"(Arrivo)... started by former SpaceX engineer Brogan BamBrogan, who was a co-founder of Hyperloop One."
"Two of BamBrogan’s fellow co-founders had resigned..."
"One of the co-founders ... left in October, came to Arrivo from construction firm AECOM’s venture wing.
Jadon Smith, a fellow SpaceX veteran who has also worked for Lockheed Martin and the CIA, left shortly after, ..."
***"Arrivo was born from of the ashes of BamBrogan’s relationship with Hyperloop One.
The co-founder was ousted from Hyperloop One in the summer of 2016 after a clash
with fellow co-founder Shervin Pishevar, his brother Afshin Pishevar (who was chief legal officer), CEO Rob Lloyd,
and the startup’s board of directors."
"...that a member of the company’s leadership brought an axe into the office, displayed it,
and also used it to punch holes into a wall.
That person was BamBrogan,..."
Basically, unstable guy who was ousted form Hyperloop one by the whole board and officers started another, similar company, and trouble again.
I don't know if BamBrogan is an "unstable guy" or not. But I'm not at all sure your summary "who was ousted form Hyperloop one by the whole board and officers" is accurate based on what was reported at the time.
For example, from an article in Wired [1]:
> The lawsuit against Hyperloop One includes a security camera image of a man, apparently Afshin Pishevar, holding rope and walking through the office. BamBrogan allegedly found a noose on his desk after complaining about company operations.
The axe is the only thing that seems weird, everything else you quoted can easily be explained by the fact that they'd failed to secure more funding and had to shut down even though they didn't want to. Many of us on Hacker News have no doubt experienced this kind of situation first hand.
Also I should mention that although Arrivo was started by ex-Hyperloop One people they were definitely not doing a hyperloop system.
Hyper loop tech is something that I simply don't understand. Is maintaining a vacuum inside a close loop really cheaper than electrifying a rail system? I would imagine it takes a lot more energy to decompress and maintain a vacuum in a loop at significant distances than just electrify the rail network.
Arrivo weren't really a vacuum system, at least for the last year or so.
But the thing is that electrified rail networks doesn't address the quadratically increasing losses from drag at high speeds. There's a reason you don't see railroads operating at airline speeds: drag at sea level is a killer. In fact, at high enough speeds, the energy of air travel is actually LOWER than that of a sea level train.\
Altitude gives you a lot of efficiency. The idea of the vacuum train is to bring that efficiency down to sea level. And I think it's a good idea, but a real engineering challenge. In principle, you can keep a vacuum pretty easily. Vacuum tubes remain sealed and evacuated for decades without energy consumption, for instance.
It's just at the interfaces you have to worry about leakage, and there it's a matter of careful sealing. It's possible to get really good at it. The International Space Station is full of interfaces (and thermal cycling every 90 minutes) and would quickly run out of air if we didn't know how to maintain a vacuum well at interfaces.
Well, you've got some pretty good answers, but I'll give it a go as well.
No. There is no way that a similarly capable system will be remotely close in price to conventional rail. Musk's estimates were wildly optimistic at best, and the system he proposed would have a small fraction of the capacity of HSR, for example.
The advantage of a vacuum train (let's not pretend it is Musk's invention) is top speed. In some scenarios, this may be worthwhile, but it's natural comparison would be short haul flights, not passenger rail.
I believe the plan was not total vacuum but only partial to avoid having to pull so far down. Also Hyperloop if it was built/buildable as designed is kind of the step beyond high speed rail.
I don't understand it either. The difficult thing in any transport system like this is clearly the land and land rights. If you can't make that cheaper and easier to manage from a legal perspective than I don't see how a slightly better mode of transportation would offset it.
The vacuum lets you travel much faster, potentially much faster than planes.
The problem isn't keeping the vacuum, it's making the whole thing safe and relatively cheap at the same time.
It seems like it's almost impossible to do that above ground with thermal expansion issues and very easy terrorism. But doing it in a tunnel solves some problems. The evacuation is still a big problem.
