When Elon Musk sent out a challenge to all university students and research teams to work on the next generation of transportation and technology, the University of Illinois Urbana-Champaign mechanical engineering students answered.
They have been working on the Hyperloop project since 2013 and they are doubling down on speed. The future of transportation, according to Elon Musk, may start with a pod system traveling through a tube and will work on speeds of up to 760 mph.
But what makes the Illinois Hyperloop pod special? The University of Illinois team is developing a vehicle that is light weight. The weight will enable to pod to accelerate rapidly, as reported by Chicago Inno. Blake Johnson, the faculty adviser to the team, says that their goal is speed and only speed.
That is their only priority when it comes to the Hyperloop pod. The University of Illinois team is just one out of the 30 teams that are participating during this weekend's competition at SpaceX. Regardless of their competitors, the team is confident that their prototype has serious potential.
Their pod is about 7 feet in length and 3 feet in width. And the thing that makes their pod a huge deal is that it weighs less than 150 pounds. With the use of magnetic levitation, they figure that it is going to work well on the Hyperloop track at SpaceX.
However, their pod is not designed to hold people yet. And this means it does not hold any "creature comforts." But they are confident that it can go as fast as possible. Their current goal is 250 mph. Although they know that the pods will need to hold people, the Illinois team just wants to focus on speed for now. They have been waiting for the competition to happen ever since SpaceX delayed the dates for six more months, as reported by Fortune.
Watch the unveiling of the Illinois pod below:
