Shift Magazine - October 7, 2019 - 5

NOT JUST A PIPE DREAM?
Cities, states want to be first with high-speed tube travel
BY ALEXA ST. JOHN

t's faster than high-speed rail, it has no direct emissions
or noise and its pods can depart several times per minute.
Hyperloop is a superfast tube travel system brought to
the public imagination by Tesla CEO Elon Musk in 2013.
Now, states and cities around the world are vying for the
chance to be first to install one.
Virgin Hyperloop One, part of British business magnate
Richard Branson's Virgin Group, is one company looking
to advance this fully autonomous mode of transportation,
in which passengers or cargo are loaded into a pod that

accelerates gradually through a low-pressure tube. The pod
floats above a track using magnetic levitation.
Hyperloop passenger or light-cargo pods would travel 670
mph. Virgin Hyperloop One hopes to have these systems
operational by the mid-2020s.
Nine states - Missouri, Texas, Colorado, Ohio, North
Carolina, Pennsylvania, Washington, Illinois and Oregon -
are exploring Virgin Hyperloop One technology, according
to the company. The systems would be built on columns or
tunneled below ground, depending on the state. ■
Virgin Hyperloop One

letters

DARPA TREE BRANCHED OUT WELL, Q&A DIDN'T

"Self-driving DNA: A DARPA Family Tree" in the July issue was
very cool. If you ever update it, you might consider companies
that existed before the DARPA challenges, how they've evolved
as a result of them and how they play in the AV ecosystem now.
On another note, the Red Whittaker Q&A lacked perspective.
"Self-driving vehicles start with Red Whittaker" is a bit much,
given the many respected scientists involved. These include
Ernst Dickmanns of Bundeswehr University Munich, whose
team in the early '90s developed a fully automated vehicle and
drove it over 620 miles on a three-lane highway in traffic at
speeds up to 80 mph. Also, Chuck Thorpe, who led Carnegie
Mellon University's work in unmanned scout vehicles for the
military and led its technical contributions to the National
Automated Highway System Consortium in concert with the
U.S. Department of Transportation in the mid-'90s, for which
I was the federal program manager. Steve Shladover led the
University of California, Berkeley's consortium team. My first
ride in a fully automated vehicle was in 1992, at the university's
Richmond Field Station.
Red has never been known for humility! While he has
certainly played an important role, he is but one of many.
RICHARD BISHOP
Principal
Bishop Consulting

V2X MIGHT SPEED PROGRESS TO AUTONOMY

"Who's in the driver's seat?" (July) seems of a piece with the
general consensus that driverless cars are harder than we thought.
Two years ago, at the Intelligent Transportation Society annual
conference in Montreal, I asked experts: "Can you imagine a
future in which a large percentage of the total vehicle fleet is
autonomous, but not connected?" The answers were unequivocal:
Vehicle-to-vehicle technology so simplified the challenge of full
autonomy that V2V should be thought of as a prerequisite.
At the time, only Tesla appeared to be working toward
relying on cameras/visible spectrum and using artificial
intelligence to anticipate the behavior of other actors on
the road. Other OEMs seemed to envision that increasing
levels of autonomy would come in an increasingly connected
environment. Today, most OEMs seem resigned to Tesla's
approach in which vehicles operate on their own, without
direct input from surrounding vehicles. Refocusing on vehicleto-everything connection might speed progress to higher-level
autonomy and improve safety in the interim.
MARK GARDINER
CEO/communications strategist
HAVstory.com
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Shift Magazine - October 7, 2019

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