The project is being backed by Silicon Valley titan Chris Hughes, whose Economic Security Project gave $1 million toward the effort.

The goal, supporters say, is to ensure that the embattled city’s residents can stay out of poverty and the experiment is designed to assess whether or not the program could be rolled out on a wider scale.

“We’ve overspent on things like arenas and marinas and things of that sort to try to lure in tourism and dollars that way,” Stockton Mayor Michael Tubbs explained, according to Fox News, believing that the model can be used to bolster quality of life in the struggling city – and others like it.

Stockton in recent years has been known as the “foreclosure capital” of the country and drew headlines in 2012 when it declared bankruptcy, becoming a flashpoint for Americans suffering during the Great Recession.

The concept of a universal basic income has gained traction in the Bay Area amid concerns that automation will increasingly displace workers. It’s been propelled by major CEOs like Mark Zuckerberg and Elon Musk, who argue that so-called “free money” may be a necessity as technological advances alter the labor landscape.

“We should explore ideas like universal basic income to make sure that everyone has a cushion to try new ideas,” Zuckerberg said in his Harvard commencement address in May 2017.

Other similar efforts have been rolled out in places like Finland, which announced in April that it was ending its trial run to explore alternative welfare programs instead. The full results will be disclosed next year.

While some experts argue that universal basic income can be a way to lessen poverty by creating a guaranteed income floor, others explain that such a framework is impractical given the current entitlement and welfare state.

“I would be in favor of this if it meant eliminating all other welfare programs and requiring work,” economist and Heritage Foundation fellow Steve Moore told CalWatchdog via email. “The only way out of poverty is a job not a government handout.”

Overall, the experiment will look at how the residents spend the money and the potential economic impact it could have on the city, something that the young 27-year-old mayor is optimistic about.

“We trust that people are smart and resilient to make the best decision for them and their families with the money,” Tubbs said in a CBS News interview back in February. 

Stockton’s effort is expected to begin in early 2019.

So far, Donald Trump has divided the Republican Party, taken large numbers of voters away from the Democrats, and infused some Americans with optimism but others with despair. Now, he has also laid bare latent political fractures within Silicon Valley, often seen as a more monolithic culture than it is. 

Contempt and caution

While some leading tech figures have been supportive or tolerant of Trump and his movement, others have responded to his election by expressing the strongest possible opposition — including a call for secession. After a tweetstorm throwing support behind the nascent movement to peacefully withdraw California from the Union, Uber investor and Hyperloop cofounder Sherwin Pishevar told CNNMoney the radical idea was “the most patriotic thing I can do. The country is [at] a serious crossroads.”

“Within hours, several other tech founders offered their support for the plan. ‘I was literally just going to tweet this. I’m in and will partner with you on it,’ Dave Morin, an investor and founder of private social networking tool Path, tweeted in response to Pishevar. ‘I support you in this effort let me know what I can do to help,’ Marc Hemeon, a former Google employee and founder of Design Inc., wrote on Twitter.”

Earlier this summer, nearly 150 tech CEOs, founders, authors and investors signed an open letter rebuking Trump. “Donald Trump articulates few policies beyond erratic and contradictory pronouncements. His reckless disregard for our legal and political institutions threatens to upend what attracts companies to start and scale in America. He risks distorting markets, reducing exports, and slowing job creation,” they wrote. “We stand against Donald Trump’s divisive candidacy and want a candidate who embraces the ideals that built America’s technology industry: freedom of expression, openness to newcomers, equality of opportunity, public investments in research and infrastructure, and respect for the rule of law.”

Nevertheless, the attitude among Silicon Valley’s heaviest hitters has been markedly different. Elon Musk waited until just before Election Day to tell CNBC he had doubts about Trump. “I think a bit strongly that he is probably not the right guy,” he said, suggesting that Hillary Clinton’s policies on the economy and the environment were “the right ones” for the current uneasy political climate. “However, the election results are unlikely to have much bearing on the future of Tesla, he said,” the network added. 

