About a year ago, I wrote a story 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 of traveling with 700 of km/h, closed. down.

Well, I stand corrected. The Hyperloop, in fact, lives on – as a 1/12 scale model in Switzerland.

Sure, that’s not quite the full realization of Musk’s 2013 white paper, in which he theorized that aluminum aerodynamic capsules filled with passengers or cargo could be propelled through a near-airless tube at speeds of up to 760 mph . These tubes, either raised on poles or sunk underground, could be built either within cities or between cities. Musk called it the “fifth mode of transportation” and claimed it could help change the way we live, work, trade and travel.

The idea is being put to the test in Lausanne, Switzerland, where a 120-meter circular test track is operated by a team that includes the Lausanne Federal Institute of Technology (EPFL), the Vaud School of Business and Engineering (HEIG-VD). ), and Swisspod Technologies. This week, the group announced that it had conducted 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 in). It sounds modest, but the group claims that in a full-scale system, their test “directly translates” to a journey of 141.6 km (88 miles), which is roughly the distance from Geneva to Bern, or San Francisco to Sacramento and speeds 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 assessed “power consumption, traction variations, response (linear induction motor) and control during acceleration, cruising, drifting and braking scenarios.”

Of course, a 1/12 scale circular test track is hardly a sign that the hyperloop is alive and well. Most startups and companies pursuing a large-scale hyperloop have shut down, victims of financial mismanagement as well as infrastructure and regulatory hurdles. Critics have said that while the hyperloop may be technically feasible, it is still just vaporware. It was called a “utopian vision” which would be financially impossible.

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

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

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

The Boring Company, Musk’s tunneling operation, is still digging underground passages in Las Vegas — but for Tesla, not hyperloops. The future, it would seem, is much the same as the present.