Cannonball Endurance Driver Alex Roy Talks Record Run, EV Future

I was not aware of. We should definitely ask him about He has the look, so I feel like I should give some context here because basically I called Alex I don't know, six weeks ago because I was doing a story about rallies and especially about Millimelia coming to the US, and the number one person I know who has done car rallies and cannonball style runs is Alex Roy.

So we when we got to talking, it was just like, Wow, this is somebody who really has been in cars a long time and also really knows the underground side of it. So like after we got off the phone, Alex I told Matt like we got to have him on because, especially in light of electric vehicles and autonomous driving, I just want to hear your thoughts on every everything about where we are now with people who love cars and compared to twenty years ago. This isn't really a question.

It's kind of a setup. Matt.

who would own one. And because most people who buy these cars have no taste at all, and like they don't in any way reflect the brands that they are driving around. They hope the brands reflect on them, but they do not reflect the brands in least.

called the US Express. That race ran four times and the last one was in the nineteen eighty three and after that that was pretty much the end of the classic era of cannonballing. But the most interesting thing about the Cannonball Run and even its name, isn't the race from the seventies. It's where the name came from. And for all the people who think that the cannonball is illegal, dangerous, foolish, and silly, the name came from a guy named Irwin

Baker whose nickname was Cannonball. Hundred years ago. He was a motorcycle racer. So in the early twentieth century he was hired by the first generation of car companies, stutz Gardner Cadillac to drive their cars from New York to LA before the interstate Highway system existed, to prove that cars were intermi combustion cars were reliable, affordable, efficient, and polluted less than horses and trains, and were the best way for anyone of any income level to get around.

And so it was at one point front page news when people went and did this, and it was for many years, and so that was the person after whom the current illegal races was named.

to go, he didn't do it. And so in the late nineties, I wanted into a nightclub in New York called Void Now Gone, and they were playing a film called Rendezvous, which was the famous French nine minute film Nowhere where Claude, Yeah, Claude de Luche, the French director, you know, put a camera in the front of a car and drove across Paris in nine minutes and change. And after that, I'm like, I'm going to do that someday.

And so I put that in the hat alongside cannonball and anything else I can think of, and I'm like, I'm going to do that eventually. When I had the time and money in my thirties, I'm like, I did do it. But the thing is cannonball a word like the as entered into like kind of the English vernacular. As a word to just do dangerous stuff in a car.

So it's been bastardized and conflated with so many other things, sometimes by people with good intentions, but often by people who want to bask in the glory of the real thing without actually doing it. And so that is, in my opinion, where most modern rallies come from, because when people talk about the cannonball they call it interchangeably a race or a rally. But in the classic definition, a rally is on a public road, timed from point to point.

It's legal, it's sanctioned, there's a governing body and their entrance who are serious people, generally in vintage cars. And in nineteen ninety nine, all of these ideas, the conflation, the confusion, the glory, the desire to drive the fund was all thrown together by a guy named Maximilian Cooper out of London, who decided to put on an event inspired He says, it's inspired by the Gumball Rally movie.

For the Gumball Rally movie itself was inspired by the Cannonball Run race and so to put the timeline together, Cannonball Run Race Gumball Rally Movie comes out in seventy six Canniball Run movie comes out in eighty one, and then seventeen years later, this Englishman shows up and says, let me put on an event, a rally call the Gumball that basts in the glow of the cannonball legend.

And yeah, that event, the Gumball three thousand launching Night ninety nine, is the modern uh you know, it's called I don't want to say inhertorys it's not a race, but it is the event that changed and utterly the landscape of modern car rallies, because prior to that they were vintage cars and an older demographic, and suddenly had all these people going in their supercars, stickered up on

public roads and acting egregiously. I was one of them, and so I went thinking that the Gumball three thousand was kind of a clearinghouse or unofficial proven ground for people who wanted to do a real cannonball to meet each other, and that eventually they would go do that. And I got there and there was no one who

wanted to go coast to coast NonStop illegally. Everybody wanted to go to a party, however, and everybody interchangeably called it cannonballing, and so that is really how I got into this.

