Hyperloop One wants $250 million from the ‘Gang of Four’ that sued the start-up Hyperloop Technologies Inc. is seeking at least $250 million in damages from four former high-ranking employees who the company says tried to incite rebellion within the Los Angeles start-up. July 19, 2016 “In the natural course of business, some projects advance and others stall,” Miller said. He said the company is continuing conversations in Korea, and is exploring ways to finance a testing and certification facility in Colorado. There’s also some hope in Italy, where HyperloopTT is waiting to hear if it won a bid on a contract. Miller said that a study the company completed in Abu Dhabi led to additional opportunities, including a potential project in the Great Lakes. That Great Lakes initiative, which HyperloopTT has been officially pitching since 2018, would cover 343 miles from Chicago to Cleveland, plus 134 miles from Cleveland to Pittsburgh. The company said it hoped to begin environmental review later this year. But progress is still a long way off. “It’s three to five years to even imagine a shovel in the ground, and that’s optimistic,” said Grace Gallucci, executive director of the Northeast Ohio Areawide Coordinating Agency. With the exception of the potential Great Lakes line, almost all of HyperloopTT’s current discussions lack the ambition of its early days. Back then, founder Dirk Ahlborn spoke about city-to-city projects stretching hundreds of miles, using tunnels under vacuum conditions to reduce friction. Projects now are smaller and hard to come by. Advertisement HyperloopTT is far from the only company that has struggled with the technology. The original partial-vacuum transportation company, Swissmetro SA, predated Musk when it was founded in 1992. It went into liquidation in 2009, though it has since been reborn as Swissmetro NG. More recently, a Los Angeles-based hyperloop startup called Arrivo shut down in 2018 less than two years after its founding. And Hyperloop One raised more than $400 million before finally giving up passenger travel. Even Musk’s Boring Co. has run into challenges. When the billionaire first laid out his ideas for the technology, he used the roughly 350-mile route of Los Angeles to San Francisco as an example. Boring’s most substantial project to date is a 1.7-mile tunnel under a convention center in Las Vegas. Boring has resisted the idea that it’s not on track to build a true hyperloop. In November, the company tweeted a picture of a Tesla in a test tunnel in its Bastrop, Texas, facility, with the message “Full-scale Hyperloop Testing has begun.” But the image puzzled some experts. “Why would you put a Tesla in a tunnel under vacuum?” Douglas Hart, a professor of mechanical engineering at MIT, wrote in an email. “People couldn’t ride in it or they’d be suffocated.” HyperloopTT has a testing site of its own, near Toulouse, France, where it built a 0.2-mile test track but never installed a planned vacuum system or built a longer track. Late last year, the mayor of Cugnaux, the suburb that houses the facility, complained to a local newspaper Actu Toulouse that HyperloopTT had all but abandoned the site and he hadn’t seen anyone there in months. “The pipe is still there, but there’s no one from Hyperloop in all the meetings we organize,” he told Actu Toulouse. Miller said the company’s “full-scale prototype resulted from the site, where testing continues, a point of pride.” A spokeswoman for the neighboring city of Toulouse said the company planned to leave the site by the end of the summer, although Miller said it wasn’t yet decided. Despite its setbacks, it’s still too early to dismiss HyperloopTT and other companies like it, said Erik Wright, founder of commercial construction firm Precision Construction Services, and who has interacted with the company in the past. “I’m really impressed by how far they’ve come and stuck with it,” Wright said. The “hyperloop has lost some of its grandeur,” he acknowledged. “It’s a long game.” Advertisement