From outlier to influencer

Peter Thiel, meanwhile, has emerged as perhaps Donald Trump’s most respected and powerful supporter outside of Washington, D.C. Thiel “was one of the few businesspeople — and the only prominent one in technology — to publicly support Mr. Trump’s presidential run,” the New York Times recalled. “Mr. Thiel spoke at the Republican convention and later gave $1.25 million to support the Trump campaign. That is not much, as presidential donations go, but it happened when the candidate was widely perceived to be floundering. In the process, Mr. Thiel was denounced by much of Silicon Valley. There were calls for Mr. Thiel to step down from Facebook, where he serves on the board, and Y Combinator, a start-up incubator where he is a part-time adviser.” Facebook chief Mark Zuckerberg weathered stiff criticism when he insisted that Thiel should not face retaliation or ostracism because of his support for a presidential candidate.

Now, as Thiel told the Times, he’ll have Trump’s ear in an informal advisory role — important, according to Thiel, because Trump’s task is so daunting. Calling for “all hands on deck,” Thiel cautioned against some of his colleague’s frustrated impulses. “At the end of the day, it would be crazy to simply spend four years issuing denunciatory tweets on Twitter,” he said. “For a day or two, that’s fine. But I hope Silicon Valley will be more productive than that.”

California’s environmental regulators have revisited their credit program for zero emissions vehicles, which hasn’t done enough to position the state for the kind of carbon savings needed to meet future targets. 

The zero-emissions subsidy hasn’t suffered from a lack of funding in the recent past. “Earlier this year, not long after declaring victory on a hard-fought measure expanding the state’s emission reduction mandate, Gov. Jerry Brown and lawmakers announced a late-session deal on where to send some of the revenue from the state’s cap-and-trade program,” the Fresno Bee recalled. “A big chunk of money in the compromise went to the Air Resource Board’s Low-Carbon Transportation initiative, including over $200 million to bolster programs offering financial incentives for purchasing cleaner vehicles.”

But Brown and the board have struggled to figure out just how to pump zero-emission vehicle acquisitions up to where they must be for California to hit its ambitious emissions targets in coming years. “Brown has argued business interests and resistant legislators will prefer the reliability of cap-and-trade to more stringent dictates,” the paper added earlier this month. “Whether or not the Legislature musters a vote to extend the program beyond a 2020 limit set in statute, the ARB has already begun sculpting regulations that could sustain the system without a vote.”

High-flying clean-energy industrialist Elon Musk has doubled down on his production plans in California. Tesla, his auto company, “took a major step toward its ambitious goal of one day building 1 million cars a year by seeking to double the size of its Fremont, Calif., assembly plant,” the Los Angeles Times reported. “Under a long-term zoning proposal submitted to Fremont’s Planning Commission, the electric car maker wants to eventually add 4.6 million square feet of space to its factory’s existing 4.5 million square feet.”

Musk “told analysts this spring that the Palo Alto-based automaker hopes to ramp up annual production to 500,000 vehicles in 2018 and build 1 million vehicles by the end of 2020,” the paper added. “The 2018 goal alone is nearly a tenfold increase from the 50,580 vehicles that Tesla produced last year in Fremont. The automaker has forecast this year’s deliveries at 80,000 to 90,000. Quality problems and production delays plagued the plant early this year and threatened sales plans. But the company said last week that those problems are behind it and that it expects to come close to its forecast for 2016.”

Broad deals

Musk has not hesitated to link up with government resources and opportunities in order to advance his business interests. This month, he aligned SpaceX closely to take advantage of President Obama’s call to use private industry to help bring Americans to Mars. “Within the next two years, private companies will for the first time send astronauts to the International Space Station,” Obama announced. “One of those private companies tasked with ferrying astronauts to the ISS and who will essentially return human spaceflight to American soil in late 2018 is SpaceX,” the Observer noted.

And last month, Musk inked a deal to change the way California backstops its energy needs. “Tesla Motors Inc. will supply 20 megawatts (80 megawatt-hours) of energy storage to Southern California Edison as part of a wider effort to prevent blackouts by replacing fossil-fuel electricity generation with lithium-ion batteries,” Bloomberg reported. “Tesla’s contribution is enough to power about 2,500 homes for a full day, the company said in a blog post on Thursday. But the real significance of the deal is the speed with which lithium-ion battery packs are being deployed,” the site added — “months not years.”

