At Motherboard, John Gardi guesses at the nature of Elon Musk’s Hyperloop, a guess which the Tesla Motors chief says is the best one he’s seen. An excerpt:

“I believe that Hyperloop is merely a modern day version of the pneumatic tubes used in banks, stores, and industry to move money and small items over long distances or to other floors of a building. They’ve been around for over a century, though not so much these days. There is only one in my town that I know of, and it has fallen into disuse. One reason I think Hyperloop is simpler than folks think is that Elon Musk has resurrected another technology from the depths of time, one that was a contender once, too: the electric car!

The main focus of this document will be to show how we might accomplish Elon Musk’s claim that his Hyperloop concept could be built for a 10th of the cost of California’s proposed high speed rail. Using technology no more complicated than warehouse building, I’ll discuss how the Hyperloop’s main line between Los Angeles and San Francisco might be constructed well within Musk’s estimates. 

I’ll describe an overall design as well as construction techniques—since the main line will comprise the bulk of Hyperloop’s hardware, this will be where cost reduction matters the most.

With what clues we all know now, I do believe I can make a pretty good (self) educated guess about how Hyperloop’s main line could be built and why it could be done cost effectively. There’s a lot we can extrapolate without having to augur down into the nuts and bolts of Hyperloop’s specific technologies.

I’ll leave that part to Elon Musk himself on August 12th.”