'm absolutely no engineer and don't know if it will ever work or be economically practical but I applaud Musk. The world needs more Musks.
I'm a fan of some Musk ideas. My gains in Tesla stock (I got in when it was in the $30s and cashed out in the low $200s) paid for my wedding.
You will NEVER get ideas like this from Siemen's, Bombardier etc because they have vested interests in making sure that such revolutionary change never happens.
That's cause they have shareholders who insist on deploying capital where they can get a return. Incidentally, Musk hasn't put a dime of his own into Hyperloop. He handed out the "tech" (his napkin drawings) for all to use. And left the actual engineering to everybody else. Now, they are are all running around building test tracks and claiming revolutionary change is around the corner when not a single one of them has actually demonstrated anything close to system feasibility. Worse, none of them look to be on a path to do so. At least not without significant government funding. And at that point, government engineers have to ask if the concept is worth researching, which of course it isn't. Because any engineer will tell you the premise is simply not worth the risk (especially with the required margin of safety for a service that will regularly have people in it and around it), let alone the massive R&D. Moreover, the risk mitigation required would have such onerous operational regulations that the costs will increase tremendously.
As an example, in the aerospace sector the factor of safety is generally around 2.0. But if the fuselage fails on an airplane, it's people on that airplane and maybe a few more on the ground who die. If there's a rupture of the tube in the Hyperloop, every single pod is going to suddenly experience supersonic shock it wasn't designed for (along with expansion waves and normal shocks reflecting between the pod and the tube walls) with follow on structural loads on the pod/capsule and possibly the tube itself if the pod collides or scrapes the walls. The risk is so much higher. Regulators would demand factors of safety substantially higher than for individual aircraft. And the cost? I can't even imagine.
Heck, people are already putting together decent first order ROMEs based on some very basic considerations, that show how wrong Musk was:
https://bits.blogs.nytimes.com/2013...op-really-cost-6-billion-critics-say-no/?_r=0
If he wasn't lying, he was certainly naive. Especially on assumptions around land acquisition, possible public opposition along the route and regulator imposition.
That said, California's HSR project is doing a fine job of killing itself.
It's too bad government agencies can't lie about numbers like Musk and his fanatical followers can. Read this on how Musk manipulated his Hyperloop proposal to make it cheaper:
https://ggwash.org/view/32078/musks-hyperloop-math-doesnt-add-up