Outracing critics

As Musk has accelerated his increasingly ambitious plans, however, he has attracted a greater share of criticism toward the mechanics of his business operations. “The pressure is now on Tesla for a smooth launch of the relatively affordable Model 3. A quality product pumped out at low cost and high volume is essential to meeting the ambitious goals of the company and its investors, auto analysts say, whereas long delays could threaten the company’s reputation — and survival,” according to the Times.

Meanwhile, wariness has centered separately around SolarCity, a startup run by family members. “The Tesla-SolarCity deal looks so bad on paper that many investors worry it’s simply a bailout of SolarCity, which Musk co-founded and continues to chair,” the MIT Technology Review noted. “While SolarCity dominates the market for leasing, installing, and maintaining solar panels for residences and businesses, it’s racked up more than $2 billion in losses over the past five years. “

“Its business model requires it to raise huge amounts of capital to cover the up-front costs of providing panels for no money down to consumers on multiyear contracts. Since its inception, the company has accumulated more than $3 billion in debt against just $1.5 billion in revenue. Now it is having a harder time convincing people to lend it money.”

What’s more, Musk has had to contend with a rebellion among his own shareholders. “As of earlier this week, seven Tesla stockholders have filed lawsuits against Elon Musk over the proposed acquisition of SolarCity and alleged Musk was in breach of his fiduciary duties for not disclosing the proposed merger properly. Some of these stockholders are asking the judge for an injunction to prevent the merger from going through,” Recode reported. But the two companies have announced the merger is going ahead anyway. “The companies have set the date for their respective shareholders to vote on the $2.6 billion all-stock transaction for Nov. 17.”

Stiffed, as he sees it, by bureaucratic incompetence, Elon Musk took the California Air Resources Board to task for the way it handles zero-emissions vehicle (ZEV) credits — at a moment when Musk’s plans for success require a huge leap forward in business expansion.

“The California Air Resources Board is being incredibly weak in its application of ZEV credits,” Musk told those listening in on the company’s latest earnings call, as Bloomberg reported. “The standards are pathetically low. They need to be increased. There’s massive lobbying by the big car companies to prevent CARB from increasing the ZEV credit mandate, which they absolutely damn well should. It’s a crying shame that they haven’t. And as a result, you can barely sell the ZEV credits for pennies on the dollar.”

Musk has enjoyed the benefit of pre-existing policy, which required auto companies falling short of CARB standards to turn to Tesla for help. “California has a Zero Emissions Vehicle Standard that requires a percentage of all auto sales in the state to be zero emission vehicles. There are two ways to meet the standard — either a company has to sell a certain number of emission-free cars, or it has to offset the failure to do so by buying credits from another company that is exceeding the standard,” CNBC explained. “The program has been a source of revenue for Tesla — in 2013, the company made just short of $130 million selling the credits to other car companies, according to CleanTechnica. Then, in the latest quarter, Tesla only ‘recognized an insignificant amount of ZEV credit revenue,’ according to a letter to shareholders.”

Round two

The tiff marked the second time Musk publicly tangled with the CARB on matters of automobile policy. Following the Volkswagen emissions cheating scandal, Musk signed an open letter to the Air Resources Board that portrayed the board’s measures as foolish and futile, arguing instead for an approach that would require Volkswagen to make dramatically more emissions-free cars. “For a significant fraction of the non-compliant diesel cars already in the hands of drivers, there is no real solution. Drivers won’t come in for a fix that compromises performance,” the letter read. “Further, solutions which result in net greater CO2 emissions, a regulated pollutant, are inappropriate for CARB to endorse. Retrofitting urea tank systems to small cars is costly and impractical. Some cars may be fixed, but many won’t and will be crushed before they are fixed.”

“A giant sum of money thus will be wasted in attempting to fix cars that cannot all be fixed, and where the fix may be worse than the problem if the cars are crushed well before the end of their useful lives. We, the undersigned, instead encourage the CARB to show leadership in directing VW to ‘cure the air, not the cars’ and reap multiples of what damage has been caused while strongly advancing California’s interests in transitioning to zero emission vehicles.”

