> Tesla’s train energy consumption numbers do not pass a sanity check, which suggests either reckless disregard for the research or fraud. I wouldn’t put either past Musk: the lack of references is consistent with the former, and the fact that Musk’s current primary endeavor is a car company is consistent with the latter
If the blog post's claims are correct - and the numbers in it seem to have a much more solid basis in fact than anything Elon Musk's come up with - then even a simple back-of-the-envelope calculation should've been enough to show his power consumption figures for high-speed rail are impossibly high. The trains are simply incapable of using that much power.
Whether or not the idea is valid is irrelevant - the fact that Elon Musk is proposing it does lend it some additional weight - with Space X and to a lesser extent Tesla, he has gone into an existing market, taken a step back, rethought things from the ground up, and re-written the book on how much it costs to do things.
I don't know if Hyperloop is as technically feasible and cost effective as it looks, I don't know if any government would have the courage to go in that direction, but I do know that it isn't going to get anywhere with good balanced debate on the technical merits of the proposed solution and ad hominem rubbish just gets in the way of that.
In particular, some parts of this article are just way way off base, e.g.:
> Tesla’s train energy consumption numbers do not pass a sanity check, which suggests either reckless disregard for the research or fraud. I wouldn’t put either past Musk: the lack of references is consistent with the former, and the fact that Musk’s current primary endeavor is a car company is consistent with the latter
and
> I write this to point out that, in the US, people will treat any crank seriously if he has enough money or enough prowess in another field.
The article would have been much stronger if it'd left ego and silly ad hominem out of it and reported on facts alone.
I also have concerns about the costings: the Hyperloop report didn't give sufficient justifications for any of them. Yet I assume they didn't just pluck them out of thin air either. We really need to know how they were calculated before we can do a more critical analysis of them or someone should try and come up with their own rigorous cost projections. We can go back and forth all day saying it seems too low until someone actually definitely proves it.
In particular, comparing Musk's projected costs for, e.g., viaducts to how much the government says they cost is almost definitely a poor metric since, after all, exactly the same could have been said for Musk's cost projections for rocket-powered spaceflight.