Sitting in crippling traffic on the West Side Freeway from LA bound for San Francisco, Musk gazed out of his car window in frustration, thinking and believing there must be a better way to travel than this, a quicker, safer and more environmentally friendly solution. Entrepreneurs and big thinkers usually stumble upon their finest moments when looking for a solution to a problem. Musk's answer may seem a little whacky but it might just work.

How about loading yourself into an enormous shotgun shell and shooting yourself 400 miles across the earths surface at speeds reaching up to an beyond 800 mph. It sounds bonkers, but Musk believes it will work. And if he doesn’t build it, someone else will. Musk’s proposal to change the face of mass transit forever has been named the Hyperloop. It would propel passengers in individual aluminum pods powered by turbines and solar energy in above-ground tubes, cost $6-10 billion to build, and make the trip from San Francisco to Los Angeles in 35 minutes. 

The concept for the Hyperloop was born from an idea similar to the vacuum tubes used to shuttle the check from your car to the bank. But maintaining that level of vacuum for hundreds of miles, according to Musk, was untenable. “The basic calculations for energy was enormous,” Musk recently stated. And it’s also incredibly dangerous. So Musk enlisted a group of engineers from his companies Tesla and Space X to begin investigating the idea in more detail. They wanted to use existing technology, require as little land as possible, and get pressure down inside the tube, determining that about half-bar was the sweet spot. And now Musk and Friends have released the concept to the world.

While there appear to be some pretty major kinks in the tube that need to be worked out in Musk’s plans, we love to see entrepreneurs dream big like this. To make the Hyperloop a reality, scientists would of course need to build and test it, and civic leaders would need to sort out the economics of such an ambitious project. But even if it never gets built, the Hyperloop will be the most important and inspiring thing to happen to transportation this year.