In theory cheaper to build (laying a dumb pre-manufactured pipe versus electrified rail) and cheaper to operate (build redundant vacuum stations). But yes, the main value prop is for areas with cheap (free?) electricity.
I think it may make more sense for high speed package delivery, for example between FedEx hubs. Smaller diameter, no need to keep passengers live, and possibly much higher acceleration tolerance.
They may have shut down, but the hype is stil up.[1]
This wasn't a "hyperloop" at all. It was a private freeway toll lane scheme with self-driving in the toll lane. Like CALTRANS demonstrated with Demo 97 back in 1997.[2] They had self-driving in dedicated lanes working back then.
I hadn't seen this before, really cool. Found more information on Wikipedia:
> In 1991, the United States Congress passed the ISTEA Transportation Authorization bill, which instructed USDOT to "demonstrate an automated vehicle and highway system by 1997." The Federal Highway Administration took on this task, first with a series of Precursor Systems Analyses and then by establishing the National Automated Highway System Consortium (NAHSC). This cost-shared project was led by FHWA and General Motors, with Caltrans, Delco, Parsons Brinkerhoff, Bechtel, UC-Berkeley, Carnegie Mellon University, and Lockheed Martin as additional partners. Extensive systems engineering work and research culminated in Demo '97 on I-15 in San Diego, California, in which about 20 automated vehicles, including cars, buses, and trucks, were demonstrated to thousands of onlookers, attracting extensive media coverage. The demonstrations involved close-headway platooning intended to operate in segregated traffic, as well as "free agent" vehicles intended to operate in mixed traffic. Other carmakers were invited to demonstrate their systems, such that Toyota and Honda also participated. While the subsequent aim was to produce a system design to aid commercialization, the program was cancelled in the late 1990s due to tightening research budgets at USDOT. Overall funding for the program was in the range of $90 million. (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/History_of_self-driving_cars)
It's interesting to wonder whether and how much farther we'd be with self driving cars and computer vision in general if the government had continued to put its resources behind this project.
Looking at it, CMU was involved (as well as Cal Berkeley), among academia, but required embedded transponders. This system is still very viable given that it would be cost effective on freeways where most of the miles are driven. It could have been a great transitional technology but DARPA went and distracted everyone with the great challenge and everyone wanted full autonomous navigation in unpredictable terrain...
It's a terrible way to learn that you are out of a job. But it's fairly common in the startup scene - especially for startups that fail. Sometimes, they don't even bother sending you the text. You just show up one day to work to see the lights are out and office equipment is gone.
Why, from the article, it seems like everybody knew the company was struggling? What is the advantage of delivering in person? In fact, getting such news in person can be more awkward as you have to mask your emotion and pretend in front of them that it is not big deal. What hurts is the fact that they are losing their job, not the fact that the news came by text message.
I personally prefer AMP. it's smoother, cleaner , faster. I know that some in HN community are against AMP (rightly so) but I don't think it's in bad taste for anyone to post a AMP link.
Can we just get trains even half as good as in Japan here in the US. A high speed train (not hyperloop speeds) connecting the east coast cities together all the way down to Miami, for example would be huge. Doing Boston to DC in just ~3 hours would be amazing. And would beat the airports easily.
Maybe in hindsight I'll be eating my words when they figure out how to actually build these hyper loops and we will all be traveling really fast with them, but I'm a bit more skeptical than that, and a good solution seems to exist already.
Need to buy it its own track since the cargo rails actually pay for themselves and have a lot of other infrastructure tied to them. I get the feeling it would actually be easier to get the land for a hyperloop (cool new thing, quieter, and no chance of hitting someone).
The problems of long distance rail transport today: Construction permissions, construction cost, operational cost, global vulnerability in case of local operational problems.
A Hyperloop solves NONE of these. In fact it would intensify almost all of them.
One thing that’s not a problem with rail transport today: Max Speed.
