Elon Musk has this great idea of a transportation system he calls Hyperloop, composed of two massive tubes with pods carrying passengers which could travel at speeds 700mph max.
A one-way trip on the Hyperloop is projected to take about 35 minutes as compared to the 6-hour long drive with the same distance. His aerospace firm SpaceX is now taking care of the technology.
But it’s not only Elon Musk that dreams of this kind of transportation system. Daryl Oster has his own version, and he claims that it’s better than the Hyperloop.
Evacuated Tube Transport Technologies or ET3, where Oster serves as its CEO, is a tube transport company with a similar ambition: develop a transportation system using tubes which enable car-sized passenger capsules. It plans to reshape how people travel and reduce labor and fuel costs to less than a tenth of the cost of flying.
According to Oster, what sets this different from that of Musk is that while Hyperloop is regional, ET3 is a “freeway” with access points all along the route.
Source: ET3
“ET3 we call it a mag-lev limo, where it’s a car-sized vehicle that operates in a network of tubes much like cars on a freeway,” Oster said. “But, it would be international and global in scope.”
Oster revealed that the vision of ET3 is to travel from the United States to India in just under 3 hours for only $50, or from New York to Beijing in China in only about 2 hours.
Source: ET3
There are no details yet with regards to their specific targets and accomplishments so far.
No matter, Oster and his team are working to prove that this is possible, and have been on it since the founding of the company in 1997. Will ET3 beat Hyperloop in the tube transport race?
Sources: CNBC | Tech Republic
