For the winning Hyperloop Pod team, it was always about ‘maximum speed’

On Sunday afternoon, all three teams competing in the final round of the second

edition of the SpaceX Hyperloop Pod Competition were confident they’d perform well at the event held in Hawthorne, California. Then WARR Hyperloop hit the button and quickly the contest ended. And Elon Musk did not hesitate to declare the 200-mph hyperloop pod from Munich the winner of the second competition. “THE COMPETITION IS MAXIMUM SPEED, SO WE LOOKED AT ALL OF OUR OPTIONS TO GET MAXIMUM SPEED” It was an early favorite, after all. At just 176 pounds and with a super-efficient set of batteries, the WARR team from the University of Munich was there to go as fast as they could to win. “The whole idea for us is that we’re interested in competition,” said Martin Riedel, a 24-year-old engineer on the team. “And the competition is maximum speed, so we looked at all of our options to get maximum speed.” But what won? It was briefly described as an electric car by event organizers, but the sleek carbon fiber-topped pod had the exterior profile of a fast train. “It’s like a mixture between a car and a train,” Riedel said of his team’s project. “It’s an electric motor on a wheel, but it pivots at one point and clamps down at the other.”                                                                                                            https://www.theverge.com/2017/8/29/16214432/spacex-hyperloop-pod-competition-warr-elon-musk