“The ethos of the company is trying to switch the paradigm,” BamBrogan told The Verge in 2017. “Mobility and transportation are both words that talk about the ‘getting there.’ And we want to make it so seamless. I don’t want to get to dinner with my friend, I want to be at dinner with my friend.”
It seems that anyone who would fund this kind of garbage talk might have more money than sense.
When the Federal reserve lowered interest rates investors had to look for places to invest their money to make a larger return. Now that rates have risen there is not as much money flowing to VCs because there are safer - albeit less profitable - investments
Is the drag on a high speed trains mainly inertial or skin (parasitic) or is it pretty even? I would expect it to be mainly inertial since it's moving at such a fast speed. If that's the case, isn't there a lot of different techniques to reduce drag actively and dynamically that they can explore instead of drawing vacuum?
Honest question... idea was based on Elon Musk's papers, who pre-engineer the thing and even gave it a name. How come he couldn't found it? Last I checked Musk is worth north of $22 Billion dollars, did the Arrivo management try to talk him into investment ??
Someone might have an idea they think is “good” without wanting to invest in it. “Good idea” is only one part of the recipe. Timing is another huge part. So is having access to the right talent, the right geographical area, etc.
I think it’s unrealistic to expect Musk to invest in any hyperloop startup without considering the timing and the team involved.
Elon Musk never just invests money into other peoples business. If he were to do hyperloop, he would run the engineering himsef - and does he really need another project to drive?
That said, there was some talk about Musk looking into Hyperloop himself in the context of one of the Boring companys projects, so we will see.
For one, Elon Musk has a tendency of overextending himself. Right now he's the CEO of at least three companies. Maybe that makes it even a better question why he didn't look into building this himself.
The Hyperloop tubes could run underground, and if there is some sort of revolution in the cost-efficiency of tunnel boring, that would make it an even better option. Which is probably one of the reasons that Elon Musk founded The Boring Company.
Also, Hyperloop was floated as an alternative to the California high speed rail project--partly out of frustration that the California high speed rail line would be both the most expensive high speed rail line in the world and the lowest speed high speed rail line in the world, but also partly because Elon Musk owns a car company and has a vested interest in discouraging future investment in other forms of transportation. What's the best way to torpedo public support for building rail right here and now? Promising something even better, that no one will actually fund and build because it's a huge unknown.
The thing about Tesla is that Tesla's success relies upon long term growth and success, and the biggest risk to that strategy is a long-term decline in car ownership and usage. And Musk is famously defensive about Tesla.
Most of Musk's wild flights of fancy, if they do succeed, go through multiple stages of revision before an actual product emerges. With Hyperloop, Musk basically dumped the first draft of one of his flights of fancy on the world and said, "I'm too busy building electric cars and going to Mars to do this myself". And that's perfectly fair by itself!
But the first stage of revision for Musk tends to be taking an obvious, cost-effective if not profitable first step. Launching satellites and resupplying ISS was the obvious first step to going to Mars, and licensing a Lotus roadster body and building an electric supercar with it was the obvious first step to electrifying the automobile industry. Maybe Musk thinks The Boring Company is a good first step towards building Hyperloop.
His net worth of $22 billion is in the shares of SpaceX and Tesla he owns, not cash lying around that he can invest. He actually takes loans against his shares to pay for his living expenses.
[+] [-] bfung|7 years ago|reply
Except this time, trouble is in charge.
[+] [-] curtis|7 years ago|reply
For example, from an article in Wired [1]:
> The lawsuit against Hyperloop One includes a security camera image of a man, apparently Afshin Pishevar, holding rope and walking through the office. BamBrogan allegedly found a noose on his desk after complaining about company operations.
The axe is the only thing that seems weird, everything else you quoted can easily be explained by the fact that they'd failed to secure more funding and had to shut down even though they didn't want to. Many of us on Hacker News have no doubt experienced this kind of situation first hand.
Also I should mention that although Arrivo was started by ex-Hyperloop One people they were definitely not doing a hyperloop system.
[1] https://www.wired.com/2016/07/hyperloop-lawsuit-brogan-bambr...
