Barrel-chested and 6ft 4in tall, Dirk Ahlborn stuck out among the gaggle of pale, spotty techies milling about a hotel bar in Redwood City, California. It was an impossibly bright afternoon in Silicon Valley. A stone’s throw away, a towering catamaran that won the last America’s Cup hung at a jaunty angle over a man-made pond at the Oracle campus.
The software giant’s founder Larry Ellison, billionaire benefactor of the America’s Cup sailing team, is famously obsessed with speed. So is Ahlborn, though he is decidedly less famous.
The chief executive of Hyperloop Transportation Technologies (HTT) spends much of his time on the road at tech conferences like the one that brought him to Silicon Valley. He gives speeches, weighs in on round tables. Anything to spread the gospel of the hyperloop.
Not heard of it? The hyperloop is, according to Ahlborn, the future of transport — a vacuum-tube system on pylons that, with very little energy, can move levitating pods full of people or cargo at up to 760mph — close to the speed of sound. A hyperloop line between London and Edinburgh would cut the journey to just over half an hour. It would, Ahlborn asserts, cost a fraction to build of, say, the £56bn HS2 high-speed rail link, and could, potentially, be free to ride.
Short-haul flights could be eliminated, as could swathes of rail and road travel. Populations would be remade.
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“Vienna and Bratislava are the two European capitals that are the closest together [about 40 miles]; they would actually become one city,” said Ahlborn. “If you think about London with hyperloop now, you can connect all these airports and they become terminals.”
There are plenty of people who dismiss Ahlborn’s vision as pure fantasy. Jose Ibanez-Gomez, urban planning professor at Harvard, said that he was “mystified that they have raised so much money because the technology seems fantastical”. However, the tech industry loves nothing more than “moon shots” such as, say, overhauling the global transport system.
Silicon Valley is, after all, where every month it seems another self-driving car company launches and where flying taxis are a serious topic of conversation.
HTT is one of two companies trying to lead the hyperloop revolution. Ahlborn last year raised $35m (£27m) in cash, most of it from Edgewater Investments, an American venture capital firm with ties to China. HTT this year opened a research centre in Toulouse, France, and Spanish engineering firm Carbures is building its first “pod”, which will be 98ft long, have a capacity of up to 35 passengers and weigh in at 20 tons.
The key to getting the pods moving at such high velocities is the vacuum tube, which simulates the thin atmosphere 20 miles above earth. “It is not yet outer space, but it’s close,” said Ahlborn. The technology, he added, is not the challenge. “It is all proven. The challenge is bringing it all together in a way that makes economic sense.”
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British engineering firm WS Atkins has partnered with the company to provide in-kind engineering and man hours, as has Leybold, the German vacuum equipment giant.
Ahlborn’s rival, Hyperloop One, has even deeper pockets. It has raised $160m from Dubai’s DP World and Sherpa Capital of San Francisco and has completed a 1,600ft test track in the Nevada desert.
Despite all this, the hyperloop remains a science project that exists mostly in artists’ impressions.
It owes its fledgling existence to the unquiet mind of Elon Musk. Four years ago, the billionaire tycoon behind Tesla, SpaceX and PayPal published a 58-page white paper about why the hyperloop could solve our traffic and airport woes.
He was inspired by the approval of a hugely controversial and very expensive plan to link Los Angeles and San Francisco via publicly funded high-speed rail.
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“How could it be that the home of Silicon Valley and JPL [Nasa’s Jet Propulsion Laboratory] . . . would build a bullet train that is both one of the most expensive per mile and one of the slowest?” he wrote.
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Short of figuring out real teleportation, which would, of course, be awesome (someone please do this), the only option for super-fast travel is to build a tube over or under the ground that contains a special environment,” mused Musk. “This is where things get tricky.” As many critics point out, Musk opted not to build the hyperloop himself. Perhaps he was simply too busy attempting to revolutionise the car industry, colonising Mars and burrowing under Los Angeles. Or maybe he wasn’t truly convinced it was a realisable goal. He dared someone else to try, saying: “If somebody else does the demo, that’ll be really awesome.”
Ahlborn and his co-founder, Bibop Gresta, an Italian former pop star and actor, took up the challenge. At the time, Ahlborn was setting up JumpStartFund, a Nasa-backed online incubator in Los Angeles seeking to use crowdsourcing to take on complex problems. Musk’s musings provided the perfect test case. “We couldn’t just build a company,” said Ahlborn. “We had to build a movement.”
He invited engineers, executives and experts from all fields to work at least 10 hours a week in exchange for stock options in the new company. Thousands of applications streamed in; HTT has chosen 800 or so.
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For such an undertaking it seemed an odd approach to take. Yet four years on, Ahlborn says he has no plans to turn HTT into a properly staffed operation. “Ten hours from one of the top engineers at Nasa is much more valuable than having some other mediocre engineer full time. I think this is the future of work.”
HTT produced a 2014 feasibility study that found the technology and financials both worked. It has since inked deals with several governments, including Slovakia, Abu Dhabi and Indonesia, to assess how they could build such a system.
And Britain? “We met David Cameron. He was very supportive,” said Ahlborn. “It was a week before the Brexit [vote]. Unfortunately, he’s no longer there.”
In its desperation to prove the hyperloop worthy, the company has perhaps been caught out by the hype. Last year it made much of a scheme to build the first “passenger-ready” hyperloop at Quay Valley, a planned city in the dry California hinterlands. The city, and hyperloop, have been delayed several times. HTT has yet to submit the required environmental impact report. A promised float in 2016 has also fallen by the wayside.
Yet Ahlborn is unswerving in his conviction that hyperloops will blossom — and, in some cases, be free to ride. “The notion of a ticket is very much 1800,” he said. “Facebook is very profitable. In the US the average person spends 50 minutes a day on Facebook. How much time is spent in transportation? It’s much more, and you can monetise that.”
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How? With what Ahlborn calls high-quality “experienced content” splashed across its “augmented windows” and other innovations. Advertising, then.
It may all seem fanciful, but, Ahlborn said, so did going to the moon. “Why does anybody believe that there is a problem with moving a capsule inside a tube where you take the air out?” If only it were that simple.
Bibop Gresta, co-founder of HTT, will be speaking at London Tech Week on Wednesday, June 14 at the TechXLR8 conference at ExCel London. Tickets are free and available from the TechXLR8 website