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Elon Musk first came with the concept of Hyperloop in 2013.

Elon Musk-led SpaceX has constructed a 1.5-km long vacuum tube close to its headquarters in California for the Hyperloop pod competition taking place this weekend between thirty teams from across the world.Musk tweeted about the competition saying, "Hyperloop pod race happening this weekend at SpaceX HQ (near LAX). We built a ~mile long vacuum tube on our campus big enough to fit people."

Teams, mostly based out of universities including MIT's Hyperloop and Berkeley University's Bloop, will be racing their prototype pods down a scaled-down test track near SpaceX headquarters in Hawthorne, California. The competition is part of the experimental transportation concept, first come up by Musk in 2013, that promises to move people and goods at more than 700 miles an hour, which is more efficient than air and requires less infrastructure cost than traditional rail.

The teams spent the last week undergoing tests to make sure their pods work perfectly in the high-speed, depressurized, and decidedly experimental test track build by SpaceX which is a mile long and half the width of a full-scale Hyperloop system. Its most important feature is the near-total vacuum inside which makes it possible to shoot pods through at very high speeds.

As described last year by Musk, the terms of the competition are very simple - the winning team will be the one that hits the highest top speed and then stops before hitting the end of the tube.

At the initial competitive design weekend held precisely a year ago in Texas, more than a hundred teams pitched pod concepts on paper. The thirty finalists have had the year since to secure funding and actually build their proposed designs. The race weekend was then rescheduled from an initial summer 2016 time slot because six months was not enough time for the teams to build.