The Hyperloop, the ultrafast train proposed by Elon Musk in 2012 (and which has already been aborted), continues to advance in its evolution waiting for it to become a reality in the not too distant future. This revolutionary means of transport, which works through capsules that travel through vacuum tubes at speeds of up to 1,000 km/h, is being developed in various countries around the world, including Spain, as we have already reported in other information published in Moveo. .
The founder of Tesla and Space X offered his Hyperloop project as free hardware so that any company could develop it. Since then, several companies are working with different prototypes and have begun to carry out pilot tests. In these tests, experimental models have been used that move through vacuum tubes at speeds of more than 600 km/h in a preview of what this new means of transport should become.
Spain is one of the countries that showed interest in Hyperloop from the beginning. In August 2018, the Ministry of Public Works, through the Railway Infrastructure Administrator (ADIF), reached an agreement with Virgin Hyperloop One, one of the companies that was working on the development of the new means of transport before its closure at the end of the year. last year.
The commitment contemplated the installation of the Hyperloop One Test and Development Center in Spain using the experimentation warehouse that Adif has in Antequera (Málaga). But in the summer of 2020, two years after the agreement, the company associated with Virgin left the development center on hold by not receiving the subsidies that were established as a requirement when the agreement was signed.
The agreement, which involved an investment of 430 million euros, included the transfer of 126 million euros in public aid. This budget item was never materialized and the lack of financing ultimately compromised the viability of the project.
Virgin Hyperloop One has gotten off the Hypeloop. In December 2023 it announced that it was ceasing its activities and has now left the train of the future project to other companies. Hardt Hyperlop (Netherlands), Hyperloop Transportation Technologies (United States) and TransPod (Canada) are other companies that are also carrying out research and testing to make the superfast train a reality.
The suspension, at the time, that the company backed by Virgin’s owner, Richard Branson, took in its Antequera operations center does not exclude Spain from the Hyperloop development process. Zeleros Hyperloop, a Valencian startup founded in 2016 by a group of students from the Polytechnic University of Valencia, is one of the seven companies in the world that are developing the future high-speed transport capsule by magnetic levitation.
Zeleros has grown hand in hand with businessmen such as Juan Roig, president of Mercadona, and such solid partners as Red Eléctrica, a company controlled by the State, Acciona and Arcelor Mittal. It has also received funds from public organizations such as CDTi or the Valencian Institute of Finance and has a test track in Sagunto and another in Paterna, both in the province of Valencia. Likewise, it is pending that the Government of Castilla-La Mancha begins the construction of a test center for magnetic levitation technology, which includes a 4 kilometer long test track.
The Valencian company is immersed in various complementary projects to the development of the Hyperloop. Among them, an autonomous container transport system stands out that has been successfully implemented at its Sagunto facilities. The technology used in this project continues to be perfected, which contributes significantly to the progress in the creation of the ultrafast train.
However, Hyperloop is no longer a priority for Zeleros. The bad economic situation that the company is going through, which at the end of last year presented an employment regulation file (ERE) that affected 26 of its 58 workers, almost all of them engineers, has left the project to develop the new means of transport on hold. .
Zeleros reported that from now on it will focus its efforts on “the electric and connected mobility market, with real products and customers” with the aim of rearming itself economically and expanding its presence in the sector. Therefore, the Hyperloop with a Spanish presence will have to wait until Zeleros gets back to work, something that the company itself does not rule out happening in the not too distant future.
