EPFLoop in the running again

The EPFLoop team - which took home third place in last year's Hyperloop Pod Competition - has been selected to compete again, making it one of around 20 short-listed teams that will head to California this summer. The pressure was on. Not only did last year's EPFLoop team put in a hugely successful showing, but this year's team invested a lot of time and energy in a design that would make it through the qualification round. However, the effort paid off - the team was one of the 20-odd entrants selected to compete in the 2019 Hyperloop Pod Competition, beating out thousands of other hopefuls. "Even though we've already spent hundreds of hours putting together our team, designing our pod and finding sponsors, the real work is only just beginning," says Lorenzo Benedetti, the EPFLoop team's technical leader. The idea for the Hyperloop Pod Competition came from Tesla and SpaceX founder Elon Musk, who wanted to promote a fifth kind of transportation - in addition to cars, trains, planes and boats - whereby passengers travel in pods propelled through vacuum tubes called Hyperloops at speeds of up to 1,000 km/h. His company SpaceX launched the Competition in 2015 to test the technical feasibility of his idea.