The Boring Company Announces Start of Hyperloop Testing

The Boring Company, founded by Elon Musk, has tweeted about the start of extensive testing of the high-speed Hyperloop transport system.

In a tweet, the company said:

Full-scale Hyperloop testing has begun

The image shows the tunnel and a Tesla electric vehicle, but no details of the transport system's testing have been revealed.

The Hyperloop project emerged in 2013 when Elon Musk published a white paper on the concept. However, recent media reports indicate that Musk may be tempering his ambitions for Hyperloop. For example, SpaceX's Hyperloop test tunnel in Hawthorne has been demolished to make way for a car park. It's a simple message, but it seems to indicate that SpaceX is scaling back its ambitions for Hyperloop.

Nevertheless, The Boring Company's social media post shows that the project is in development. The tunneling startup, which is also working on the Vegas Loop tunnel extension in Las Vegas, appears to have made serious progress on a full-scale Hyperloop tunnel. The Tesla Model 3, photographed inside the sealed tunnel, hints at this.

The Hyperloop project involves creating a high-speed transportation system that involves vacuum trains moving by magnetic levitation inside pipes of highly rarefied air, Musk calculates that the journey from San Francisco to Los Angeles will take only about 30 minutes.

It's unclear what stage The Boring Company's Hyperloop test tunnel is at but, as The Boring Company gains more experience in building transport tunnels through projects such as the Vegas Loop, the startup's Hyperloop projects are also likely to get much closer to Musk's vision.