Hyperloop Dreams Endangered After SPAC Deal Fails
Well-funded startups set out to build super-fast transit; passengers are still waiting.
HyperloopTT’s full-scale passenger capsule at a press conference in El Puerto de Santa Maria, Spain, in 2018.
Photographer: Cristina Quicler/AFP/Getty Images
Elon Musk described a dazzling vision: a transit system that could hurl passengers between cities at nearly the speed of sound. His paper on the topic spurred a cohort of big-thinking entrepreneurs to try to create the futuristic transportation system that he called the hyperloop.
But 10 years and hundreds of millions of dollars later, more than a half-dozen startups have tried to create the 760-mile-per-hour super highway and none have succeeded. Last year, the Richard Branson-backed startup Hyperloop One cut half its staff and pivoted to moving freight. Outside Musk’s own Space Exploration Technologies Corp., workers put in a parking lot where a hyperloop test tunnel used to be. And earlier this month, one of the longest standing leaders in the arena, Hyperloop Transportation Technologies Inc., abandoned an attempt to go public.