Amsterdam to Frankfurt in 50 mins? Dutch hyperloop startup believes so

Instead of taking four hours to travel between Amsterdam and Frankfurt, Dutch hyperloop startup Hardt Hyperloop wants to make that trip in less than an hour, including seven stops along the way.

Tim Houter

Throttling passengers from Amsterdam in the Netherlands to Frankfurt, Germany through a vaccuum tube at speeds of 1,000 Km/hr would take just 50 minutes, according to a Hyperloop Implementation Program (HIP) joint kick-off study presented last week by Hardt Hyperloop and Royal Schiphol Group at the first edition of HyperSummit in Utrecht.

“We are extremely proud that the movement focussing on the hyperloop developments keeps growing. This event today once again proves that collaboration holds the key,” said Hardt Hyperloop CEO Tim Houter at HyperSummit.

Developed on a very energy-efficient platform, with the possibility of installing solar technology on the outside of the tube, and with the configuration of the vehicles designed to adapt to customers’ social travel trend projections, the hyperloop researched at Hardt Hyperloop is an ambitious undertaking.

A hyperloop is a proposed mode of passenger and/or freight transportation, first used to describe an open-source vactrain design released by a joint team from Tesla and SpaceX.

Ren Yee

“The hyperloop system has the potential to address multiple challenges at once,” said Ren Yee, Head of Innovation Strategy and Forecasting at UNStudio

“With globalization has come the interdependency of different nations – economically, politically and socially – we believe hyperloop has the potential to help with all of those challenges. And the design of the hub is an essential key,” he remarked at HyperSummit.

The Dutch team revealed last week that an Amsterdam-Frankfurt route is 450 kilometers long and that the journey, with seven intermediate stations, takes around 50 minutes. This stands in sharp contrast to the four hours it would take using regular transport.

This route alone could serve more than 4.3 million residents and the hyperloop could carry more than 48 million passengers annually. The hyperloop would provide a sustainable alternative for the approximately two million airline passengers annually, which would save 83,690 tons of CO2 emissions each year.

‘Hyperloop Will Never Work’

There are; however, some high-level naysayers that believe a hyperloop “will never work,” but the research will lead to advancements in mobility.

Carlo van de Weijer

“All that buzz will lead to major advances in mobility. Even if Hyperloop as a serious means of transport will never happen,” said Carlo van de Weijer, head of the Strategic Area Smart Mobility at the Eindhoven University of Technology, in a recent report in Innovation Origins.

“We don’t need a transportation system that takes us only from point A to point B if it’s not integrated into existing infrastructure,” he added.

The main arguments are that a hyperloop isn’t compatible with existing transport infrastructures and that the logistics make it extremely difficult to pull off.

According to Innovation Origins, “The atmospheric pressure on the tubes under vacuum would be 10 tons per square meter, basically the weight of a lorry. With just the slightest crack, outside air would enter the tubes at the speed of sound, and the infrastructure would implode.”

Still, Hardt Hyperloop believes a connected world where you can live, work, and be with everyone and everything you care about by developing the the “future of transportation” — the hyperloop.