Production prep

But Musk’s current frustrations suggested some urgency to settle scores before buckling in for a big production push. Tesla’s plans for extraordinarily rapid growth have promised a substantial increase in activity around its manufacturing plant in Fremont, California, purchased from Toyota after its partner in the property, GM, backed out of its role in the wake of the financial crisis. Musk’s automaker has already “announced plans for a gigantic increase in output when its $35,000 Model 3 enters production,” Green Car Reports noted. “That ex-GM plant had a capacity of half a million cars […]. Six years later, Tesla says it is now building 2,000 electric cars a week at the Fremont plant.”

The room for growth has spurred activity inside and outside its doors. Now, “companies small and large are looking to cluster operations around Tesla’s 5.3 million square foot factory in Fremont to help with production and also with research and development,” the San Francisco Business Journal reported. “Such companies range from a locally grown machine shop making parts for Tesla’s battery packs to a giant Mexican producer of plastic and foam auto parts opening an East Bay factory with 280 jobs.”

California regulators have made preparations to close Diablo Canyon, the state’s last remaining nuclear power plant, in a move quickly characterized as a turning point in the nation’s approach to energy production and use.

“Pacific Gas and Electric Co. announced Tuesday it will close California’s last nuclear plant, Diablo Canyon, in 2025, ending atomic energy’s more than a half-century history in the state,” noted the San Francisco Chronicle. “The move will shutter a plant whose construction on a seaside cliff surrounded by earthquake faults helped create the antinuclear movement. And yet, some conservationists have fought to keep Diablo Canyon open, arguing California needed its output of greenhouse gas-free electricity to not exacerbate global warming.”

In fact, nuclear power has staked a claim to greater efficiencies than other forms of energy such as wind, driving critics of prevailing environmentalist policies to cast Diablo Canyon as a relatively smarter way to meet anti-carbon objectives hard to dislodge from Sacramento. “Nuclear energy is a huge source of clean power that doesn’t release the greenhouse gases that are changing the climate,” according to the U-T San Diego editorial board. “And unlike the San Onofre plant in San Diego County that closed in 2012 because of severe problems with steam generators and more, the Diablo Canyon plant appeared to be functioning well.”

Key players in the state’s environmentalist movement, however, determined that nuclear power represented more of an obstacle to their agenda than a source of potential allies. The proposal to shut down Diablo Canyon, “part of an agreement with environmental and labor groups, is intended to help meet California’s aggressive clean energy goals, which have already transformed the power mix with a large and growing renewable energy fleet at a time of slowing electric demand,” the New York Times reported. “It also comes after years of public pressure to close the plant, near San Luis Obispo, because of safety concerns over its location, near several fault lines, and its use of ocean water for cooling.”

Final approval for the change must come through the California Public Utilities Commission. “The agreement calls for PG&E to withdraw its pending application to extend the licenses for another 20 years, and to replace the plant’s 2,240-megawatt capacity with a combination of efficiency improvements and renewable sources,” as the Los Angeles Times’ Michael Hitzlik noted. “Among the deal’s unique features are provisions for $350 million in retention, severance and retraining payments to existing workers and $49.5 million in payments to San Luis Obispo County as compensation for the loss of a major source of employment and taxes.”

As legacy players in the public and private sector have haggled over the costs and benefits of nuclear power production, innovators have pushed the conversation in a different direction. Although advances in the efficiency of solar power production and retention have become something of a political football in recent years, with Democrats at the state and federal level bent on subsidizing businesses geared toward solar and other nontraditional power sources, alternate-energy entrepreneur Elon Musk has forged ahead with what appear to be plans for a dramatic new play in the space. 

With his Tesla company’s bid to acquire SolarCity, as Fortune suggested, “a fully vertically integrated energy company—from energy generation to installation to storage to application—could create a massive Elon Musk Energy Empire. It would be a company that generates power from the sun, stores energy in batteries, and uses those batteries to power cars and buildings.”

“And it would all be provided by a brand that consumers increasingly know and are excited about. Tesla’s brand is starting to be so powerful that it’s as if Apple decided it wanted to be a full-fledged power company (oh wait, it’s kind of doing that). But never before has the energy industry had such a player that so was so attractive to consumers and also so willing to act disruptively.”

Falling short even of some critics’ expectations, California’s beleaguered high-speed rail was dealt another blow to its credibility as the state’s biggest and most ambitious infrastructure project, with news emerging that the federal government signed off on a massive reschedule that would push back construction by four additional years. 

