Speaker 1: I'm Matt Miller and I'm Hannah Elliott, and this is
Speaker 1: hot pursuit.
Speaker 2: All right, we have a pretty interesting guest today who
Speaker 2: has won a Cannonball Run.
Speaker 1: Yeah, I'm mystery Man of the Car World, if you will.
Speaker 1: By the way, someone who's been around forever.
Speaker 2: I gotta say, I'm I think I'm older than you.
Speaker 2: But when I was a kid, Cannonball Run was the
Speaker 2: first movies. I'm sorry, sorry, I'm just saying because of
Speaker 2: the date right when Cannonball Run came out, the original
Speaker 2: with Burt Reynolds, which was a long long time ago,
Speaker 2: that's one of the first movies I saw that really
Speaker 2: got me kind of obsessed with cars.
Speaker 3: I'm gonna google it right.
Speaker 1: Now to see you exactly when it came His guest
Speaker 1: is Alex Roy. I mean, why why delay? This is
Speaker 1: Alex Roy, who kind of is like this international Man
Speaker 1: of Mystery slash world's most interesting car guy. I was
Speaker 1: reading his Wikipedia page and we should ask him about this.
Speaker 1: It said that in two thousand and four he won
Speaker 1: a British reality TV series called The Ultimate Playboy, which
Speaker 1: I was not aware of. We should definitely ask him
Speaker 1: about He has the look, so I feel like I
Speaker 1: should give some context here because basically I called Alex
Speaker 1: I don't know, six weeks ago because I was doing
Speaker 1: a story about rallies and especially about Millimelia coming to
Speaker 1: the US, and the number one person I know who
Speaker 1: has done car rallies and cannonball style runs is Alex Roy.
Speaker 1: So we when we got to talking, it was just like, Wow,
Speaker 1: this is somebody who really has been in cars a
Speaker 1: long time and also really knows the underground side of it.
Speaker 1: So like after we got off the phone, Alex I
Speaker 1: told Matt like we got to have him on because,
Speaker 1: especially in light of electric vehicles and autonomous driving, I
Speaker 1: just want to hear your thoughts on every everything about
Speaker 1: where we are now with people who love cars and
Speaker 1: compared to twenty years ago. This isn't really a question.
Speaker 1: It's kind of a setup. Matt.
Speaker 4: I don't know.
Speaker 3: Well, I want to ask.
Speaker 2: You, but I think it's weird that I've never that
Speaker 2: we've never actually met in person to my knowledge, because
Speaker 2: I've been obsessed with cars and covering like the business
Speaker 2: side for Bloomberg for twenty years. But I've been following
Speaker 2: you from Afar throughout all of your antics and I mean,
Speaker 2: and also you give a lot of legit like important reporting,
Speaker 2: you know for journalists on self driving stuff and on Tesla.
Speaker 2: But I'm more interested in like the Canniball Run in
Speaker 2: the Morgan.
Speaker 4: Happy to talk about all of it. I mean, actually, Hannah,
Speaker 4: our conversation win that direction because there's car reporting and
Speaker 4: then there's like luxury goods reporting, like rob report. But
Speaker 4: Hannah a complement, is the only journalist who covers automotive
Speaker 4: who has her own fashion language and can actually justify
Speaker 4: getting into some of these cars as like a not
Speaker 4: just as a driver, but as the kind of person
Speaker 4: who would own one. And because most people who buy
Speaker 4: these cars have no taste at all, and like they
Speaker 4: don't in any way reflect the brands that they are
Speaker 4: driving around. They hope the brands reflect on them, but
Speaker 4: they do not reflect the brands in least.
Speaker 3: That's a very nice that point.
Speaker 4: Yeah, that's what set me off.
Speaker 3: Well, where should we start? Then? Should we start?
Speaker 2: We were talking about the Cannibal Run movie. I was
Speaker 2: saying that it was like the first thing that I
Speaker 2: watched that got me into cars. I was born at
Speaker 2: the end of seventy three, and it came out in
Speaker 2: eighty one, So I was like eight years old or
Speaker 2: I was seven turning eight when I saw it?
Speaker 3: And was that based on anything real?
Speaker 1: Like?
Speaker 2: Had there been a true cannonball run before that? Or
Speaker 2: is the race that the record that you set based
Speaker 2: on the movie?
Speaker 3: How's that whole story play out?
Speaker 4: Okay? So the answer is that, yes, there was a
Speaker 4: real cannonball run race that ran from nineteen seventy one
Speaker 4: to nineteen seventy nine. Brock Yates was the progenitor of that.
