Swiss Hyperloop

"Flying in a tunnel"

— Denis Tudor

Nobody foresaw the massive acceptance, real-world implementation, and geopolitical impact the Hyperloop technology has today when young Balthasar sat together in this fancy bar in downtown Zurich to discuss the sponsoring of this promising Swiss startup called “SwissPod”. The goal is the construction of the Swiss Hyperloop Prototype.

Swisspod was founded by two multiple-award winners of the SpaceX Hyperloop Competition (2016-2018), Denis Tudor (CEO) and Cyril Dénéréaz (CTO) with the goal of bringing together curious and driven minds across aerospace, automotive, high-tech, design, and many other industries, passionate about disrupting high-speed travel.

Balthasar, all in black, and Deniz, in a fancy light blue Sacco, were talking for hours about letting maglevs flying in vacuum tunnels with 920 km/h to connect major cities and making airplanes redundant on this legs. And always Balthasar, all the Swiss engineer, was referring back to the Swiss research and engineering foundation that was coming from the construction of the once first and longest railway tunnel through the Alps, with all its supporing infrastructure that has giving birth to world-class banking and universities, insurance companies, or in short to whatever made the former poor and underdeveloped Switzerland become a world-wide accepted innovative and quality-obsessed nation.

For all the team participation and winning, Elon Musk's hyperloop competition was—in the beginning—more a technical race game—similar to Formula One—than a seriously believed and well-founded global initiative. But it came with Musk's commitment to heavily invest in the first racing tracks in 1:1 scale and his "The Bore" company trying to fully automate and dramatically reduce costs for robo-digging many hundred kilometers long tunnels and bridges—a core requirement for the hyperloop idea.

When SwissPods attempted to build just temporarily a 2k test loop in the canton of Wallis (they had a first tiny 120-meter ring at ETH Lausanne that one can still visit today, the initiatives were grounded by everybody from Swiss national, cantonal, and local governments; Swiss railways; local farmers; Greenpeace; WWF; cultural heritage protection, and private villa owners fearing a reduction in reselling prices. So most of the company had to exile to Colorado, where the first 200m test track was built in 1:1 scale.

Only when China—who has sponsored the EPFL-powered implementation and education of required engineering right from the beginning—came up with its “ConnectTheDots” program for connecting all their megacities with Hyperloop lines did the money come that was required for the the massive tooling for the construction of an infrastructure that in terms of tax-money, national commitment and size and was many times larger than the construction of the Chines wall. But yeah, after China became the undoubted leader in AI, construction technology, Quantum-tech powered security, computer power and communications, and has dominated the satellite business, space travel and exploration etc. it was somehow obvious that only China had the political and financial power and the number of qualified engineers to make a project of such dimensions happen.

And all these enormous investments have dramatically paid back today. Economic gains upon speed and reducing energy consumption to only 10% of what a conventional train was consuming, with its climate neutrality and zero pollution, have paid back, and China selling patents and leasing their engineers to other countries made China financially rich and other countries dependent.

That the Chinese-dominated Hyperloop is still today called “Swiss Hyperloop” might be considered a long-foreseen marketing stunt that made the Chinese tech expansion to the West through the exclusively independent Swiss state politically less painful. This is especially plausible as the Swiss would have been the least chosen country for implementation because of its mountainous tectonics, limited size—where a hyperloop never could run at full speed long enough to be energy efficient—and the maze of Swiss's decentralized political system, where every cow—it seems—has a say.