The world's first Hyperloop competition that should have seen miniature "pods" from 30 student teams race against each other inside a special test track tube was a disappointment with only three teams managing to actually launch their scaled down pods.

The eagerly anticipated races from Jan-27 to 29 saw only three teams compete: MIT; a team from the Delft University of Technology in The Netherlands and the WARR Hyperloop team from the Technical University of Munich in Germany.

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The other 27 teams failed to pass a series of tests that would have allowed them to compete. Among these tests were structural integrity and vacuum chamber survivability.

The race pods, which are small scale models of real passenger pods, would have sped along a one mile-long test track called Hypertube made by SpaceX and located at the company's headquarters in Hawthorne, California.

Hyperloop is a future high-speed transportation concept from Tesla Motors and SpaceX founder Elon Musk, who called it a fifth form of transportation. It will see people rise inside passenger pods that will race along a system of tubes connecting major cities.

These passenger pods are propelled through tubes maintained in a near-vacuum. Without air or surface friction, the pods travel at close to the speed of sound and use only low-energy propulsion systems.

During the test races, Delft got the best overall score for its design. Technical University of Munich posted the fastest time. MIT came in third after having won the award for best overall design in 2016.

A final phase of the competition is set for this summer. All 30 teams are expected to compete there even if they didn't pass the tests this time.

The teams that advanced to the prototype hardware build stage and that are in competition are:

Badgerloop, University of Wisconsin-Madison; Bayou Bengals, Louisiana State University; bLoop, University of California-Berkeley; Carnegie Mellon Hyperloop, Carnegie-Mellon University; Codex, Oral Roberts University; Delft Hyperloop, Delft University of Technology

Drexel Hyperloop, Drexel University; GatorLoop, University of Florida; HyperLift, St. John's School Texas (the only high school team); Hyperloop UC, University of Cincinnati; Hyperloop Toronto, University of Toronto; Hyperloop at Virginia Tech, Virginia Tech

HyperXite, University of California Irvine; Illini Hyperloop, University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign; Keio Alpha,  Keio University, Japan; Lehigh Hyperloop, Lehigh University; Hyperloop Makers UPV team Valencia, Spain, Universitat Politècnica de Valencia.

Mercury Three, University of Wisconsin, Milwaukee; MIT Hyperloop Team, Massachusetts Institute of Technology;  NYU Hyperloop, Slate, New York University; OpenLoop, Cornell University, Harvey Mudd College, University of Michigan, Northeastern University, Memorial University of Newfoundland and Princeton University

Purdue Hyperloop, Purdue University; Team rLoop, the only non-student team and organized on Reddit; TAMU Aerospace Hyperloop, Texas A&M; Team Frigates, Shiv Nadar University in India; Team HyperLynx, University of Colorado-Denver

UCSB Hyperloop, University of California-Santa Barbara; UMD Loop, University of Maryland; USC Hyperloop, University of Southern California; UWashington Hyperloop, University of Washington; Waterloop, University of Waterloo in Canada; VicHyper, Royal Melbourne Institute of Technology in Australia and WARR Hyperloop, Technical University of Munich in Germany.

TagsHyperloop, Hyperloop competition, SpaceX, Elon Musk, Hypertube, MIT, Delft University, Technical University of Munich