“The first segment of California’s first-in-the-nation bullet-train project, currently scheduled for completion in 2018, will not be done until the end of 2022, according to a contract revision the Obama administration quietly approved,” Politico reported. “That initial 119-mile segment through the relatively flat and empty Central Valley was considered the easiest-to-build stretch of a planned $64 billion line, which is eventually supposed to zip passengers between San Francisco and Los Angeles in under three hours. So the four-year delay is sure to spark new doubts about whether the state’s — and perhaps the nation’s — most controversial and expensive infrastructure project will ever reach its destination.”

Positive spin

But the bullet train’s stalwart supporters had reason to spin the stretched-out timetable as an act of clemency and commitment by the federal government. “The extension came through modification of a $2.5-billion grant that originally required completion of a segment of rail structures from Madera to Shafter by 2017,” according to the Los Angeles Times.

“The changes also allow the Department of Transportation to extend a cash advance to the state, which potentially means the California High-Speed Rail Authority can continue spending long after the original deadline that was set in 2009 under the American Recovery and Reinvestment Act.”

Lisa Marie Alley waving away entirely claims that the new schedule ought to be seen as a setback. “The misconception that this amendment somehow delays California’s high-speed rail project is completely false,” she said. 

Mounting criticism

In addition to vested local and statewide interests saddled with the burdens imposed by train construction, the train’s national critics have lined up against the project for political and economic reasons. “Everyone is intrigued by new technology, and certainly we should do all we can to encourage the capital formation that breeds innovation,” wrote National Review’s John Fund. “But building high-speed rail may be all about fighting the last war, given that the first Shinkansen was launched more than 50 years ago in Japan and is clearly not a technology of the future.”

A successful new test by a team working on Elon Musk’s Hyperloop vacuum-train concept has fueled concerns that California’s rail could be obsolescent before it is even finished. Hyperloop One Chief Executive Rob Lloyd has suggested “the most likely scenario to bring a hyperloop to California would be one that ships goods from the docks in Long Beach and San Pedro to warehouses in the Inland Empire,” the Los Angeles Times reported separately. “Almost any other major California project would require overcoming mountainous terrain and securing expensive real estate along farmlands and urban corridors. Both issues have slowed the state’s high-speed rail effort.”

Pointing the finger

Well aware of the adverse reaction awaiting the news, transportation bureaucrats tried to get out ahead of the backlash by fingering rail critics themselves. “State and federal officials downplayed the shift in the timetable, saying it partly reflected more ambitious plans for the Central Valley work, and in any case merely ratified construction realities on the ground,” as Politico noted. “Federal Railroad Administration officials assigned much of the blame for the lags to the project’s vociferous critics, who have tied it up with a tangle of lawsuits, administrative challenges, and other red tape.”

“They complained that the opponents, especially Central Valley farmers and other not-in-my-back-yard landowners, have gotten far more traction against the railway than they would have against a highway, reflecting a cultural and political bias in favor of traditional asphalt infrastructure.”

Hyperloop Transportation Technologies, one of the leading companies dedicated to taking SpaceX CEO Elon Musk’s revolutionary brainchild off the drawing board and into reality, went public with news of its plans to break ground this year. “Construction is set to begin in the second quarter of 2016,” Entrepreneur noted.

In an interview with CNBC, HTT COO Bibop Gresta framed the details in ambitious new terms. “We are announcing the filing of the first building permit to Kings County to the building of the first full-scale hyperloop, not a test track,” he said. “In 36 months we will have the first passenger in the first full-scale hyperloop.”

Ben Cooke, a spokesman for the company, supplied some additional details separately. HTT, he indicated, “hopes to do geological surveys and map out the track in the next six months, then start building. The plan is to use a hyperloop to whisk residents around a proposed development called Quay Valley, south of Kettleman City. Preliminary estimates based on construction bids are that the hyperloop’s cost will be between $100 million and $170 million,” noted Southern California Public Radio.

Rival locations

Gresta made clear, however, that Californians won’t be able to cue up for travel up and down the state quite so soon, CNBC reported, noting that the completed track HTT plans to build won’t stretch between cities. “Gresta said that a full-scale city to city hyperloop could be a reality within five years, but said it will most likely not be in the U.S.,” the network added.

