The futuristic super-fast transportation system dreamed up by self-proclaimed visionary Elon Musk could be coming to Great Britain.
Hyperloop One, the official company behind the space-age system, has revealed that it has been in talks with the UK government regarding building routes across the country.
The company have said that there has been “quite a strong response” from the government, and has since met with the Peel Group, which owns the Manchester Canal, connecting Manchester and Liverpool.
The Hyperloop would theoretically cut the journey time from London to Manchester to just 18 minutes, travelling at a terrifying 760mph. This dwarfs the current high-speed ambitions of the HS2, which aims to connect London and Manchester in 1 hour and 24 minutes.
Hyperloop One have also set their sights on connecting Liverpool, Manchester and Leeds, creating effectively “a single city”.
The HS2 is scheduled to begin construction in 2017, but will not be completed til 2033. However, the Hyperloop is still in the prototype stage, with the futuristic design involving shooting pods through vacuum tubes, using magnetic levitation. Musk has described it as the ‘fifth mode of transportation’ – the others being land, air, sea, and space.
There was a competition launched last year to design the pods, with more than 100 teams from around the world entering, eventually won by a team from MIT.
Prototypes are now being tested out in Hawthorne, California, and the project is now in its second phase, though many regulatory requirements would have to be met, as well as negotiations around huge amounts of land, before the “Concorde of commuting” could be up and running.
