Watch the Hyperloop Complete Its First Successful Test Ride

Five, four, three, two, one, fire.

[Narrator] If you believe the hype,

this is the future of city to city transport

being tested for the very first time.

It hit 70 miles an hour, whisking through 500 feet

of a 1600 foot long steel tube.

The team at Hyperloop One says this short but sweet

firing of a sled in a vacuum tube is the world's first

successful hyperloop full systems test.

The coming out party for the first new mode

of transportation in over 100 years.

Now that's a bit hyperbolic.

They're forgetting perhaps about orbital rockets,

practical helicopters, and even hoverboards.

But this test in the Nevada desert is a major milestone,

maybe giving Hyperloop One the lead in the race

to deliver this high-speed tubular transportation system.

Hyperloop One also used the chance to show off

its prototype pod that will carry the humans

or more likely just cargo at first

and that will one day be propelled through enormous

vacuum tube networks at speeds of up to 700 miles an hour

with close to zero air resistance to work against.

It would mean a journey from LA to San Francisco

city centers would take just 50 minutes door to door

instead of half a day in a car

and there'd be no need to deal with the hassle of airports.

Hyperloop One didn't stick its new pod in its tube yet

but instead it used a magnetically levitated sled

which it compares to a stripped-down racing car,

for this first chance to show

all the engineering systems working together.

So we've got the levitation and guidance surfaces,

the levitation is magnetic, so is the guidance.

We have the electromagnetic propulsion,

which is a contactless propulsion system that propels

the pod down the tube, and then we have the tube,

which creates the vacuum environment and that allows the pod

to fly down the tube with very little drag.

[Narrator] They Hyperloop is another one of Elon Musk's

ideas but one that he decided he didn't have the time

to work on himself, probably smart.

Instead, groups around the world

are racing to make his concept a reality.

Hyperloop transportation technologies is building capsules

in France and wants to make a system to connect

Slovakia and the Czech Republic

or maybe run through South Korea.

After a flurry of bizarre lawsuits were settled,

ex-Hyperloop One co-founder Brogan BamBrogan

started a new company, Arrivo, and it plans to have

a hyperloop up and running in just three years.

And let's not forget that a bunch of talented students

from around the world are competing to build

hyperloop pods and test them in a smaller scale tube

at Elon Musk's SpaceX headquarters near Los Angeles.

Hyperloop One will build its initial operational system

in Dubai, the Emirate that likes

to be first with anything new and shiny.

But it may just have the vision and the massive amounts

of money that it's going to take

to get this new form of transport up and running for real.