Elon Musk said goodbye to the first Hyperloop tunnel prototype. Nearly 4 years after its construction, the billionaire’s crazy project, which stretched over a kilometer, will finally give way to a parking lot.
Bloomberg reports that the roughly mile-long white steel tube that ran along Jack Northrop Avenue near SpaceX’s headquarters in Hawthorne, Calif., was removed and will be replaced with parking spaces for employees. As a reminder, the latter was unveiled for the first time in 2018, and promised to revolutionize transport.
For those who remember, Project Hyperloop is an entirely theoretical form of transportation that has been heralded as the ” fifth mode of transportation and which promised to change the way humans move around the world. Indeed, the Hyperloop initially promised to allow high-speed intercity travel through vacuum-packed underground tunnels.
The tunnel will be replaced by a parking lot for SpaceX employees
The white tube outside, which has hosted many competitions between students from all over the world, has probably already been dismantled. However, Elon Musk will also convert his mythical prototype of the Hyperloop, the famous tunnel which was about 1.5 km long and 3.6 meters wide. It was located near Hawthorne Municipal Airport, just outside of Los Angeles, and will soon be transformed into a parking lot for SpaceX employees.
With help from the Boring Company, owned by Musk, which he said could dig tunnels faster and more efficiently than existing technologies, the system promised to be able to transport passengers from San Francisco to Los Angeles in just 30 minutes. However, after realizing the huge production costs, SpaceX eventually scaled back its plans.
The Boring Company’s first true tunnel is only 1.3 miles long, cost $49 million to build. The latter accommodates only human-driven Tesla vehicles and runs from one end of the Las Vegas Convention Center to the other.. We had also been able to see that the latter was not completely developed, since small plugs had formed during the first demonstration at CES 2022.
