The Hyperloop India team was founded in 2015 when a few ambitious students from the Pilani campus got together with an aim to build India’s first Hyperloop pod prototype put forward as a challenge by Elon Musk. Collaborating with students from the Goa and Hyderabad campuses, the team made an impression on the Hyperloop scene almost immediately. For those unaware, the Hyperloop is a mass transit system consisting of passenger and cargo pod-like vehicles plying every few seconds, travelling inside a semi-vacuum tube, floating using magnetic levitation and propelled using linear motors first, suggested by Elon Musk in 2013.

They are the first and only Indian team out of the 24 selected for the SpaceX Hyperloop Pod Competition, which asked competitors to build a pod and test it out on a one-mile long track in Hawthorne, CA. The team has students from all three Indian campuses of BITS Pilani, and the work was divided in a modular fashion.  The Pilani campus handled the under-structure of the pod, including the levitation, braking and vehicle dynamics. The Goa campus took care of electronics while the Hyderabad campus handled structural aspects like aerodynamics. The teams conferenced online every week to keep each other updated of progress and to discuss strategies. They raised upwards of 1 crore in cash and kind through various sponsors and an additional 35 lakhs via crowdfunding.

An important benchmark for the team was their participation in a competition called Hyperloop One Global Challenge while partnering up with teams from ISB and IIMA. This contest involved creating a comprehensive case study on the practical aspects of establishing and maintaining a hyperloop network in India. Out of the 2600 teams that applied from all over the world,  Hyperloop India was one of the 35 selected for the semi-finals. The team then gathered at Bangalore to strike the right partnerships, raise money, build India’s first Hyperloop pod prototype and ship it halfway across the world within a span of just two and a half months.

However, the pod’s journey to the competition was fraught with obstacles. Customs had issues with the pod’s batteries and magnets, considered dangerous goods, which resulted in delays in shipping the pod to the competition. At California, only three teams out of 24 were allowed to run in the tube due to logistics constraints of the competition and SpaceX refused to run pods having magnetic levitation because of possible damage that magnetic drag might have caused SpaceX’s auxiliary Pusher vehicle. However, their scalable design and India’s first permanent magnetic levitation system impressed Hyperloop One, and they struck up a partnership  to explore how to build the first Hyperloop routes in India.