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Adjacent to SpaceX headquarters, 25 teams gathered for another Hyperloop Pod Competition. This time the winner would be judged by how quickly they could go down the 1.25 kilometer (about .77 miles) track. On the final day of competition, three teams advanced to the finals and had the chance to push their pod to the limit.
With a speed of just over 200 miles per-hour, the Warr (pronounced Varr) team from the Technical University of Munich handily beat the two other finalists with its small, but quick pod. Weighing just 80 kg (176 pounds) and powered by a 50kw motor, the vehicle was essentially a small electric car built specifically for winning the competition.
[...] At the end of the competition, SpaceX CEO Elon Musk mused that there's no reason why future pods in the competition couldn't hit 500 to 600 miles per-hour on the 1.25 kilometer track. Of course that means that there will be another Hyperloop Pod Competition sometime next year and who knows, maybe we'll see pods hitting the speeds that'll make the mode of transportation truly rival air travel.
Source: https://www.engadget.com/2017/08/27/hyperloop-pod-competition-winner-hits-200-mph/
(Score: 2) by Open4D on Tuesday August 29 2017, @02:12PM
Sounds about right. But I believe Musk was just suggesting they could do high speed tests even on their short test track. (Without humans)
In a real life system, the acceleration and deceleration would be slow enough to be comfortable for humans, and yet still only a small part of the journey time.
There's a graph of this at the top of page 43 of the original PDF [spacex.com] It seems that for the LA->SF journey, they looked at the geography and planned for 3 separate cruising speeds, with 3 phases of acceleration and 3 phases of deceleration. The slopes of the lines are nearly vertical, but I think they are accurate, and represent perfectly comfortable 'g forces'.