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Here's What Happens If The Hyperloop Crashes

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A cutaway of the Hyperloop, showing the passengers wearing seatbelts..  Elon Musk / SpaceX

Elon Musk's plan for a pressurized "Hyperloop" transport system between San Francisco and Los Angeles contains a contingency in case there's a crash.

Musk doesn't use the word "crash" specifically, but there's a whole section devoted to safety, depressurization, and structural integrity.

And the diagrams note that the passengers are wearing seatbelts. There is only one reason to wear a seatbelt, of course — crashes.

Musk starts by saying that the system will likely be safer than other forms of transport:

The system is immune to wind, ice, fog, and rain. The propulsion system is integrated into the tube and can only accelerate the capsule to speeds that are safe in each section. With human control error and unpredictable weather removed from the system, very few safety concerns remain.

In many cases Hyperloop is intrinsically safer than airplanes, trains, or automobiles.

But in the event of a serious incident, passengers may lose oxygen — they're inside a sealed tube, after all. So Oxygen masks would be deployed:

In the case of a more significant depressurization, oxygen masks would be deployed as in airplanes. Once the capsule reached the destination safely it would be removed from service. Safety of the onboard air supply in Hyperloop would be very similar to aircraft, and can take advantage of decades of development in similar systems.

The passenger capsules — which coast through the tubes, pushed in front of a column of pressurized air — are coasting for much of their journey, so they have emergency brakes and engine-driven wheels in case they are stranded or need to avoid hitting a stranded Hyperloop car:

In the unlikely event of a large scale capsule depressurization, other capsules in the tube would automatically begin emergency braking whilst the Hyperloop tube would undergo rapid re-pressurization along its entire length.

Once all capsules behind the stranded capsule had been safely brought to rest, capsules would drive themselves to safety using small onboard electric motors to power deployed wheels. All capsules would be equipped with a reserve air supply great enough to ensure the safety of all passengers for a worst case scenario event.

Read Musk's entire Hyperloop design here.

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Jim is the former editor-in-chief of Insider's news division.Previously he was the founding editor of Business Insider UK.He has also been managing editor at Adweek, an advertising columnist at CBS Interactive, and a Knight-Bagehot Fellow at Columbia Business School. His work has appeared in Slate, Salon, The Independent, MTV, The Nation and AOL.His investigative journalism changed the law in the US First Circuit Court of Appeals (U.S. v. Kravetz), the Third Circuit Court of Appeals (North Jersey Media v. Ashcroft), New Jersey (In Re El-Atriss), and New York State (Mosallem v. Berenson).The US Supreme Court cited his work on the death penalty in the concurrence to Baze v. Rees, on the issue of whether lethal injection is cruel or unusual.He won the Neal award for business journalism in 2005 for a series investigating bribes and kickbacks in the advertising business.Here's a selection of his past stories:    The alleged betrayal in these photos, texts, and emails cost Snapchat $158 million    Inside the conspiracy that forced Dov Charney out of American Apparel    The Evolution of Ev: The creator of Twitter, Blogger, and Medium has a plan to fix the mess he made of the internet    THE "KNOCK-IN SHORT": Nigel Farage and the massive bet against the pound on the night of the Brexit vote    eBay worked with the FBI to put its top affiliate marketer in prison    How Dunkin Donuts ended up hiring a psychotic credit card thief as director of communications    BEJEWELED: The definitive, illustrated history of the most underrated game ever   • The CEO of Publicis told us how he stared down a furious internal rebellion to bet the future of his $11 billion company on artificial intelligence   • FBX: The billion-dollar Facebook business that never happened   • The €150 million check-kiting scam that bankrupted Leo Burnett in Greece   • My Polaroids of the September 11 attacks led me into America's secret court system for terrorist suspects   • YouTube deleted 130 rap videos to help police fight street gangs responsible for thousands of stabbingsDisclosure: I own shares of Twitter (TWTR).