Hyperloop One, a transportation startup that promised to move passengers and cargo in nearly airless tubes at airplane speeds, has filed for bankruptcy. The company is selling all its assets. He closed offices and fired employees. According to Bloomberg, formal closure is expected at the end of the year, at which point all intellectual property will pass to its majority shareholder: a Dubai company that deals with port logistics, DP World. Since its founding in 2014, the company has raised around $450 million in venture capital funds, plus other smaller investments coming from its shareholders, which have changed over time with changes of hands that also involved Virgin’s Richard Branson.
Does Hyperloop One fail, end of the dream of ultra-fast transport?
The failure of Hyperloop One casts a shadow over the dream of creating ultra-fast trains that move passengers in an empty tube. A dream born from a document published in 2013 by Elon Musk. It’s called Alpha paper. A project where the owner of Tesla and SpaceX theorized that aerodynamic aluminum capsules with passengers or goods could be launched up to 1,223 kilometers per hour. Reducing costs, times and, in the long term, transport costs. Pipes placed on pylons or underground would have solved the traffic problem. Musk had called it the “fifth mode of transportation.”
From that project dozens of companies were born which in various countries around the world have tried to close agreements with local railways and municipal companies to build this transport system. One also in Italy, Hyperloop Italia in fact. According to US media, Hyperloop One was one of the largest. A Las Vegas company that built a huge testing hub in the desert in Nevada, of which little will remain – mostly an aluminum tube a couple of miles long. The reasons for the failure are currently unclear. The US media talk about problems related to technology, which is too expensive to allow returns on investment.
Gresta (Hyperloop Italia): “Technology has nothing to do with it, the ban in Veneto has a little more to do with it”
Hypothesis rejected by the CEO of Hyperloop Italia, Bibob Gresta: “Technology has nothing to do with it. The papers and the studies say so. It is absurd that we continue to argue that technology has something to do with it. The truth behind this failure? I think another reason had weight: the fact that we beat them in Veneto, where we won the construction of a line between Venice and Padua. With that project, Italy will become the country with the most advanced Hyperloop projects in the world.” Gresta is referring to the tender won in May 2013 for the implementation of the feasibility study of the ultra-fast transport system launched by the Venetian motorway concessions.
Tender awarded to a consortium formed by Webuild, Leonardo with Hyperloop TT (of which Gresta is co-founder and president). The project is expected to start in January. Hyperloop One, explains Gresta, participated in that tender. But it was defeated by the consortium. In fact, all Hyperloop companies that began as licensing companies of Hyperloop technology compete with each other. They carry out their research, their developments, their technologies. And the fact that Hyperloop Italia won such an important tender, for Gresta, would have had an impact on the company’s plans. Not only that: “When DP World bought the shares from Richard Branson’s Virgin, it fired everyone who worked in the passenger sector. There I understood that they wouldn’t make it. In Veneto, as in the rest of the world, we have won projects. Not them.”
At the moment the Venetian project, explains Gresta, is confirmed. There is a budget for the feasibility study (4 million, within 5 months). If positive, we will move on to the design phase (12 months of design, 56 million). Then the final phase, the realization of the project itself (within 36 months, 750 million). The budget at the moment is to carry out the study for 10 kilometers of the route, although it will probably concern all 38.
There are currently no scale Hyperloops. The most advanced project in Italy
Gresta remains convinced of the validity of Elon Musk’s idea. He defends the technology, the projects, the idea that it is the future of transport. Meanwhile, the failure of Hyperloop One shocks those in the United States where the media speaks of the end of a dream for an unrealizable technology. The news is at the top of all the sector newspapers. He causes discussion. And it will cause discussion in the future.
There are no scale Hyperloops today. Nowhere in the world. Musk with his Boring Company is busy digging tunnels and underground passages in Las Vegas, but only for Teslas, not Hyperloops. Italy is currently the first candidate to see a Hyperloop built. Which could see its realization between Venice and Padua in the next few years. A challenge. Technological and credible.