The Daily Telegraph - 19.08.2019

Hyperloop: pipe dream or the future of travel?

F

rom mind-reading

machines to colonies on

Mars, no idea is too

ambitious or eccentric for

Elon Musk. But it is the

billionaire Tesla founder’s

concept of a “hyperloop” to end traffic

jams that has perhaps drawn the

greatest scepticism.

In 2013, he outlined his vision for a

magnetic levitation train that would

fire passengers in pods at speeds of up

to 700mph.

While many dismissed it as a pipe

dream, the proposal captured the

imagination of a select group of

engineers around the world who

believed the concept could, one day,

become a reality.

One of those ventures is Dutch

start-up Hardt Hyperloop based in the

quaint, medieval town of Delft.

Its narrow canals and bicycles may

seem far removed from Musk’s

original dream of a Silicon Valley

hyperloop, but here a team of

university graduates have taken to his

vision with gusto.

“It’s a major challenge that will have

a huge impact on the world as a

whole,” says Tim Houter, the

27-year-old chief executive of Hardt.

Musk’s hyperloop plans led to a

grand, global challenge; the Hyperloop

Pod Competition. In 2017, the

entrepreneur put out calls for teams to

design and build pods for the

technology.

It was an idea that Houter, a student

at the time, took to immediately. “One

of my friends said on our group chat:

‘Time to drop your studies because we

are going to build a hyperloop’.”

Hyperloop was dreamt up by Musk

as a “fifth mode of transport”. He

believed the hyperloop would fire

passengers at hundreds of miles per

hour using magnetic levitation and air

pressure in a vacuum-sealed tunnel. In

theory, it would require less land and

power than traditional trains and

achieve plane-like speeds due to a lack

of air resistance.

Houter and his co-founders –

product head Marinus van der Meijs,

commercial boss Mars Geuze and

research lead Sascha Lamme – were a

team originally made up of members

of a club at Delft University designing

electric race cars. 

The ambitious students set up the

none of which have even been started.

“That is the world of venture capital,”

Dennis says, “if the hype reduces from

a boil to a simmer, the cash

disappears.”

Despite the challenges, Houter is

full of optimism. Hardt will need every

ounce of it, a start-up founded by four

university students and with only a

few million euros in backing certainly

looks like a long shot. It currently has

just 25 staff. “We said we had to dream

big, but start small. We are really now

at the point of scaling up to a larger

test facility,” he says.

Houter claims they are planning a

project of two to three years, the first

stage of which will be a 3km proof of

concept track in the Flevoland region

of the Netherland.

“Implementing infrastructure takes

a lot of time,” Houter says. He says he

expects to build a “showcase route of

around 10 to 15km” around 2023, “that

will be the first moment you can sit in

and travel in a hyperloop”.

It is also planning more ambitious

ventures, such as a concept for a

280-mile route from Amsterdam to

Frankfurt. Houter is hesitant to talk

funding, but a filing on the European

Investment tendering website

suggests Hardt is looking for an initial

€150m. Its filing says the track would

create around 400 jobs. 

But any serious European project is

likely to be far off, with little

government appetite for major

infrastructure projects and sluggish

economies across Europe. An estimate

from the Transport Research

Laboratory put the cost of a hyperloop

at £53m per mile, while a leaked

internal estimate from Virgin

Hyperloop One suggested upwards of

$121m (£100m). 

In a country that has just started a

£56bn high speed rail project, HS2, a

UK hyperloop seems even more

remote. A report from Innovate UK

last year said Britain could play some

role in developing a technical supply

chain for hyperloop, but added “some

doubt the logic of building a hyperloop

in the UK based on geography”. A

source close to the UK’s innovation

strategy said they “don’t think there is

any possibility” of a hyperloop

happening in the UK.

Houter is undaunted. “Take

aeroplanes 100 years ago. People could

not imagine how that would change

the world, enhance the development of

society as a whole. That is something

we are truly striving for with a

European hyperloop connecting

capital cities faster than aeroplanes.”

For now, Hardt will have to make do

with its 30m test track. “This would

never have been done without our

team working day and night to realise

it,” Houter says.

Unfortunately, it will take more than

hard work and Dutch courage to get

Europe’s hyperloop on the rails.

first Delft Hyperloop team, a group

that has sent pod designs to the

competition every year since 2017. The

group developed a hyperloop pod that

they took to the 2017 round of the

hyperloop challenge at SpaceX’s

headquarters (another Musk company)

in Hawthorne, California.

After the competition, they spun out

of the venerable engineering

university into a start-up. But turning

the hare-brained idea into reality is

something that will take time and will

need, Houter says, someone to sign off

on “a couple of billion”.

So far, Hardt hyperloop has raised

just €7m (£6.4m) from investors such

as InnoEnergy, although it is arguably

Europe’s best-known hyperloop effort.

“We are working on acquiring

financial resources,” Houter says. The

company has projects with

Amsterdam’s Royal Schiphol Airport

Group and the Netherlands’ largest

engineering firm, BAM Group, which

are providing support. It also has deals

with industry giant Tata Steel

and Deutsche Bahn to research the

technology.

And yet larger rivals, backed by

hundreds of millions of dollars from

venture capital, have made only

limited progress on the technology in

the six years since it was proposed.

The largest is Virgin Hyperloop One,

the Nevada-based hyperloop company

that has built a 500m-long test track

(Hardt’s is just 30 metres and cannot do

speed tests). It has said it plans to

develop a 330-mile hyperloop from

London to Edinburgh some day. The

Branson-backed firm laid off 60 staff

last year, including its chief financial

officer and head of engineering. In

May it secured further funding,

bringing its total raised to £330m. One

hyperloop venture has failed

outright. Los Angeles-based Arrivo, a

hyperloop start-up founded by the

extravagantly named former

Hyperloop One founder Brogan

BamBrogan, laid off all its staff in

November last year, despite claiming it

had a $1bn (£820m) deal with a

Chinese firm to develop its technology.  