was thirty two hours of seven minutes. We broke it by a little bit over an hour the way we did, and it was really made possible by going on the Gumball three thousand rally and other rallies is one called the bull Run was one I did so many of them I forget, and on those rallies, you're in a stickered car and you're in a group of fifty to one hundred other cars going city to city with the police generally waiting for you, and so on those events

from two thousand and three to two thousand and five, I figured out what hardware you needed and what equipment was necessary, and so everyone knows you need a radar detector. And at that time, laser jammers were just coming into use and laser was becoming more popular among police. But what we had done is we'd studied the teams from nineteen eighty three and one of them had a spotter

plane which flew overhead in the daytime stretch. So, using everything I knew from tech startup world, we put in the car triple redundant sell communications, one phone from every network at the time. I forget how many GPS we had. There were probably four GPS displays in the vehicle, one for navigation, two for speed, two more in the back. Every one of them had their own antenta on the roof.

Because of the spotter plane, we put a partially a semi reflective white stripe pair on the roof of the plane could see us in low light conditions, rear brake light cutoff switches, rear running light cutoff switches, thermal cameras who could drive it out with no headlights, a fourteen gallon fuel tank, redundant replacement parts for anything we could fix on the move, and some things quickly on the ground, and so everything that had ever been done historically ever

had been installed in that car at that time, and we tested all of it except the plane on the Gumball three thousand. The most important lesson from the Gumball was that if you have a highly stickered car in a group of stickered cars, you're running a lottery because it's basically how many police cars have been vectored to a group of speeding vehicles. And if you are early in the speeding pack, you will get away, take the stickers off. With all the skills you learned, it becomes

actually pretty easy to speed and not get caught. The hard part is there's no cars running scrimmage for you, so you've got to get really tactical. I know it sounds crazy about safety, and the hardest part is not the car. It's not the driving, it's the research into the road conditions, and volume of traffic on the road, so you can pick a date for maximum safety and

risk mitigation. And that was a lot of trial, expensive and time consuming trial and error because the best driver in the world, in the best car or the best equipment cannot be safe rolling through packs of pedestrians and traffic. It's not possible.

so it won't work. You need a holiday weekend, preferably that is a low traffic weekend, and ideally tornadoes because most law enforcement and first responders are diverted to deal with tornado issues. So that meant Columbus Day was the perfect weekend, and so we had mapped it out, and I looked at like twenty years of data from the Federal Dot on traffic and weather determined that was it.

And it turned out that was the right day. However, Hannah, you are correct, Christmas Day would be if it was not snowing and there was minimal to no ice, maybe the best day of the year.

And she was really essential because she had been making a documentary about the US Express for years and had not yet completed it when we met, and so the availability of the veteran drivers from that time and her knowledge was invaluable. I was physically better shape than than I am now. I smoked at the time, and I was allowed to smoke a cigarette anytime we saw a police car. Nice and which ended up being three times the whole way, But that was it, because you cannot

stop to go to the bathroom. You can only go when you stop for gas, which is and a maximum five minute stop. One person's got to stay at the car, so it means one person go in, so you really can't.

There are no luxuries or convenience, so minimal flavor. I tested diapers in advance, very uncomfortable, and I have also used tubes in the past on other events, but I learned that if you have a tube running down through the bottom of the car, it leaks in both directions or there comes out oh no, yeah, and it's very awkward. And so we settled on something that was the least bad of all bad choices, a device called a portagon

or something. Oh it's basically it's a thing that could be used by a man or a woman.

the last Cannibal and then thirty two to seven the last Express and so he here he is, you know, twenty years later, saying can't be done. Thirty eight is the floor. And so I called my lawyer, I've got a question, and he's like, that'll be an expensive answer.

So he started digging around, looking into I had a book deal at the time for the record we not yet set, and so he said, well, in worst case scenario, you could maybe get hit under Rico statutes because you're committing fel any crimes across state lines, all of them, you could, and you're profiting from it, so maybe an angry prosecutor could come. And of course there's the felony spinning charges themselves. So I had him prepare a document.

It's a wonderful spreadsheet. I should send you, Hannah, color coded document with the state by state the severity color coded of the likely charges want to receive based on speed. Some states have an arbitrary felony charge trigger based on speed. My book tour I knew would go to some states and not others, so I gave the states I knew I would not ever want to go to to Dave Maher to drive, so when I showed up a year later or two years later, I wouldn't be charged because

I wouldn't be going there. So Dave he's like, great, I'll take them. And I also learned that everyone's familiar with the idea of statue limitations, but they also think called a tolling law. So if you commit a crime and a state and you leave that state, the statue limitations clock is frozen until you set footnet state again.

