On Sunday 8th November 2020, Virgin Hyperloop announced that it has successfully carried out its first passenger ride at a velocity of 48 m/s (or 172 km/h). Business Insider reveals that the company completed the test in the desert outside Las Vegas, Nevada.
For the test, named Project Pegasus, Virgin Hyperloop used a two-seater Experimental-Pod-2 (XP-2). It says that its production vehicle will be able to seat up to 28 passengers. It’s transportation tech is hinged on magnetic levitation mechanism. This makes the pod float just above the track and travel in some sort of suspension through a vacuum tube.
In its press release, the futuristic transport company revealed that the air pressure within their experimental tube was 100 pascals. “You won’t need a space suite to go in our vacuum,” it says. For its test, it transported two executives of the company; Josh Giegel and Sara Lucian. Their pod carried them over a distance of 500 metres in 15 seconds.
“Virgin Hyperloop is developing the necessary subsystems required to ensure traveling with hyperloop is as safe as riding an elevator. Independently validated by an Independent Safety Assessor, Certifer, our XP-2 vehicle demonstrates many of the safety-critical systems that will be found on a commercial hyperloop system, and is equipped with a state-of-the-art control system that can detect off-nominal states and rapidly trigger appropriate emergency responses,” the company assures the public.
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Virgin Hyperloop aims to drastically improve transportation by building systems with top speeds of more than 1000 km/h. It wants its vehicles to be ‘3x faster than high-speed rail and more than 10x faster than traditional rail’.
According to its route estimator, a trip from within Los Angeles that will take an airplane 1hr 28min, and a car 6hrs to complete will take a Virgin Hyperloop vehicle just 43 minutes. It claims to have run 400 tests and hit a top speed of 387 km/h. It has built a track that is 500 metres long (used in the test journey mentioned earlier). However, it will extend the track soon.
Besides safety and speed, pods will come with multiple configurations and it will comfortably seat passengers and their light luggage. It will operate efficiently when it goes public, but there is no time projection for when this will happen yet.
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