These failures have led to no

shortage of sceptics. “There are still

zero full-scale hyperloop test tracks

worldwide,” says Gareth Dennis,

director of engineering consultancy

Permanent Rail. “Once you realise it is

just maglev made more expensive, you

realise why it is so ridiculous.”

Venture capital firms have

ploughed money into early hyperloop

firms, many of which have splashed

cash on marketing as they try to

convince governments to provide

backing to any kind of hyperloop

infrastructure project. Start-ups have

boasted of plans for tracks spanning

the US, India and the Middle East,

Matthew Field meets

the Dutch team who

are looking to take

on Elon Musk in race

for vacuum-assisted

maglev transport

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Solar

panels

Low

pressure

tube

Steel track

Track-embedded

electric motor

Pressurised

vehicle

Support

structure

Key hyperloop stops

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London^5

Amsterdam

Paris

Lisbon

Prague

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Rome

Stockholm

Warsaw

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Athens

Istanbul

Hyperloop system breakdown

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Solar

panels

Key

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What a European hyperloop network could look like

Southampton’s finest invention

and its pioneer tech start-ups

A

merican troops waiting

to sail for Normandy in

1944 have left their

mark in Southampton.

More than 100 of their

names are etched into a

62ft brick wall at Western Esplanade

• a reminder of the city’s crucial role
  in D-Day.
  Today that wall is crumbling, as are
  many of the concrete post-war
  buildings that were quickly erected
  following devastating Nazi air raids.
  “You know, the old joke that they tell
  about Southampton is that what the
  Luftwaffe failed to achieve, the
  planners succeeded,” says Sir David
  Payne, who has lived in the city ever
  since studying at the University of
  Southampton in the mid-Sixties.
  The 75-year-old may be brutally
  honest about Southampton’s aesthetic
  shortcomings, but he is passionate
  about its future as a force in
  technology. Sir David is one of the
  city’s most celebrated residents,
  credited with developing the world’s
  first practical optical fibre amplifier.
  The technology today forms the
  backbone of the internet. It is used in
  optical fibres to boost light signals,
  allowing vast amounts of data to travel
  at rapid speeds all over the globe. “It’s
  no idle boast when we say we changed
  the world,” says Sir David, speaking
  about his work with colleagues
  Graham Reed and David Richardson.
  “We claim to have invented what
  makes the internet work,” adds Dame
  Wendy Hall, another of the city’s
  leading technologists, and director of
  Southampton University’s Web Science
  Institute. But that’s not the first thing
  people usually associate with the city.
  Southampton, which has a
  population of just over a quarter of a
  million people, is still trying to shake
  off its reputation as a declining port
  city. A change is slowly taking place
  that aims to inspire a new generation of
  technology pioneers.
  “Southampton is an interesting
  place,” says John Mountain, Starling
  Bank’s technology chief, who has
  recently opened an office on the city’s
  waterfront in Town Quay. “It doesn’t

somehow make the news. But there’s a

load of tech talent down here.”

The city ranks in the UK’s top five

tech superclusters, ahead of

Cambridge and Bristol, according to

the latest report by estate advisers

CBRE. Between 2010 and 2016, the

number of hi-tech workers grew by a

quarter. In 2017, Southampton’s

turnover for digital tech businesses

was £2.1bn.

The city’s port has shaped a global

perspective.

“I’ve often contended that the

culture of the people at Southampton

is determined by the fact that we tend

to have a very international view of the

world,” says Sir David.

Dame Wendy believes this is down

to the university and its strengths in

science, technology and engineering.

In the past two decades, it has spun out

27 companies, four of which have

floated on London’s Aim with a

combined market value of £180m.

Ben Clark is partly responsible for

those figures. He runs the Future

Worlds incubator on campus, helping

to mentor students and grow start-ups

that he says stand “shoulder to

shoulder” with those in Silicon Valley.

His frustration isn’t the lack of

available talent, but the pessimistic

attitude of British investors.

“Whenever I’m in Silicon Valley the

sense of hope is just palpable,” says

Clark. “There’s this sort of enthusiastic

optimism that maybe just maybe,

you’re the next Zuck, or maybe just

maybe, this could be enormous. I

think, often in the UK, we start in the

opposite direction.”

Despite the differences in attitude,

he believes Southampton is, in many

ways, better than Silicon Valley. For

one thing, he says, you’re not stuck in

traffic every day to get to work, London

is just one hour away and there is a far

better work-life balance. There are also

more opportunities to grow a start-up.

Clark is now on a mission to inject

some US-style optimism into his

students – and so far, it seems to be

working. Joshua Steer, for example,

has built upon an undergraduate

project in prosthetics to create spin-out

company, Radii Devices. The

company’s software helps clinicians

predict the pressure between a limb

and a prosthetic to help create the

perfect fit. Through Future Worlds,

25-year-old Steer has raised £180,000

to commercialise his technology.

Major tech companies have also

invested in the city. IBM has a base,

alongside the likes of Ordnance Survey,

Sparkbox, Senseye and Etch, as well as

telecoms company toob.

The backbone of the

internet was developed in

Southampton. Its digital

future look bright, too,

says Ellie Zolfagharifard

Profs Graham Reed, Sir David Payne and David Richardson, University of Southampton

‘It’s no idle boast when we

say we changed the world ...

we tend to have a very

international view’

CHRISTOPHER PLEDGER FOR THE TELEGRAPH

Technology Intelligence

‘That is the world of venture

capital. If the hype reduces

from a boil to a simmer, the

cash disappears’

The Daily Telegraph Monday 19 August 2019 *** 31

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