The Hyperloop cabin design competition kicks off, bringing Musk's crazy dream one step closer

This weekend, 20 teams gathered outside Los Angeles to compete for the title of the best hyperloop pod design, bringing Tesla CEO Elon Musk's dream one step closer to reality.

Cradle of American car modification culture

Sunny Southern California is considered the cradle of American car modification culture. Over fifty years ago, many returning veterans of the war turned their passion for machines, fuel, and adventure into an inspired automotive movement whose influences are still felt today. So it makes sense that the seeds of a new transportation revolution were sown in the same land.

This weekend, in Hawthorne, a small town near Los Angeles, California, 20 teams will compete for the title of the best hyperloop cabin design. The hyperloop is a means of transportation designed with "vacuum steel tube transportation" as the core theory. It has the characteristics of ultra-high speed, high safety, low energy consumption, low noise and low pollution. Because of its capsule-shaped appearance, it is also called "capsule high-speed rail".

The concept was first proposed by SpaceX and Tesla CEO Elon Musk four years ago, and since then a slew of companies have emerged with the goal of commercializing the technology, including Hyperloop One and Hyperloop Transportation Technologies.

Musk's SpaceX was the first company to propose the concept of a super high-speed rail

The Hyperloop can travel in a sealed vacuum tube or low-pressure tube at a speed of up to 600 miles per hour (965 kilometers), which means that it will only take 30 minutes to travel from Los Angeles to San Francisco, while it currently takes 6 hours by car.

Musk has not expressed interest in starting a hyperloop company, but he has been pushing for scientific research into the concept, culminating in a competition to design a hyperloop pod, and now the finalists have arrived at SpaceX's San Francisco campus, where a mile-long track has been built to test the best pod designs.

Prize money still unknown

NASA employee Tom Lambot said: "If we win, it's not clear what the prize will be in the end. SpaceX is evasive on this issue, but for us, this is more of a challenge. We are not going for the prize money."

In his spare time, Lamport serves as the lead engineer for Team rLoop, an international group of people who met on Reddit and communicated through Slack to design the 5-foot-tall, 12-foot-long prototype of the Hyperloop pod.

rLoop team designs hyperloop cabin

"I think the Hyperloop will be a groundbreaking means of transportation that looks like something I don't know, but I'm still very interested in this area," Lamport said. "Will the future design be like Train 2.0, or will it be more like the Hyperloop itself? Let's wait and see."

Train 2.0 sounds like a concept that might win the support of the new US President Trump. During the presidential campaign, Trump repeatedly complained about the current state of rail transportation in the United States, while praising high-speed railways in parts of Europe and Asia. Trump said in March last year: "The trains in these countries are running at 300 miles per hour, and our trains are always making a rumbling sound."

Whether this means that the Trump administration will use federal funds to support the development of controversial new forms of transportation, such as the planned high-speed rail or hyperloop projects, remains to be seen.

Spectators walk through the Hyperloop tube

Hyperloop supporters believe that once this transportation system receives federal support, it will quickly become "self-sufficient" because it will speed up commercialization and transport goods more efficiently and at a lower cost. However, most experts in the field of hyperloop believe that passenger transportation is only a side benefit of hyperloop.

Skeptics say that although hyperloop technology has been demonstrated, it will still be a huge challenge for this new type of transportation to obtain the necessary land use permits and be deployed across the United States, and it also faces many challenges in ensuring that it meets human safety standards.

So far, Hyperloop One and other hyperloop companies have only conducted various feasibility studies in regions such as Scandinavia, Russia and the Middle East, which lack the necessary government funding and have cumbersome regulatory document approval procedures.

The Return of "Old Soldier" Bam Brogan

One of the newest entrants into the hyperloop race has other considerations. Brogan BamBrogan, the co-founder of Hyperloop One who left the company amid a legal battle of lawsuits and countersuits and later founded a Los Angeles-based hyperloop project called Arrivo, is now back in the game with this one.

BamBrogan co-founded Hyperloop One with Uber investor Shervin Pishevar and served as the company's chief technology officer, but he abruptly left the company in July last year after Hyperloop One successfully demonstrated its super high-speed rail pod design on tracks outside Las Vegas.

Hyperloop One co-founder Bam Brogan

BamBrogan claimed that he was tired of the company. Hyperloop One countered that BamBrogan and three other employees were poaching talent from within the company and trying to create another new company.

The dispute was finally settled in November, and this month, BamBrogan and three others — David Pendergast, William Mulholland and Knut Sauer — updated their LinkedIn pages to include all four of them as co-founders of Arrivo. But the exact details of the company’s plans remain a mystery.

Meanwhile, the entire hyperloop industry will be watching the results of this weekend's design competition closely. With the exception of rLoop, all of the participating teams originated from university research projects, and each project only received a small budget, which is far from the same as the strong funds owned by Hyperloop One, which has raised a total of $160 million. Lamport said that the rLoop hyperloop pod cost about $80,000 and received technical support from TE Connectivity, a large sensor connection solution provider.

According to Musk's request, once the winners are announced, the secrets of their successful hyperloop cabin designs will be made public, and their designs will be open to the entire hyperloop industry. According to the organizer's official website, the second hyperloop cabin design competition will be held this summer, and "the entry criteria will focus on one aspect: maximum speed."

As a winner of Toutiao's Qingyun Plan and Baijiahao's Bai+ Plan, the 2019 Baidu Digital Author of the Year, the Baijiahao's Most Popular Author in the Technology Field, the 2019 Sogou Technology and Culture Author, and the 2021 Baijiahao Quarterly Influential Creator, he has won many awards, including the 2013 Sohu Best Industry Media Person, the 2015 China New Media Entrepreneurship Competition Beijing Third Place, the 2015 Guangmang Experience Award, the 2015 China New Media Entrepreneurship Competition Finals Third Place, and the 2018 Baidu Dynamic Annual Powerful Celebrity.