For the first time, two human passengers have travelled in one of Virgin's levitating hyperloop capsules, which was sent at 100 miles per hour through a near-airless tunnel in the Nevada desert.
Josh Giegel, CTO and co-founder of Virgin Hyperloop, and Sara Luchian, Virgin Hyperloop's director of passenger experience, were the two passengers to ride the new form of transportation for the first time on 8 November.
The 15-second-long test trip was carried out by the company at its DevLoop site 35 miles north of Las Vegas in Nevada, which comprises a 500-metre concrete tube located in a barren stretch of desert.
Two human passengers have travelled in one of Virgin's levitating hyperloop capsules for the first time
The maiden voyage took place in the newly released two-seater XP-2 vehicle, designed by Bjarke Ingels Group (BIG) and Danish studio Kilo Design, which was built to demonstrate that passengers are able to travel safely inside a hyperloop pod. After the passengers were strapped into the capsule's plush white seats, an airlock system was used to bring the pod in and out of the semi-vacuum environment.
The XP-2 vehicle was then electromagnetically propelled through the tunnel at a speed just over 100 miles per hour (mph) before coming to a stop, with the journey lasting around 15 seconds.
When the system is fully realised, the singular capsule that Giegel and Luchian travelled in will be larger, able to seat up to 28 passengers, and will aim to reach speeds of up to 760 ...