Virgin Hyperloop said it made history on Sunday as the first people successfully travelled in a hyperloop pod at the DevLoop test facility in the United States.
The testing will continue with Tanay Manjrekar, Virgin Hyperloop’s Power Electronics specialist and native of Pune, riding next.
“For the past few years,the Virgin Hyperloop team has been working on turning its technology into reality,” said Richard Branson, founder of the Virgin Group. “With today’s successful test, we have shown that this spirit of innovation will in fact change the way people everywhere live, work, and travel in the years to come.”
Josh Giegel, Co-Founder and Chief Technology Officer, and Sara Luchian, Director of Passenger Experience, were the first people in the world to ride on this new form of transportation.
“Working on hyperloop – let alone being one of the first to ride it – is truly a dream come true,” said Manjrekar, Power Electronics Specialist at Virgin Hyperloop. “It is my hope that India sees the tremendous opportunity ahead of them – to embrace the challenge and leapfrog the rest of the world yet again – and continues to progress the Pune-Mumbai hyperloop project.”
The human testing was overseen by the industry-recognized Independent Safety Assessor (ISA) Certifer. Having undergone a rigorous and exhaustive safety process, the newly-unveiled XP-2 vehicle demonstrates many of the safety-critical systems that will be found on a commercial hyperloop system and is equipped with a state-of-the-art control system that can detect abnormal conditions and rapidly trigger appropriate emergency responses, as per a company release.
