LAS VEGAS (KLAS) — When Hyperloop came on the scene in 2013, it was hailed as a transportation revolution — the “fifth mode of transport,” according to Elon Musk — with a test track in North Las Vegas that would stun the world with new possibilities.
Now, the project appears to be dead.
A Bloomberg report last week indicates Hyperloop One is done, a dream that couldn’t attract any customers to push beyond concept and testing to operations and contracts.
The track at Apex Industrial Park in North Las Vegas, where a 2017 test sent a Hyperloop pod down a track at 192 mph, will be put up for sale, according to the Bloomberg report.
8 News Now has contacted Hyperloop One for comment, but we have not received a response. Kathleen Richards, public information officer for North Las Vegas, said, “The City is not typically notified when a company ceases operations so we would not have any information about a closure.”
It ends a promising chapter of innovation that began with lofty marketing about capsules traveling at speeds faster than commercial airplanes on a route between Los Angeles and San Francisco. The project attracted $450 million in venture capital, according to Bloomberg, but failed to reach its goal of three operating systems by 2021.
In November 2020, Hyperloop One put two employees in a full-scale vacuum tube and sent them on a 1/3-mile run that reached 107 mph. But a year ago the company was backing away from passenger transport, focusing its efforts on cargo — and continuing to trim its workforce.
Over the past year, Hyperloop notified Nevada’s Department of Employment, Training and Rehabilitation (DETR) of six layoffs. In 2022, 32 employees were laid off in Nevada, according to DETR — but a New York Times report indicated 100 people were fired as the company changed hands. It became Virgin Hyperloop One under billionaire Richard Branson, and then Hyperloop One again.
The site of the Hyperloop One Test and Safety Site, just off U.S. 93 at Apex, was previously the site of Faraday Future, an electric car maker that pulled out after reaching a deal that included $335 million in incentives from the state to locate here.
Hyperloop was designed to use propulsion based on residual air pressure inside a tube — gliding on “air bearings.” Elon Musk compared Hyperloop to a “cross between a Concorde and a railgun and an air hockey table” in a 2013 paper describing the project.
The high-speed rail project that recently won $3 billion in federal funding from the Biden administration — Brightline West, between Las Vegas and Rancho Cucamonga, California — is designed to carry passengers on all-electric trains.
