North Carolina's high-tech Research Triangle may get even more advanced in years to come.
The Tar Heel State announced on Friday that it is exploring options to bring Virgin Hyperloop One technology to the Raleigh-Durham-Chapel Hill corridor, which has grown into a hub for technology companies and research universities.
"You can literally begin to start thinking about the cities like they're metro stops," Jay Walder, the CEO of Virgin Hyperloop One, told Cheddar. North Carolina's inquiry makes it the ninth state to explore hyperloop as a potential regional transportation system.
"We have stopped our imagination somewhere around 1956, which is when the interstate highway system was created, and it is time to restart our imagination," Walder said.
Virgin Hyperloop One, which was developed by Virgin founder Richard Branson, is the first company to successfully operate a full-scale hyperloop vehicle system, which uses electric propulsion and electromagnetic levitation in depressurized tubes to propel vehicles at hundreds of miles per hour.
"Imagine being in a super-fast vehicle that is completely smooth, no turbulence moving at airline speed," Walder added.
Although still in its early stages, hyperloop technology is proving to be a far faster, safer, and more environmentally friendly alternative to traditional forms of transportation, according to the company.
"The Research Triangle area is uniquely positioned from a technology focus, spatial layout, and favorable mid-East Coast location to benefit from a hyperloop travel solution that could quickly link America's R&D cities of Raleigh and Durham with each other and with neighboring regions in the southeast and mid-Atlantic," Joe Milazzo II, the executive director of North Carolina's Regional Transportation Alliance, said in a statement.
Trips between Raleigh, Durham, and Chapel Hill are expected to be under 10 minutes, according Virgin Hyperloop One's initial estimates.
"You can take it a step further — Raleigh-Durham to Washington DC it just over 35 minutes," Walder told Cheddar.
Tesla reported a surprise increase in sales in the third quarter as the electric car maker likely benefited from a rush by consumers to take advantage of a $7,500 credit before it expired on Sept. 30. The company reported Thursday that sales in the three months through September rose 7% compared to the same period a year ago. The gain follows two quarters of steep declines as people turned off by CEO Elon Musk’s foray into right-wing politics avoided buying his company’s cars and even protested at some dealerships. Sales rose to 497,099 vehicles, compared with 462,890 in the same period last year.
OpenAI could now be the world’s most valuable startup, ahead of Elon Musk’s SpaceX and TikTok parent company ByteDance, after a secondary stock sale designed to retain employees at the ChatGPT maker. Current and former OpenAI employees sold $6.6 billion in shares to a group of investors, pushing the privately held artificial intelligence company’s valuation to $500 billion, according to a source with knowledge of the deal who was not authorized to discuss it publicly. The valuation reflects high expectations for the future of AI technology and continues OpenAI’s remarkable trajectory from its start as a nonprofit research lab in 2015.
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