【Student Wife (2016)】

Shrugging off internecine battles and Student Wife (2016)public lawsuits, Hyperloop One on Tuesday announced an official agreement with greater Dubai and the United Arab Emirates to launch a feasibility study for building one of the first hyperloop transportation systems in the Arab desert.

And Hyperloop One is selling that feasibility with sizzle.

The two-and-a-half-minute video the company launched as part of this announcement (and which it teased on Monday) reveals exactly how its proposed sub-supersonic, ground-based transportation system will work in Dubai and connecting locations. Hyperloop One claims that such a system could cut the travel time between Abu Dhabi and Dubai from a 90-minute to 12-minute drive.

The slickly produced video shows a businessman in Dubai who realizes that he's about to miss his mom's birthday. He books a trip on Hyperloop One through his smartphone and then boards a pod that takes him to the Hyperloop One system.

Those pods are easily the most interesting feature of the video. Passengers will board Pods at Hyperloop One terminals. Each one will then converge on a single Hyperloop One tube. The box-like vessels fit four at a time inside the cylindrical transporters that then fit inside the Hyperloop One tubes. It's enough encasement to freak out those with even a mild case of claustrophobia. However, in the video, the passenger, who is traveling at about the same speed as an airplane, sees the outside world, or at least screen projections of what's flying by his window.

When we last joined Hyperloop One, it was suffering through an embarrassing battle with its former CTO, a legal skirmish that happened just weeks after the company successfully tested its frictionless propulsion system. At the time, the company said it was aiming for human transportation by 2021 and appeared to be targeting the U.S., with a launch most likely in the innovation and development-friendly state of Nevada.

However, now Dubai and the UAE are the targets.

In the release of the news, Shervin Pishevar, the executive chairman of Hyperloop One said, "Dubai makes perfect sense for Hyperloop One because this is the 21st century’s global transport hub and its leaders understand that Hyperloop One is ushering in the next era of transportation." It's statement that suggests that some other potential partners didn't quite understand the mission.

Hyperloop One has not stopped building in Nevada. It promises a full-scale test there by 2017 and said in the release that it's still projecting "multiple operational Hyperloop systems" by 2021.

Obviously, Hyperloop One is still a fair distance from an approval to build a transportation line in the desert from Dubai to Abu Dhabi. For now, the agreement only promises an evaluation by McKinsey & Company and Bjarke Ingels Group (BIG).

We've asked Hyperloop One for comment on the status of the lawsuits (sources tell us litigation is still making its way through the legal process), how long the study will take and what a single Hyperloop ride might cost and will update this post with responses.

(Editor: {typename type="name"/})