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These German students just smashed a hyperloop speed record

This is the students' third time winning the SpaceX hyperloop pod competition.

Marrian Zhou Staff Reporter
Marrian Zhou is a Beijing-born Californian living in New York City. She joined CNET as a staff reporter upon graduation from Columbia Journalism School. When Marrian is not reporting, she is probably binge watching, playing saxophone or eating hot pot.
Marrian Zhou
2 min read

Hyperloop test in progress.

A student group in Munich just smashed the SpaceX hyperloop speed record.

WARR Hyperloop, a group of engineering students at the Technical University of Munich, won the SpaceX hyperloop pod competition on Sunday. WARR's pod set a competition record with a top speed of 284 miles per hour.

The victory marked the third time the group has won the competition. WARR's pod hit a top speed that was 50 percent faster than the record it set last year, according to TechCrunch.

"After the second competition, we realized we could build something that would run even faster than our previous pod in the tube," Gabriele Semino, the group's project leader, said in an email statement. "After many months of hard work yesterday we finally got a chance to test our new pod in the tube and show how fast we can go."

SpaceX, run by billionaire Elon Musk, held its first first hyperloop competition in January last year, where the winning pod reportedly traveled at 58 miles per hour. The competition had two main rules -- all pods must be self-propelled and the winner is solely judged on maximum speed without crashing.

Musk congratulated the team in a tweet.

Last December, Richard Branson's Virgin Hyperloop One tested its own pod, hitting a speed of 240 miles per hour. When asked if WARR's pod is faster, Semino said that "it's rather hard to compare the records in the two facilities, as they are very different in length and propulsion system."

Hyperloop is a revolutionary transportation concept that can travel at nearly the speed of sound. Passengers sit in a pod inside a nearly airless tube that runs underground. The pod is powered by electric motors and levitated by powerful magnets in the tube.

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