Speaker 4: It ran four times. Right after it ended seventy nine,
Speaker 4: a bunch of cannonball drivers and fans who wanted to
Speaker 4: keep going decided to put on what they considered a
Speaker 4: more professional event with no media coverage, no movie at all,
Speaker 4: called the US Express. That race ran four times and
Speaker 4: the last one was in the nineteen eighty three and
Speaker 4: after that that was pretty much the end of the
Speaker 4: classic era of cannonballing. But the most interesting thing about
Speaker 4: the Cannonball Run and even its name, isn't the race
Speaker 4: from the seventies. It's where the name came from. And
Speaker 4: for all the people who think that the cannonball is illegal, dangerous, foolish,
Speaker 4: and silly, the name came from a guy named Irwin
Speaker 4: Baker whose nickname was Cannonball. Hundred years ago. He was
Speaker 4: a motorcycle racer. So in the early twentieth century he
Speaker 4: was hired by the first generation of car companies, stutz
Speaker 4: Gardner Cadillac to drive their cars from New York to
Speaker 4: LA before the interstate Highway system existed, to prove that
Speaker 4: cars were intermi combustion cars were reliable, affordable, efficient, and
Speaker 4: polluted less than horses and trains, and were the best
Speaker 4: way for anyone of any income level to get around.
Speaker 4: And so it was at one point front page news
Speaker 4: when people went and did this, and it was for
Speaker 4: many years, and so that was the person after whom
Speaker 4: the current illegal races was named.
Speaker 1: That's very cool. So how did you conceive this idea
Speaker 1: to attack and attempt a cannon ball run?
Speaker 2: And by the way, to state I think the obvious
Speaker 2: the cannonball run, the US expressed they're not legal races, right, they're.
Speaker 1: All not regulated.
Speaker 2: Well, there you have to break the speed limit in
Speaker 2: order to win, like by a substantial amount for a
Speaker 2: very long period of time.
Speaker 4: Totally illegal for anyone who wants to set a record.
Speaker 4: But anyone can go. There's no organizing body, there's no
Speaker 4: rules other than same car stays on the ground and
Speaker 4: at least one person in the whole way, although that
Speaker 4: might not be true in the future of autonomous records.
Speaker 4: The you know, I got into it the way almost
Speaker 4: everyone has ever gotten into it. They saw the movie
Speaker 4: as a kid. My father talked about it. He wanted
Speaker 4: to go, he didn't do it. And so in the
Speaker 4: late nineties, I wanted into a nightclub in New York
Speaker 4: called Void Now Gone, and they were playing a film
Speaker 4: called Rendezvous, which was the famous French nine minute film
Speaker 4: Nowhere where Claude, Yeah, Claude de Luche, the French director,
Speaker 4: you know, put a camera in the front of a
Speaker 4: car and drove across Paris in nine minutes and change.
Speaker 4: And after that, I'm like, I'm going to do that someday.
Speaker 4: And so I put that in the hat alongside cannonball
Speaker 4: and anything else I can think of, and I'm like,
Speaker 4: I'm going to do that eventually. When I had the
Speaker 4: time and money in my thirties, I'm like, I did
Speaker 4: do it. But the thing is cannonball a word like
Speaker 4: the as entered into like kind of the English vernacular.
Speaker 4: As a word to just do dangerous stuff in a car.
Speaker 4: So it's been bastardized and conflated with so many other things,
Speaker 4: sometimes by people with good intentions, but often by people
Speaker 4: who want to bask in the glory of the real
Speaker 4: thing without actually doing it. And so that is, in
Speaker 4: my opinion, where most modern rallies come from, because when
Speaker 4: people talk about the cannonball they call it interchangeably a
Speaker 4: race or a rally. But in the classic definition, a
Speaker 4: rally is on a public road, timed from point to point.
Speaker 4: It's legal, it's sanctioned, there's a governing body and their
Speaker 4: entrance who are serious people, generally in vintage cars. And
Speaker 4: in nineteen ninety nine, all of these ideas, the conflation,
Speaker 4: the confusion, the glory, the desire to drive the fund
Speaker 4: was all thrown together by a guy named Maximilian Cooper
Speaker 4: out of London, who decided to put on an event
Speaker 4: inspired He says, it's inspired by the Gumball Rally movie.
Speaker 4: For the Gumball Rally movie itself was inspired by the
Speaker 4: Cannonball Run race and so to put the timeline together,
Speaker 4: Cannonball Run Race Gumball Rally Movie comes out in seventy
Speaker 4: six Canniball Run movie comes out in eighty one, and
Speaker 4: then seventeen years later, this Englishman shows up and says,
Speaker 4: let me put on an event, a rally call the
Speaker 4: Gumball that basts in the glow of the cannonball legend.