[+] [-] vivekd|7 years ago|reply
[+] [-] Robotbeat|7 years ago|reply
But the thing is that electrified rail networks doesn't address the quadratically increasing losses from drag at high speeds. There's a reason you don't see railroads operating at airline speeds: drag at sea level is a killer. In fact, at high enough speeds, the energy of air travel is actually LOWER than that of a sea level train.\
Altitude gives you a lot of efficiency. The idea of the vacuum train is to bring that efficiency down to sea level. And I think it's a good idea, but a real engineering challenge. In principle, you can keep a vacuum pretty easily. Vacuum tubes remain sealed and evacuated for decades without energy consumption, for instance.
It's just at the interfaces you have to worry about leakage, and there it's a matter of careful sealing. It's possible to get really good at it. The International Space Station is full of interfaces (and thermal cycling every 90 minutes) and would quickly run out of air if we didn't know how to maintain a vacuum well at interfaces.
[+] [-] goodcanadian|7 years ago|reply
No. There is no way that a similarly capable system will be remotely close in price to conventional rail. Musk's estimates were wildly optimistic at best, and the system he proposed would have a small fraction of the capacity of HSR, for example.
The advantage of a vacuum train (let's not pretend it is Musk's invention) is top speed. In some scenarios, this may be worthwhile, but it's natural comparison would be short haul flights, not passenger rail.
[+] [-] rtkwe|7 years ago|reply
[+] [-] bb2018|7 years ago|reply
[+] [-] bufferoverflow|7 years ago|reply
The problem isn't keeping the vacuum, it's making the whole thing safe and relatively cheap at the same time.
It seems like it's almost impossible to do that above ground with thermal expansion issues and very easy terrorism. But doing it in a tunnel solves some problems. The evacuation is still a big problem.
[+] [-] prostoalex|7 years ago|reply
[+] [-] pfdietz|7 years ago|reply
[+] [-] jccooper|7 years ago|reply
[+] [-] Animats|7 years ago|reply
This wasn't a "hyperloop" at all. It was a private freeway toll lane scheme with self-driving in the toll lane. Like CALTRANS demonstrated with Demo 97 back in 1997.[2] They had self-driving in dedicated lanes working back then.
[1] https://www.arrivo-loop.com/ [2] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=RlZEeIC_2lI
[+] [-] busted|7 years ago|reply
> In 1991, the United States Congress passed the ISTEA Transportation Authorization bill, which instructed USDOT to "demonstrate an automated vehicle and highway system by 1997." The Federal Highway Administration took on this task, first with a series of Precursor Systems Analyses and then by establishing the National Automated Highway System Consortium (NAHSC). This cost-shared project was led by FHWA and General Motors, with Caltrans, Delco, Parsons Brinkerhoff, Bechtel, UC-Berkeley, Carnegie Mellon University, and Lockheed Martin as additional partners. Extensive systems engineering work and research culminated in Demo '97 on I-15 in San Diego, California, in which about 20 automated vehicles, including cars, buses, and trucks, were demonstrated to thousands of onlookers, attracting extensive media coverage. The demonstrations involved close-headway platooning intended to operate in segregated traffic, as well as "free agent" vehicles intended to operate in mixed traffic. Other carmakers were invited to demonstrate their systems, such that Toyota and Honda also participated. While the subsequent aim was to produce a system design to aid commercialization, the program was cancelled in the late 1990s due to tightening research budgets at USDOT. Overall funding for the program was in the range of $90 million. (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/History_of_self-driving_cars)
7 years later there was the first DARPA Grand Challenge, where no cars completed successfully. There's a great episode of startup podcast with interviews of the original competitors: https://www.gimletmedia.com/startup/grand-challenge-season-6....
It's interesting to wonder whether and how much farther we'd be with self driving cars and computer vision in general if the government had continued to put its resources behind this project.
[+] [-] mc32|7 years ago|reply
[+] [-] greenyoda|7 years ago|reply
What a rotten way to tell an employee that they just lost their job!