So take Oklahoma. Yeah, so leaving the state does not protect you necessarily because if you don't let spend say the full twelve months in that state, you can go back for a minute and they can just grab you if they want to. So my attorney advised me that a very cranky prosecutor could just make it his mission to take down that Roy guy. And I need to be very careful about this. So we went and did it,

and we were successful. However, before we succeeded, we did have a failed drive at it was meant to be the real drive in April two thousand and six, and we broke down halfway in Oklahoma City. And this is a story I rarely tell. My teammates left the state and I had the being able to be picked up and taken to the local dealership, and then I went to the airport and I told the dealership hold the car, I'll call you in like six hours. So at the airport.

I called my girlfriend, my mother, my attorney and told them what happened. And then I flew to uh forget tell some other city to stop over. And it was a message from the dealership that the state police, Oklahoma State Police were already there looking for me. Hours later. Yeah, And so it turned out that behind me in line at the Oaklahoma City airport was the Lieutenant Governor of Oklahoma, and he had overheard my entire conversation with my lawyer

where I said, now, BMW, we escaped. They didn't catch us, They can't catch us, and he they deployed the entire state police academy to go find the guy in the blue BMW. They thought I was a drug dealer whose car broke it down, and a judge ordered the vehicle held for several days as they figured out what was

going on. And on, like the second day the car was being held at BMW, an off duty district attorney who had no idea about the investigation, happened to be shopping for cars and spotted my blue BMW, which he recognized from Gumball three thousand videos, and got in the car and turned on the police lights and started playing with the systems, and as a result, I got my attorney to contact the court to declare evidence had been tampered with, get the car released returned to me, and

six months later we went back and that attorney, that district attorney, years later became my friend and we're friends to this day. And I'm also great friends with the now retired Oklahoma state trooper led the investigation and to whom I sold my second BMW five stickred as a German police car.

Davy recipes. He went to the finish line, and then we had a guy. We had a turnalist from the New York Times review all the evidence. We recorded all of the GPS devices, and then we had Charles Graeber from Wired magazine go through the evidence. And we also had uninterrupted video off of two cameras on front and rear bumpers, as well as video recorded from the spot er plant. And then we had receipts from the tolls,

receipts from the gas. So by our standard, we had multiple corroborating, overlapping, redundant witnesses and evidence, and more evidence that had ever been compiled to any prior team. But I do want to have a shout out right now to the guy who broke my record, Ed Bullion, who broke it seven years later, because I was so convinced that we had raised the bar and evidence on evidence that anyone who came after us would have to meet

or surpass it. And years later, when I heard that this record had been broken, I didn't give it the credence that it deserved. Now, of course everybody right now, everyone recognizes that the record was broken. But I didn't

jump all over it to recognize it. And I feel bad about that because they had something we didn't have, which is they had high quality real time vehicle tracking, and every vehicle's gone after us just puts in what you see in every truck now, which is a real time transponder that you can watch progress on a password protected site, which is what goes on today. Anytime someone wants to set a record.

So in twenty fourteen, and I've been watching the Tesla story kind of evolve, and I wasn't totally convinced that the cars were great. In twenty fourteen, when Tesla released autopilot as a software update to all their cars, I immediately was like, I need to do this because whoever is going to inherit the mantle of Erwin Baker has got to go and test new technologies. It's going to electric, hydrogen, hybrid, autonomy,

whatever it is. Someone's got to do that. No one was doing it, and so that is what God means

the EV records. So in late twenty fourteen went across and broke the EV record and also set the first driving assistance record using Tesla Autopilot, which I think we did it like ninety eight percent engaged across country and then broke it two more time in Tesla's and subsequent years, and that was far more intellectually challenging than the gas records because what is known, like what one has to know and learn to set a gas record, is known.

There is nothing more to be learned except weather forecasting and potentially incremental improvements entire technology, because weather and and your tires ability to survive road surfaces at high speed are the only limiting factors. Is setting a record in a gas car whereas an electric vehicle, It's like nineteen fifteen. Again.

