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posted by CoolHand on Wednesday December 02 2015, @03:02AM   Printer-friendly
from the super-duper-transport dept.

Two years after the Tesla CEO crowdsourced the idea for the Hyperloop, his dream of a 'fifth mode' of transportation is quickly and quietly becoming a reality, but what's his endgame?
...
Reactions at the time [of Elon Musk's announcement about the Hyperloop] ranged from excitement to skepticism to outright disbelief—Musk was even accused of sabotaging the high-speed rail project for profit, despite his statement that he had no plans to develop the Hyperloop commercially. Musk stepped back, essentially giving the field to the host of students, engineers and entrepreneurs who almost immediately answered the challenge. Musk spent the next two years tweeting support for any opensource Hyperloop developments. He remains close to members of both startups currently in the lead to produce the first working Hyperloop—Hyperloop Transportation Technologies, or HTT, and Hyperloop Technologies Inc., or HTI. But on Jan. 15th of this year, Musk shook up the field when he announced plans to build a Hyperloop test track and hold a contest in summer 2016 at SpaceX headquarters in Hawthorne, Calif. The challenge? Create a functioning, half-scale pod. Specs for the test track's tube were released in October, and in November, 318 teams from 162 universities and 16 countries submitted their final pod designs. U.S. Secretary of Transportation Anthony Foxx will be the keynote speaker at the first event, a Hyperloop design weekend for the finalists at Texas A&M University on January 13th, 2016.

"Hyperloop." The name still evokes images of Toucan Sam.


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  • (Score: 4, Interesting) by Nerdfest on Wednesday December 02 2015, @04:05AM

    by Nerdfest (80) on Wednesday December 02 2015, @04:05AM (#270485)

    As someone who opened up all the patents for his electric vehicles, perhaps he's just doing something good for people. Perhaps he's one of the few that seems to have 'enough money', rare thing that it is these days.

    Perhaps he's the 'anti-Jobs'.

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  • (Score: 4, Insightful) by Anonymous Coward on Wednesday December 02 2015, @04:34AM

    by Anonymous Coward on Wednesday December 02 2015, @04:34AM (#270497)

    To be fair, opening up the electrocar patents is also a good long-term business decision. The lack of basic infrastructure (recharge stations) is a main hurdle towards electric car adoption. With many more players able to enter the market using free Tesla patents, the pressure to build the infrastructure grows, the demand grows, more electric cars are sold overall. Tesla gets a smaller piece of a much, much larger pie.

    I'm not saying that was Musk's main motivation, but it sure as hell is at least a nice bonus. Even if the profit it is a main motivation, it shows a capability for long-term planning that is tragically absent from most corporations...