrastructure in the US, it’s ‘building back better’ in Europe. We can’t achieve that with the status quo, and we need a technology that doesn’t regress in the way we’ve recently seen in Europe, with the introduction of a short-haul ban on flights – which for all its nobility, is putting people onto a service that’s more inconvenient. In the case of Hyperloop, we’ll be combining the low air resistance offered by the tube with two more key pieces of technology: our own battery-powered maglev, which is roughly 10 times more energy efficient than other systems available today, and our own propulsion system, capable of speeds two-to-three times that of highspeed rail, at double the efficiency.”
Armed with these innovations, Hyperloop threats to rip-up the rule book when it comes to mass transportation. “The Japanese Shinkansen moves between Tokyo and Nagoya something on the order of about 500 kilometres an hour,” says Mr. Giegel. “We can go even faster if we wish, but we can match those speeds easily, for a fraction of the energy. Right now, Kansas City and St. Louis – two-to-three million person cities – are about a three and a half hour car drive car ride apart. Hyperloop would do that in about 30 minutes, faster than you could get across uptown Manhattan. In places like the Middle East, just by covering the tops of the tube with solar panels, you can create a form of a renewable-powered transportation, moving about 45 million passengers a year. Hyperloop also takes up less right-of-way, climbs steeper hills, and can take tighter turns, all inside of an enclosed environment, safe from weather, turbulence, or other vehicles crossing people. Looking at the full package, all these benefits are really driving quite the value proposition for projects and cities around the world as they try to hit their their net zero targets.”
SAFETY FIRST
In November of last year, Virgin Hyperloop celebrated it’s first passenger-in-a-pod test. “People understand that Hyperloop is a good concept, but the main question on most people’s minds has always been: is it safe?” says Mr. Giegel. “With that in mind, the pod test was a really big thing – because two people got on a Hyperloop, and then two people got off. Since we were able to demonstrate that, we’ve since seen far fewer questions about the safety of the system.”
“We’re in the process of commercialising the technology now, and getting the economics right,” says Mr. Giegel. “Back in January, we released the passenger experience video to showcase the new kind of user experience so to speak of what the system would be like. The two passenger vehicle used in the pod-test will be expanded to a 28-passenger vehicle ahead pilot developments between 2024 and 2026. We’ll then move into more commercial projects towards the latter part of this decade. When we go to put Hyperloop into the world, we would be the technology provider, and then you’d have the person that’s actually building the project – the government or the private entity – along with a third party assessor, whose role it is to evaluate the system technically, and to make sure it’s safe. Slowly, we’re
seeing this small idea becoming influential – with governments around the world starting to take notice, with more projects around the world.”
ROMAN ROADS
Just like the plane, train, or automobile before it, Hyperloop promises to revolutionise lives across the globe. “As a species, humans have moved forward as they’ve moved faster,” says Mr. Giegel. “Whether it’s Roman roads, or Spanish ships, every time we’ve become more connected there’s been an explosion of economic growth and idea flow. We saw a version of that with the internet become connected, but we’re still missing that next leap in transportation. Moving forward, what we envisage is a new platform that produces new possibilities. We didn’t know Uber would exist without the smartphone, and we have a similar type opportunity here: when you’re building a platform of high speed connectivity, where I could get goods or people anywhere at the speed of thought, what is that going to enable?”
“Today, you can see tens of billions being invested in things like the One Belt, One Road initiative, now stretching from Asia to Europe,” says Mr. Giegel. “That investment is increasing the average speed on that route by maybe 30 or 40 kilometres per hour. But, to use the proverbial phrase, we can ‘10x’ that with our type of system. Instead of taking four to six weeks on a boat, or a couple of weeks on a train, you’re doing that in a day. If you’re in Europe or in the US, you can do same-day shipping from logistics hubs, you can move people back and forth, you could have breakfast in Kansas City, lunch in St. Louis. We’re on the precipice of an autonomous electric world, where you’re tied into both first and last mile. Whenever you want to go somewhere you’ll have a seamless experiences, that’s potentially a matter of just getting your phone out and tapping wherever you want to go. This is the decade of Hyperloop: it started off with myself and a colleague – by the end, we want hundreds of millions of people riding on multiple Hyperloops around the world.” c