In nineteen fifteen, there were no gas stations. You have to buy gas at a hardware store pharmacy, and over the years of the teens and twenties, gas station networks began to get built out, but they still weren't consistent. Pump speeds were different, pumps didn't always work. It's exactly like electric vehicles today. So to anyone who thinks that EV's not inevitable, ask yourself what is the rate of improvement of EV's today in their ability to get cross

country quickly versus one hundred years ago? And the answer is it's the same, if not slightly better than it was at the dawn of internal combustion, so EV's are inevitible. And in fact, I would encourage anyone, any car company that wants to save billions go drive cross country or hire me to go a cross country for you, because every problem that's occurred in the EV sector, software, hardware, reliability, we saw this five six years ago.

enthusiasts at all. They're not They are as much enthusiasts of ours as someone who buys a really beautiful dress and wears it once and gives it back. Just you have to eat. This is a task. You can't go mountaineering in couture. You have to bring the gear the day. Yeah. So, but everything has its place. And so we I mean we were speeding. I'm guessing ninety nine point nine percent

of the time. The speed limit was inwhere from fifty five to seventy five, and we're our Our driving average was ninety two point seven and our average including stop time was ninety point four. So we're stopped for approximately thirty thirty one minutes just to refuel, and then you're

just as fast as you can. Our toss speed was one sixty, but most of the time we're in the one twenty range, and we would have been an hour faster, except that I am a more cautious driver than my co driver Dave, who really was flat out most of the way, and I slowed down.

Never got in trouble subsequently, but came close when I was pulled over for speeding in it in Upstate New York by an officer who recognized me in the car and stated that he gave a copy of my book. I tell all of this to every student in radar class at the New York State Police Academy, and he couldn't wait to see me in court to defense where I would try to defend myself. So that story is.

at the time. She connected me with him, and so I learned a lot and they let's just say that they lent me the first let's see, the second record I set was set in a Tesla press car. They did not have advanced notice of what we were doing. They did know that we would pick it up in New York and drop it in La. They didn't ask and I didn't tell them, uh, And I did receive many likes and retweets from very important people in Tesla at the time. That's no longer the case as in

the years since. I've lobbed some criticism at Tesla for some safety issues around autopilot. But there was a time when they gave let's just say tacit indirect approve.

Lucid could do it for efficiency, but no one can do it with front page headlines setting time unless it's done literally a canniball record is set, and they are of course, are all concerned about legal legal issues. So what is really interesting about Tesla and EV's and charging is that if a car company wanted to beat the EV record in it that was set by in a Tesla, the window when it could be done opens every year

for a few months and then closes. The first generation portion tychon technically well the range is shorter than the best the longest range Tesla. However, the battery technology and some of the EA chargers that it could connect to are better. So there was a window when a portchit Tychon could have broken the record. That window closed with multiple software updates from Tesla and the improvement of the Tesla chargers. Lucid currently is probably the only ev that

could be used to break the Tesla record. The Lucid longest range air battery pack five hundred and sixteen miles is twenty percent longer than a Tesla, but it would require that the chargers have an uptime i'm equivalent to the Tesla charging network, which they do not, and so there is an arms race among evy manufacturers to enable a third party like myself to go do this. But

currently the record is basically sitting. I think it's forty two hours in the Tesla and it will sit there until the charging networks available to non Tesla companies achieve a level of liability that Tesla has always had.

table and to determine if it can be done. But the choke point today is not the cars. It's the chargers. Uh, it's the chargers, Alex.

cars are not great just because they're analog. They matter to us that we connect with them. Because we are analog. Our heart beats, we can hear it. We run faster, our heart beats faster, we get scared, heart beats faster, We can feel the blood pulsing in our veins. So we are connected as our own bodies with exert Hannah used to be a runner. You know this, Yeah, I mean athletes understand that people who understand exertion and physicality

understand cars. In a way different from others, And so a vehicle that when we change gears, it is analogous to the psychological decision to I will now know that the final sprint in a marathon, like I'm changing gears now you do in a car. It's the same decision, and the noise changes in the same way. The noise changes in our heads and when our heart rates that

much faster. So an EV that lacks that doesn't have a parallel set of sounds and feelings to what we feel inside ourselves, because that's what we do in a car too. When we get scared and excited, we react, and EV lacks that bridge connecting the driver, the organic

human analog driver, to what the vehicle does. Now, the corrollary to that is that an EV, because the power it comes at is linear and the noise floor is lower in a way, connects us much more deeply than any analog vehicle to the actual act of driving, because the outputs of driving fast are quicker, less time, and an EV will do those things that analog cars can't do.

