About a year ago, I wrote an article titled “Hyperloop is Dead for Real This Time”, based on the news that Hyperloop One, one of the biggest companies pursuing Elon Musk’s dream to travel at 700 mph by tube, had closed its doors. down.

Well, I’m right. The hyperloop, in fact, lives on – as a 1/12th scale model in Switzerland.

Of course, this isn’t exactly the full realization of Musk’s 2013 white paper, in which he hypothesized that aerodynamic aluminum capsules filled with passengers or cargo could be propelled through a nearly airless tube at speeds of up to 760 mph. These tubes, either raised on pylons or sunk underground, could be built within or between cities. Musk called it the “fifth mode of transportation” and argued that it could help change the way we live, work, trade and travel.

The idea is being tested in Lausanne, Switzerland, where a 120-meter circular test track is operated by a team including the Ecole Polytechnique Fédérale de Lausanne (EPFL), Haute Ecole de Commerce et d’Ingénierie Vaud (HEIG -VD). ) and Swisspod Technologies. This week, the group announced that it had completed “the longest” hyperloop test of its kind: traveling 11.8 km (7.3 miles) at a speed of 40.7 km/h (25.3 mph).

The circular test track has a circumference of 125.6 meters (412 feet) and a diameter of 40 centimeters (15.7 inches). That sounds modest, but the group says that in a large-scale system, their test “directly translates” to a trip of 141.6 km (88 miles), or about the distance from Geneva to Bern, or San Francisco to Sacramento , and speeds of up to 488.2 km/h (303.4 mph).

The project is called LIMITLESS, which stands for Linear Induction Motor Drive for Traction and Levitation in Sustainable Hyperloop Systems. During the test, the team “monitored the performance of vital subsystems,” including propulsion, communications infrastructure, power electronics and thermal management. They evaluated “power consumption, thrust variations, response (of the linear induction motor), and control during acceleration, cruise, coasting, and braking scenarios.”

Of course, a 1/12th scale circular test track is hardly a sign that the hyperloop is alive and well. Most startups and companies seeking to create a large-scale hyperloop have shut down, victims of poor financial management, as well as infrastructure and regulatory hurdles. Critics have said that even if the hyperloop is technically feasible, it is still just vaporware. We called him a “utopian vision” this would be financially impossible to achieve.

But the Swiss team remains undeterred, promising to conduct a battery of future tests to further validate the system. Swisspod CEO Denis Tudor said the group plans to test its first cargo product soon and is currently building a larger test track in the United States.

“This is a key step in making hyperloop for passengers a reality and changing the way we connect, work and live,” he said.

This would be a feat in itself, given that there are no large-scale hyperloops in the world. Musk’s test tunnel in California is gone. The man himself has become more enamored of campaigning for Donald Trump than solving the traffic problem.

The Boring Company, Musk’s tunneling company, is still digging underground passages in Las Vegas – but for Teslas, not hyperloops. The future, it seems, is much the same as the present.