Speed thrills: Germans dominate Hyperloop Pod Competition at Hawthorne’s SpaceX for second year in a row

It’s one thing to put a student engineering project on the line in front of more than 1,000 people. It’s another to have SpaceX founder Elon Musk looking over your shoulder.

Musk – the high-profile high-tech pioneer who also created Tesla and The Boring Company –  stood behind the WARR Hyperloop team from the Technical University of Munich as they prepared to defend their championship at the Hyperloop Pod Competition at the SpaceX campus in Hawthorne on Sunday.

The team positioned their custom-built vehicle within a mile-long tube about six feet in diameter – scaled to about half the size needed for human travel – then sealed the large metal door shut.

Before the pod could be launched, all the air needed to be drawn from the tube so a vacuum could create a nearly friction-less environment, while magnets allowed the pod to hover over the metal I-beam.

When the countdown finished and the pod launched through the tube, all audience members could do was watch the monitors as the hand-built craft screamed past cameras followed by the cheers and jubilation of the student team.

The pod reached 284 miles per hour, earning them first place – and breaking the team’s record from last year.

“This is very exciting,” Musk said afterward. “You guys got me fired up! This is good!”

WARR team lead Gabriele Semino said the competition was really against themselves – and their performance last year.

“We tried to take the learning from last year and optimize them in every way,” Semino said. “For us, the most important thing is that what we’ve done actually works. We’ve spent days and nights working on this pod because we want to show how fast we can go.”

Next year, Musk said he plans to hold the competition within the underground tunnel created by his Boring Company, under the city of Hawthorne and not far from Sunday’s event. It dug as part of experiment Musk launched after vowing to deliver a solution to Los Angeles County’s “soul-crushing” traffic

By that time, Musk said the tunnel should be more than a mile long – with a curve in it.

“It might add more drama,” he told members of the WARR team in a Facebook Live video.

Elon’s got quite the following here at the @hyperloop. pic.twitter.com/WnalD5jnqh

— David Rosenfeld (@RosenfeldReport) July 22, 2018

Musk arrived around 2 p.m. to the day-long event, drawing an ever-growing following of fans as he walked through the exhibits and visited with several teams. In remarks before a crowd of about 1,000 people, Musk said he was blown away by the progress around hyperloop technology.

Just five years ago Musk authored a white paper where he first proposed the hyperloop concept, potentially capable of turning a trip from Los Angeles to San Francisco into a 45-minute journey. The plan to create vacuum-sealed tubes in which trains could reach speeds of 700 miles per hour at a fraction of the cost of high-speed rail – an estimated $7 billion versus $77 billion – has set in motion a cottage industry.

“A lot people around the world don’t know this exists,” Musk said. “They want to do the same old thing and create another train or something like this. This is the first time to truly create a new form of transportation that can radically change cities and the way people get around. It will be a radical improvement.”

Creating the contest was a way for Musk and those who believed in the concept to spur innovation.

Clearly they have.

Steve Davis, who heads The Boring Company, said the first year of the contest drew 1,000 entries, teams coming together from various universities across the nation and the world.

“Not only is it a great competition, but it really means the entire world is serious about making transportation better,” Davis said.

Here comes the defending champs, @WARR_Hyperloop from University of Munich, hoping to break 200 mph at the #hyperlooppodcompetition pic.twitter.com/UBSFc6vGnR

— David Rosenfeld (@RosenfeldReport) July 22, 2018

For students such as Andrew Ching from the University of Santa Barbara, participating in the event has motivated him to work harder.

“You come here and you realize why SpaceX is such a prestigious company,” Ching said. “Every time I come here, it puts me in a different mindset.”

Ching and his team focused only on the magnetic levitation portion of the hyperloop technology, entering a separate competition. So, the pod they built only had to hover above the aluminum surface and complete a 75-foot track – then return to its starting point.

“Going fast is cool, but the levitation part is really the ‘wow’ part for us,” Ching said.

The first time the pod rose up off the track, he said it was “magical.”

“We’re flying, even though it’s only a quarter inch off the ground,” he said. “To see that once you levitate, you can give it a shove and it goes because there’s no friction is really amazing.”

In the levitation competition, the team from UCSB had only one other competitor, the Spartan Hyperloop team from San Jose State University, but their pod had technical difficulties and could not compete. The reality is that the vast majority of the 20 teams, roughly 600 competing students, did not actually get to run on the test track.

Throughout the week, teams ran their pods on an open air track at the SpaceX headquarters where they were judged on a series of tests to earn the right to race down the actual tube. Four teams made it to the finals and three ran on Sunday including, WARR Hyperloop, EPF Hyperloop from Switzerland and a team from Delft University of Technology in Netherlands.

Miles Richman, a mechanical engineering student competing with the HyperXite team from University of California at Irvine, said just being a part of the event was a great experience – even though the pod did not make it to the final round.

“It’s great to see everyone come together and work on a common goal of trying to build the next form of transportation,” Richman said. “It’s really cool.”

For each of the teams, earning sponsorships was an important way to raise money and resources. Sponsors such as Sierra Circuits from the Bay Area have as much to learn as the students, said Rachel Whalon, who attended the event on Sunday. The company donated a circuit board to the team from San Jose State.

“Aside from giving back to the research and development of technology in our community, we also get to try to do new things with circuit boards,” Whalon said. “Every time we make a new type of board for a new type of technology that increases our knowledge. We learn as much as they do along the way.”