Here's the latest mesmerizing video of a Hyperloop pod going over 200 mph
The Elon Musk social-media onslaught of promotion for his products and technology continues, and today we have another mesmerizing image of a Hyperloop pod speeding down the test track, seemingly faster than the last one we saw.
In the last test we saw, a Hyperloop One pod hit 192 mph, a new speed record for tubular travel. That pod, the The Hyperloop One XP-1, is a prototype of an actual passenger pod. (No passengers were sharply accelerated and decelerated in the making of that video.)
The pod in this latest video, however, was an entrant in a weekend competition by Musk's own separate Hyperloop project under the auspices of SpaceX, in which teams, mostly from universities, were invited to compete for speed. The winner, by the Warr team from the University of Munich, was not designed to carry passengers, just make speed — the passengers would have to be mighty small, as the pod weighed less than 200 pounds. And speed it made, exceeding 200 mph on Musk's three-quarter-mile test track in Hawthorne, Calif.
What's cool about the video is, of course, its futuristic, trance-enducing quality of the boost phase, but also the image of the pod's braking phase, in which it throws up a cloud of brake dust or steam or something in the process.
Tesla and SpaceX founder Musk first came up with the idea of Hyperloop travel, but he has no business relationship with Hyperloop One. He is working on his own Hyperloop project, and on Twitter, he announced weeks ago that he had received "verbal govt approval" to build a Hyperloop route connecting New York, Philadelphia, Baltimore and Washington D.C. We've heard no more about that claim since then.
That East Coast course, assuming his tweet was not simply Hyperloop hyperbole, would be built underground, using Musk's other side project, The Boring Company.
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