Tesla’s Elon Musk has a wild new idea
Commentary: Hyperloop is the transit system of the future
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By Carol Kopp
Tesla Motors Chief Executive and co-founder
Elon Musk started off his week on Monday by tweeting an announcement that, from
anyone else, would have sounded like a tease for a bad sci-fi movie.
“Will publish Hyperloop alpha design by Aug 12. Critical
feedback for improvements would be much appreciated.”
If you still think electric cars or rocket ships are
cool, you haven’t been keeping up with Musk. His “hyperloop” is a proposed
“really rapid transit system” that he says will be able to get a passenger from
San Francisco to Los Angeles in a half-hour. That would mean travel at 800 miles
per hour, or about twice the speed of conventional aircraft.
He has been a little vague on how this works, except to
say recently that the concept is “a cross between a Concorde, a railgun, and an
air-hockey table.”
Also, he says it will be impossible to crash, always
available on demand, way less expensive than current travel options and,
ideally, solar-powered.
Remember, this isn’t Donald
Trump talking trash. This is Elon Musk, who has already changed the
nature of money, as a co-founder of PayPal, the electronic payments system.
Since selling PayPal to eBay /quotes/zigman/76117/quotes/nls/ebay EBAY +0.03% , Musk has served as CEO of
SpaceX, which is in the business of building rocket ships and spacecraft. The
company, which he co-founded, is now under contract with NASA
to service the International Space Station.
Of greater interest to today’s investors, though, is
Musk’s role as co-founder, CEO, and CTO of Tesla Motors /quotes/zigman/118681/quotes/nls/tsla TSLA +6.95% , the venture that is proving
that building all-electric vehicles can be a profitable business.
We’ll find out how profitable it is right now on July
22, when Tesla announces its earnings results for the second quarter. The stock,
which just made a splashy debut on the Nasdaq-100 Index /quotes/zigman/12633930 NDX +0.33% , has zoomed from $25.52 to
$133.26 in a bit less than a year.
That’s the kind of price increase that makes for
warnings about a bubble market.
But Musk says Tesla is just getting started. His real
goal is to produce electric cars at an increasingly economical price. The first
Tesla model, launched in 2008, was a roadster with a base price of about
$70,000.
At an event for Tesla owners over the weekend, Musk said the company hopes to ship
800 vehicles per week by the end of 2014. It has added a second model, Model S,
and has a minivan in the works for next year.
Modern family retreat in the Hamptons: $6.4M
A look at a family vacation home in the Hamptons with
125 feet of bay frontage and room for privacy.
If you think this is sufficient innovation for an
entrepreneur who is, after all, only 42 years old, wait until he unveils his
plans for what he calls “the fifth mode of transportation,” alongside trains,
planes, cars and boats.
Speculation is rife about what exactly this mode of
transportation could be. Blogger Brian Dodson, who really is a rocket scientist,
explains how he thinks it might work,
based on the sparse information available.
In short, it sounds like the hyperloop might be a kind
of pneumatic tube for people. Musk has to be one of the few people on Earth who
could suggest such an idea without getting laughed at.
Ironically, the concept, like that of an electric car,
isn’t new. Pneumatic tube systems, which use compressed air to move objects
through a tube connecting fixed points, are still in use in some industries, but
were more common in the late 19th century. In their early years, there was
speculation that the technology could be used to transport people, but nobody
ever proved it.
Musk hasn’t promised proof at this point, just an “alpha
design.” But he has said that he will make the design available as “open
source,” and that he will not seek any patents for it.
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