Let’s face it, he’s trying to build a vacuum tube over many hundreds of km’s. The energy you need to keep that at reduced pressure is more than a Little Boy or a Fat Man. The pods are the size of somewhere between a coach and a railway carriage, with seating built to Frecciarossa Executive Class. It’s propelled using Maglev tech, so you need a not-insignificant amount of power to also move your pods. And getting into or out of your vactube is going to take some extra work.

One thing that I’ve seen being pointed out by some critics is that a maglev system is often quoted to cost about a billion per unit distance, while high speed rail is quoted at about 500 million, about half. But then the Hyperloop shows up and is quoted at 250 million. How do the economics of that work? I mean, you take a maglev, which is twice as expensive as conventional but very precise regular railway, but by adding a vacuum tube, which is an added system that takes a ton of energy to even get it start making operational sense, you somehow cut costs in half from effectively a regular railway? I’m no economists, but that makes no economic sense.

The tech looks really snazzy in CGI renderings until you start to look into the engineering and physics to make it actually work. At which point it becomes awful.

So what if we tried?

First thing, the vacuum tube has to go. This is the number one obstacle preventing it from ever working. We’ll still accept the special right of way for high speeds though, we’ll just make our pods amazingly aerodynamic. Given the fact that our constraining factors may just become simpler, we can rig our pods to form a hyperpod chain, which allows us to bundle power and improve reliability and efficiency via an economy of scale. We can lower the seating quality in some of these pods and sell those seats for a lower price, making up for it in volume. We can still power everything with green energy, we’re still using our own hyperway, with a very narrow path that our hyperpods can take, so rigging up an electrification scheme via an infrastructure power supply is quite easy. If we want to deploy quickly and make true on our 250 million quid per unit distance, we may have to rely on proven technology, so we probably base our new hyperway structure on two steel beams being kept a fixed distance of 1435mm apart. Bonus: there’s a lot of largely compatible infrastructure at both ends that we can now use, as well as a giant pool of trained professionals around the world, so we can cheap out on stations and hyperway maintenance can be quite cheap and quick.

I just invented a train again, didn’t I?

Elon is a con artist and I will take no criticism.