Meet the hyperloop: the future of travel?

The supersonic system would embrace the kind of technology seen in Futurama and The Jetsons to shoot passengers across the country at speeds of over 700 miles per hour. Passengers would sit in specially designed carriages that would then fly through 1.35-metre-wide tubes on a floating cushion of air using magnets.

A 382-mile tunnel linking Los Angeles and San Francisco would cut down journey time to just 30 minutes.

It sounds far-fetched, but if anyone could make this happen, it is Musk. The billionaire founder of PayPal, he has since formed electric car manufacturer Tesla and the commercial space company SpaceX.

“Hyperloop is a new mode of transport that seeks to Change this paradigm by being both fast and inexpensive for people and goods," explains Musk in the design study.

The low pressure tubes could exist above or below the ground, using a low pressure and a magnetic linear accelerator to achieve the speeds. The tubes and supporting structure would be built to withstand earthquakes, added Musk, who compared the sensation of gravity to feeling of being inside an airplane.

"It should really feel just super smooth and quiet. And there'd never be any turbulence or anything."

Indeed, with no need to ascend or descend into the sky, Hyperloop would be twice as fast as an airplane - but also cheaper than a cab. The designs are open source.

“When the California "high speed" rail was approved, I was quite disappointed,” he wrote on the SpaceX blog, “as I know many others were too. How could it be that the home of Silicon Valley and JPL – doing incredible things like indexing all the world's knowledge and putting rovers on Mars – would build a bullet train that is both one of the most expensive per mile and one of the slowest in the world?”

"If we are to make a massive investment in a new transportation system, then the return should by rights be equally massive," Musk added. "Compared to the alternatives, it should ideally be: safer, faster, lower-cost, more convenient, immune to weather, sustainably self-powering, resistant to earthquakes and not too disruptive to those along the route."