I must be suffering from red flag fatigue. It wasn't until after I posted this that the significance of the following hit me.
From A Real Tube Carrying Dreams of 600-M.P.H. Transit by Eric Taub
All three companies contend that because of energy cost advantages over other forms of transportation, a system will be able to break even in a decade after full-scale operations begin.No one knows how much it would cost to build and operate a hyperloop over a great enough distance to make the speed worth while. Using existing methods, a project requiring this level of precision on this scale would be obscenely expensive. In order to make a serious attempt, a company would have to come up with radically new approaches and technology.
If Virgin and the rest were each pursuing possible breakthroughs independently, we should be seeing big differences in their cost estimates, even if those estimates were wildly unrealistic. The fact that all three give the same time to break even point is curious.
I'm afraid the most likely explanation is that they haven't really done anything substantive on the construction side. They're still using the orifice-derived numbers from the original whitepaper, which are even more nonsensical since all of them have abandoned Musk's original air-caster proposal.
I originally parsed the sentence as the following pessimistic take: "a system will be able to break - even in a decade after full-scale operations begin." Probably a much more accurate reading.
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