After 10 years in the making, Musk’s The Boring company started testing Hyperloop

The first time we heard about the “Hyperloop” was back in 2013, when Elon Musk – the founder of Tesla, the Boring Company (Hyperloop’s creator) and the cause of Twitter’s bad PR – began talking about his vision for an entirely new mode of transportation consisting of building a near-hard vacuum environment in a tunnel or tube in order to move electric vehicles at high speeds more efficiently inside of them.

Now, the Boring Company has announced that it has finally begun testing on its first full-scale high-speed Hyperloop transportation system. In contrast to the initial idea, the loops developed by the Boring Company propose a more modest iteration of the technology. The firm develops loops under cities, e.g., in Las Vegas. It has also proposed connecting cities over longer distances.

The news of the first prototypes came shortly after the Boring Company closed a hefty $675 million fundraising round. The announcement was made in a cryptic tweet from the company’s Twitter account. Since then, enthusiasts around the world have been trying to decipher the location where the pictures have been taken.

Others have been questioning the “hyper” aspect of the hyperloops. The latest images show a Tesla car in the tunnel, however, in the previous discussions the company claimed that in order to use the full potential of the acceleration, special cars would have to be designed. With a Tesla inside the tunnel, the project just looks like an underground highway.