A bunch of college engineers hit a top speed of 288mph in Elon Musk's Hyperloop pod competition

Mike Blake/Reuters

SpaceX runs the Hyperloop engineering competition every year.

• Elon Musk's SpaceX held its annual Hyperloop pod race on Sunday.
• Teams of college engineers race pods through the specially-built Hawthorne tunnel by SpaceX's headquarters in California.
• A team of engineers from the Technical University of Munich (TUM) won the competition for the fourth year in a row, with their pod reaching a top speed of 288mph, even though some parts broke off while it was whizzing through the tunnel.
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A team of German engineers have won Elon Musk's underground pod racing competition once again.

For the last four years Elon Musk's company SpaceX has run the Hyperloop pod race for college engineers. The race takes place in a tunnel roughly a mile long by Hawthorne, California headquarters.

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Teams of engineers see who can build the pod that can be whisked through the tunnel fastest. The last three races have been won by a team of engineers from the Technical University of Munich, and this year was no exception.

Team TUM Hyperloop (formerly known as WARR Hyperloop) built a pod which zoomed through the tunnel at a top speed of 288mph, 2mph slower than last year.

They were awarded first place despite the pod experiencing what one observer described as "rapid unplanned disassembly."

TUM Hyperloop also mentioned the pod "lost some parts on the way."

Hyperloop is part of Elon Musk's high-speed transportation ambitions, and is bound up with the Boring Company, a tunnel-digging company set up by Musk which got its first paying client in May of this year. Conceptually, the hyperloop is a sealed tunnel system that would allow pods to travel through it at high speed, and with little air resistance. The pods would theoretically carry freight or passengers.

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Following the competition Elon Musk made the surprise announcement on Twitter that next year the tunnel will be 10km (just over 6 miles) long.

According to TechCrunch, this is at odds with Boring Company President Steve Davis, who reportedly said earlier during the competition that the Hawthorne test tunnel can take an additional 200 meters.