In an interview with a separate network, Gresta raised more eyebrows by suggesting that Russia could be among the first countries to bankroll a hyperloop that does reach from city to city. “Hyperloop Technologies is in talks with a Russian investor to finance the possible building of a new kind of transport, the company’s COO told RT at the World Economic Forum in Davos,” RT reported. “It is likely the government will also be keen on the idea, he believes.”

Speaking about HTT’s current negotiations, Gresta told RT, “We’re talking with a Russian private investor to basically have the first route in Russia, and we’re analyzing different possible solutions between different cities. You can connect Moscow and St. Petersburg in 35 minutes.”

Three ways forward

But HTT, which isn’t alone in the race to develop the hyperloop, made waves at Davos while another company rolled out development news of its own. According to SpaceX itself, Aecom, a global infrastructure firm, will construct “a one-mile track at SpaceX headquarters near Los Angeles International Airport,” as SCPR reported. “If all goes well, by summer’s end, the track will host prototype capsules that emerge from a design competition this weekend at Texas A&M University. The prototype pods would be half the size of the system that Musk envisioned and would not carry people.”

Michael Burke, Aecom chairman and CEO, released a statement portraying the company’s foray into hyperloop construction as a natural next step. Aecom, he said, “has designed and built some of the world’s most impressive transportation systems, so we appreciate how the development of a functioning Hyperloop with SpaceX can dramatically expand the ways people move across cities, countries and continents.”

A third firm has already forged ahead with a similar test track across the California border in North Las Vegas, “Hyperloop Technologies Inc. says that track will be used to develop ways to propel capsules,” SCPR observed. “The company plans to build a second, full-scale loop to test a prototype, spokeswoman Meredith Kendall said.”

Speculation has swirled around the debut of another entrant into California’s crowded, cutting-edge automotive industry. The company, known as Faraday Future, “has been hunting for a place to build what it says will be a $1 billion manufacturing plant for a new line of cars,” reported the San Francisco Chronicle. “Four states are contenders and the company says to expect an announcement within weeks.”

Contenders for the site included not only California but Georgia, Nevada and Louisiana, Faraday Future Product Development Chief Nick Sampson said, according to the Wall Street Journal. “Mr. Sampson is one of a team of former Tesla executives now leading Faraday Future. Like Tesla, Faraday Future is named after an inventor from the 19th century.”

High hopes, low profile

The company has responded to the media spotlight by cultivating an air of mystery from its Gardena headquarters south of Los Angeles — the former home to Nissan’s sales HQ, noted the Journal. Reporters have had to wade through obscure documents to collect details about Faraday’s origins. “Though it won’t confirm the source of its funds, documents filed in California point to a parent company run by a Chinese billionaire who styles himself after Apple’s late Steve Jobs,” the Chronicle observed.

That billionaire has been identified as Jia Yueting, the chairman of Chinese tech company LeTV, short for Leshi Internet Information & Television — one of the largest online video companies in China. “He recently launched a line of smartphones and acquired a 70 percent stake in Yidao Yongche, an Uber-like car service in China,” reported the Los Angeles Times.

In a press conference late last year, Leshi spokesperson Jiang Dongge said the company has “already organized a research and development team based in Silicon Valley about a year ago, with experts poached from traditional car companies including Tesla Motors, Mercedes-Benz and Ford Motor Company working on the forthcoming model. Leshi is also in touch with Google as well as other technology firms based in Silicon Valley,” he claimed, according to Forbes Asia.

Close competition

Although some Californians may bristle at the thought of a Chinese company pouring billions into competition with homegrown Silicon Valley products, analysts have linked up Faraday’s relative secrecy to its interest in foreign, not American, markets. “A lot of the evidence to support Faraday Future’s backing from the Chinese tech conglomerate is of public record. So why all the dodging from Faraday? It may have something to do with the way the company plans to market its vehicles,” Techcrunch speculated. “According to a source familiar with the matter, Faraday Future needs to be seen as a U.S.-based Tesla rival. ‘Chinese people don’t want to buy Chinese products,'” said the source.