[+] [-] porpoisely|7 years ago|reply
[+] [-] RcouF1uZ4gsC|7 years ago|reply
[+] [-] networkimprov|7 years ago|reply
[+] [-] rascul|7 years ago|reply
[+] [-] auslander|7 years ago|reply
https://www.theverge.com/2018/12/14/18128848/hyperloop-arriv...
[+] [-] gandutraveler|7 years ago|reply
[+] [-] nixpulvis|7 years ago|reply
Maybe in hindsight I'll be eating my words when they figure out how to actually build these hyper loops and we will all be traveling really fast with them, but I'm a bit more skeptical than that, and a good solution seems to exist already.
[+] [-] protomyth|7 years ago|reply
[+] [-] solarkraft|7 years ago|reply
A major part of the infrastructure needed, land, is the same. So it's not inconceivable to convert between the two.
[+] [-] konschubert|7 years ago|reply
A Hyperloop solves NONE of these. In fact it would intensify almost all of them.
One thing that’s not a problem with rail transport today: Max Speed.
[+] [-] jlangenauer|7 years ago|reply
[+] [-] sxcurry|7 years ago|reply
It seems that anyone who would fund this kind of garbage talk might have more money than sense.
[+] [-] ksec|7 years ago|reply
Slightly off topic: I am seeing a lot more "Startup" having difficulties getting funding than usual. What is happening to VCs and Silicon Valley?
[+] [-] lunchbreak|7 years ago|reply
[+] [-] atomicUpdate|7 years ago|reply
[+] [-] syntaxing|7 years ago|reply
[+] [-] tartoran|7 years ago|reply
[+] [-] joering2|7 years ago|reply
[+] [-] Robotbeat|7 years ago|reply
The exception is now The Boring Company, which long-term is going to try doing Hyperloop.
[+] [-] smt88|7 years ago|reply
I think it’s unrealistic to expect Musk to invest in any hyperloop startup without considering the timing and the team involved.
[+] [-] _ph_|7 years ago|reply
That said, there was some talk about Musk looking into Hyperloop himself in the context of one of the Boring companys projects, so we will see.
[+] [-] philwelch|7 years ago|reply
For one, Elon Musk has a tendency of overextending himself. Right now he's the CEO of at least three companies. Maybe that makes it even a better question why he didn't look into building this himself.
The Hyperloop tubes could run underground, and if there is some sort of revolution in the cost-efficiency of tunnel boring, that would make it an even better option. Which is probably one of the reasons that Elon Musk founded The Boring Company.
Also, Hyperloop was floated as an alternative to the California high speed rail project--partly out of frustration that the California high speed rail line would be both the most expensive high speed rail line in the world and the lowest speed high speed rail line in the world, but also partly because Elon Musk owns a car company and has a vested interest in discouraging future investment in other forms of transportation. What's the best way to torpedo public support for building rail right here and now? Promising something even better, that no one will actually fund and build because it's a huge unknown.
The thing about Tesla is that Tesla's success relies upon long term growth and success, and the biggest risk to that strategy is a long-term decline in car ownership and usage. And Musk is famously defensive about Tesla.
Most of Musk's wild flights of fancy, if they do succeed, go through multiple stages of revision before an actual product emerges. With Hyperloop, Musk basically dumped the first draft of one of his flights of fancy on the world and said, "I'm too busy building electric cars and going to Mars to do this myself". And that's perfectly fair by itself!
But the first stage of revision for Musk tends to be taking an obvious, cost-effective if not profitable first step. Launching satellites and resupplying ISS was the obvious first step to going to Mars, and licensing a Lotus roadster body and building an electric supercar with it was the obvious first step to electrifying the automobile industry. Maybe Musk thinks The Boring Company is a good first step towards building Hyperloop.
[+] [-] sqrut|7 years ago|reply
[+] [-] unknown|7 years ago|reply
[deleted]
[+] [-] auslander|7 years ago|reply
[+] [-] unknown|7 years ago|reply
[deleted]