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What Musk has said so far is that the Hyperloop would be a "a cross between a Concorde, a rail gun, and an air hockey table," and would be able to deliver people the 380 miles between Los Angeles and San Francisco in just 30 minutes, dramatically outpacing California's bullet train project, which would make the same trip in just under three hours. Musk has publicly bashed California's bullet train plans as inefficient, and maintains that the Hyperloop would be a better project for the state to undertake. He first brought up the idea for the Hyperloop just about a year ago at a PandoDaily fireside chat and said that he would provide further details on June 20th this year, but it looks as though we'll all have to wait until August to learn more about how his proposed system would function.

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Almost a year after Elon Musk, chief executive of Tesla Motors (TSLA) and SpaceX, first floated the idea of a superfast mode of transportation, he has finally revealed the details: a solar-powered, city-to-city elevated transit system that could take passengers and cars from Los Angeles to San Francisco in 30 minutes. In typical Musk fashion, the Hyperloop, as he calls it, immediately poses a challenge to the status quo—in this case, California’s $70 billion high-speed train that has been knocked by Musk and others as too expensive, too slow, and too impractical.

In Musk’s vision, the Hyperloop would transport people via aluminum pods enclosed inside of steel tubes. He describes the design as looking like a shotgun with the tubes running side by side for most of the journey and closing the loop at either end. These tubes would be mounted on columns 50 to 100 yards apart, and the pods inside would travel up to 800 miles per hour. Some of this Musk has hinted at before; he now adds that pods could ferry cars as well as people. “You just drive on, and the pod departs,” Musk told Bloomberg Businessweek in his first interview about the Hyperloop.

Musk published a blog post detailing the Hyperloop on Monday. He will hold a press call later in the day to go over the details.

Musk has released the plans as an open-source project. He stated last week that he did not have time to devote to the project at present, but in a conference call yesterday, he said that he was coming around to the idea that one of his existing, or future, companies could take it on. "I'm tempted to make a demonstration prototype," he said. Musk estimates that it would take one or two years of dedicated work to build the prototype, and another four to five years to deploy a full-scale version between San Francisco and Los Angeles.

What is even more ambitious than Musk's proposed timeline is his estimate of the cost. He projects that Hyperloop would cost a mere $7.5 billion, about a tenth of the cost of the currently planned high speed rail corridor between the two cities. He also estimates that a ticket for a one-way Hyperloop trip could cost as little as $20, about half what high-speed rail service is likely to charge. Such modest costs are partly down to his claim that Hyperloop could generate most of the power it needs using solar panels – similar to those used at the charging stations for the electric cars made by Musk's Tesla MotorsMovie Camera – on top of the tube.


Musk claims that Hyperloop can easily and cheaply be made earthquake-resistant. Others agree that it won't be hard, but are less sure about the price tag. "Given the right amount of money, we can design almost anything to sustain earthquake loading," says Scott Brandenberg, an earthquake engineering expert at UCLA. "But the question is how much does it cost?"