But the dizzying costs of launching a high-end electric car company have ensured that any additional player in the marketplace will squeeze relatively more established firms. And Faraday has already been preceded in California by another Chinese concern. “Karma Automotive, formerly Fisker Automotive, which is based in Southern California, has revived its hopes after China’s Wanxiang Group Corp. bought the failed hybrid-electric supercar maker out of bankruptcy in 2014,” the Journal reported. “The company has secured a manufacturing facility in Southern California and is planning to sell a new car in 2016.”

Cross-border competition

For their part, California officials faced a fresh possibility of losing out to neighboring Nevada on big-ticket electric car construction. “If North Las Vegas lands the factory,” Bloomberg noted of Faraday’s future plant, “it would be the second major coup for Nevada as it attempts to diversify its economy and promote itself as a center of electric-car manufacturing. Tesla is building the world’s largest lithium-ion battery factory east of Reno after Gov. Brian Sandoval last year signed off on tax breaks worth as much as $1.3 billion for a plant on which Tesla expects to spend $10 billion over 15 years.”

As the latest model of Musk’s Tesla automobile scored the highest-ever rating given by Consumer Reports (99 out of 100) his even more revolutionary Hyperloop concept gained new respect, with one firm closing key deals that could bring established global expertise to bear on the Hyperloop’s demanding requirements.

Construction heavyweights

The Los Angeles-based Hyperloop Transportation Technologies, or HTT, recently announced a significant new agreement with Oerlikon Leybold Vacuum and with engineering goliath Aecom. The three companies agreed “to begin construction on a full-scale Hyperloop prototype running alongside Interstate 5 through five miles of Quay Valley in the San Joaquin Valley of California,” as the International Business Times reported. Despite stubborn skepticism around the ultimate feasibility of Musk’s Hyperloop concept, “HTT’s new partnership with Oerlikon and Aecom (which is involved with the rail tunnel being constructed beneath the streets of London), publicly traded companies with a responsibility to shareholders, is validation that Musk’s blueprints could eventually pay off,” IBT noted.

Adding to Aecom’s expertise with massive construction projects, the Oerlikon partnership sent a strong signal that investors and tech watchers ought to take Hyperloop much more seriously. “Oerlikon has been in the vacuum business for more than a century, and has worked on projects like the large hadron collider at CERN,” Wired observed.

Although energy and cost were substantial hurdles to success, according to Oerlikon business development chief Carl Brockmeyer, the most surreal aspect of Hyperloop — the sheer creation of a vaccuum-sealed shuttle track hundreds of miles long — ranked relatively low on the list of challenges. “I don’t think the construction hurdles are significant compared to other technologies that are already out there,” he told Wired. “From a technical point of view, it’s not a challenge. We are used to much higher and harsher applications.”

Still, said Brockmeyer, “you will be surprised” by how low the energy requirements could be, relatively speaking. “In fact, he says the energy could be generated by the solar panels and wind turbines” that HTT chief Dirk Ahlborn has decided to set up in Quay Valley — the planned community paralleling California’s Interstate 5 highway, alongside which a closely-watched Hyperloop test track will be constructed.

The race for design

Hyperloop still has not settled on a specific design for the “pods” that will carry passengers inside the vacuum train. But with a Musk-sponsored contest around the bend, researchers — especially in academia — are gearing up to the task. Universities including Purdue and Texas A&M were set to introduce courses on Hyperloop design and engineering, with the University of Illinois and other schools assembling teams to vie for victory in Elon Musk’s SpaceX Hyperloop Pod Competition, according to Gizmodo.

“The competition, which is slated for June 2016, is aimed at university students and will enable selected applicants to try out their pod design on a one-mile Hyperloop test track that will be built adjacent to the SpaceX headquarters in Hawthorne, California,” Business Insider reported when Musk announced the event this June. Finalists will be selected by committee and announced at the start of next year, at the so-called Design Weekend hosted by Texas A&M itself.

According to the detailed rules laid down by SpaceX, pods must weigh in under 11,000 pounds and measure under 14 feet long, Popular Science reported. “Among the other requirements, they also have to have brakes, communications, telemetry, and it is recommended that the pods levitate.” the SpaceX rules state that, while any “mechanism(s) for levitation is up to the entrant and is not actually required,” vehicles with wheels “(e.g. an ‘electric car in a vacuum’) can compete, but are unlikely to win prizes.”