And so for someone to drive an EV faster better than they do an analog vehicle, they have to be willing to give up that bridge but intellectually connect with a vehicle that will do more of what they want better than any ice vehicle. And the community does not really recognize that that what few professional drivers have raised in formulae. They get it, but everyone else doesn't get it. And I think that the enthusiast community will have to age into it, and then the next generation of kids

after that will just take it for granted. But the other half of this is something that I'm very disappointed to see, which is that virtually every car company in the planet working on EV's and there's a few exceptions. Rimok Wull be an exception. Everyone else is shoehorning electric power trains into internal combustion thinking, and they've made it with this concept of the software defined vehicle. And their notion is, oh, well, we'll offer subscription services with these evs.

People will love it just like a phone. That's just not true. The only thing we want an EV to do is be cheaper and more reliable than an ice car. Than that, we most people just don't care. The missing piece, the piece that will connect with enthusiasts, is there's only one company thinking about this really well, it's Hyundai. So Hyundai's new Ionic five n the racing of the I five has fake engine sounds. Many companies have done this, but most of them are terrible. But Hyundai's did it

with a purpose. They offer not just fake engine sounds, but a fake synthetic gearbox paddle gearbox with synthetic gears that mimic actual driving gears. You can redline the car. So now the car sounds and feels closer to an ice vehicle, and you have all the benefits of learning how an ice vehicle drives, and other downside is potentially damaging it. So you actually have a vehicle which you

could learn to drive an ice vehicle better. And this and this is tip of the iceberg because ultimately, and I wrote about this ten years ago, every legacy car maker that has a brand or a model whose brand is more powerful than the parent brand. As an example, the Corvette is worth more than GM, are worth more than four now nine to eleven is probably worth more than Portia. Every company but he has one model like

this Jeep is worth more than Stilantis. So each of these companies has a fifteen hundred year library of sound and feel and enthusiasts who want that sound and feel. And in the future, because no one those cars aren't made anymore, people will want that sound and feel. What is the future of software defined vehicles? The only future is one where you can buy a future nine to eleven. It's a skateboard that looks like a future nine to eleven, but on board you can subscribe to the sound, feel,

and physics of every nine to eleven ever made. Pick your year, portable download physics, model, sound, the field into the car, and the car's chassis itself. They'll need some kind of actual dynamic chassis that's very far more evolved than anything we've seen yet to actually mimic oversteer, understeer and while doing all these things inside a software defined boundary that prevents a crash. The dream of everyone is to have a sports car that does whatever you want that will

never hit anything. We're very far from this, but that is the dream and we'll only get there Biosolvin vehicles from oatims that have legacy. So because the new ones have no.

which is a political one. China has most of the rare earth's required to build evs, so they can churn out EV's all day long that are better than anything made in the West except maybe a Teslam and sell them throughout the world. And they have already started. And so if the United States wants to compete in these markets expert vehicles anywhere in the world, they need start trading out EV's, And so, in the absence of a supply chain that could support you know, EV's sold at scale,

something else must be done. Hopefully some of the sources of these rare earths, some buish in the United States and some elsewhere. Well, many of them are locked up for environmental reasons, some of them for political reasons. Will be unlocked so American car makers can compete with Chinese ev makers. And the second thing, which I'm very optimistic about, is that you know, formerly of Tesla as a company called Redwood Materials and they recycle batteries and they are

just starting to scale. So between the pressure to compete with the Chinese ev companies and the potential of Redwood Materials, I think they'll be both a stick and a carrot to get American car companies on board with evds. But hybrids are going to become a bigger thing first. And you know, really, all this is it's tiresome because these

things should not be politicized. The market should have to decide, and the market has already decided that if we don't compete with China, our car companies are going to be not going to go away, but they're not going to be what they were. Alex.

a self driving car company for four years. All of them are wrong, and human driving will never die, even when autonomous vehicles are available at scale cheaply love it.