Over the weekend, Elon Musk’s SpaceX held its third hyperloop competition with a focus on speed — how fast can teams get a hyperloop pod to travel along a one-mile track?
For the third time in a row, it was the Technical University of Munich team, WARR Hyperloop, taking the prize, reaching a final speed of 467 km/h (290 mph). The speed beats WARR Hyperloop’s previous record speed of 323 km/h (200 mph) that it set at the second competition held in September of last year.
The third SpaceX competition was a competition between teams of universities around the world that tested their pods on SpaceX’s test track. Delft Hyperloop, which had hopes of showcasing their pod and achieving the highest speed, experienced technical difficulties with their pod and were able to still achieve the second place position with a speed of 88 mph. EPF Loop of Switzerland managed third place with speeds of 55 mph.
This third competition, which took place at SpaceX’s headquarters in Hawthorne, California, was a bit different from the previous two contests in that the pods had to be self-propelled, although they could use a pusher supplied by SpaceX.
The competition was between 20 teams from research institutes and universities from around the world including ETH Zurich, University of California, Berkeley, University of Wisconsin-Madison, University of Edinburgh, University of Texas at Austin, École Polytechnique Fédérale de Lausanne and many more.