Speaker 4: And yeah, that event, the Gumball three thousand launching Night
Speaker 4: ninety nine, is the modern uh you know, it's called
Speaker 4: I don't want to say inhertorys it's not a race,
Speaker 4: but it is the event that changed and utterly the
Speaker 4: landscape of modern car rallies, because prior to that they
Speaker 4: were vintage cars and an older demographic, and suddenly had
Speaker 4: all these people going in their supercars, stickered up on
Speaker 4: public roads and acting egregiously. I was one of them,
Speaker 4: and so I went thinking that the Gumball three thousand
Speaker 4: was kind of a clearinghouse or unofficial proven ground for
Speaker 4: people who wanted to do a real cannonball to meet
Speaker 4: each other, and that eventually they would go do that.
Speaker 4: And I got there and there was no one who
Speaker 4: wanted to go coast to coast NonStop illegally. Everybody wanted
Speaker 4: to go to a party, however, and everybody interchangeably called
Speaker 4: it cannonballing, and so that is really how I got
Speaker 4: into this.
Speaker 2: So tell us about your your first attempt and how
Speaker 2: you set it up because it must take a lot
Speaker 2: of planning. I imagine you're going to want to either
Speaker 2: have extra gas tanks or like four radar detectors or
Speaker 2: a spotter or I don't know, but like what do
Speaker 2: you do to because you you achieved the fastest crossing
Speaker 2: right what from New York to LA.
Speaker 4: So, yeah, we did set the record in two thousand
Speaker 4: and six, and we were the first team to successfully
Speaker 4: break it in I think twenty five or twenty six years.
Speaker 4: What car in a BMW five two thousand and thirty
Speaker 4: nine five Our record has been broken anytime since.
Speaker 1: And you did it in about thirty four thirty four hours.
Speaker 4: Thirty one thirty one. So the record in nineteen eighty
Speaker 4: three in the last US Express unsanctioned full on race
Speaker 4: was thirty two hours of seven minutes. We broke it
Speaker 4: by a little bit over an hour the way we did,
Speaker 4: and it was really made possible by going on the
Speaker 4: Gumball three thousand rally and other rallies is one called
Speaker 4: the bull Run was one I did so many of
Speaker 4: them I forget, and on those rallies, you're in a
Speaker 4: stickered car and you're in a group of fifty to
Speaker 4: one hundred other cars going city to city with the
Speaker 4: police generally waiting for you, and so on those events
Speaker 4: from two thousand and three to two thousand and five,
Speaker 4: I figured out what hardware you needed and what equipment
Speaker 4: was necessary, and so everyone knows you need a radar detector.
Speaker 4: And at that time, laser jammers were just coming into
Speaker 4: use and laser was becoming more popular among police. But
Speaker 4: what we had done is we'd studied the teams from
Speaker 4: nineteen eighty three and one of them had a spotter
Speaker 4: plane which flew overhead in the daytime stretch. So, using
Speaker 4: everything I knew from tech startup world, we put in
Speaker 4: the car triple redundant sell communications, one phone from every
Speaker 4: network at the time. I forget how many GPS we had.
Speaker 4: There were probably four GPS displays in the vehicle, one
Speaker 4: for navigation, two for speed, two more in the back.
Speaker 4: Every one of them had their own antenta on the roof.
Speaker 4: Because of the spotter plane, we put a partially a
Speaker 4: semi reflective white stripe pair on the roof of the
Speaker 4: plane could see us in low light conditions, rear brake
Speaker 4: light cutoff switches, rear running light cutoff switches, thermal cameras
Speaker 4: who could drive it out with no headlights, a fourteen
Speaker 4: gallon fuel tank, redundant replacement parts for anything we could
Speaker 4: fix on the move, and some things quickly on the ground,
Speaker 4: and so everything that had ever been done historically ever
Speaker 4: had been installed in that car at that time, and
Speaker 4: we tested all of it except the plane on the
Speaker 4: Gumball three thousand. The most important lesson from the Gumball
Speaker 4: was that if you have a highly stickered car in
Speaker 4: a group of stickered cars, you're running a lottery because
Speaker 4: it's basically how many police cars have been vectored to
Speaker 4: a group of speeding vehicles. And if you are early
Speaker 4: in the speeding pack, you will get away, take the
Speaker 4: stickers off. With all the skills you learned, it becomes
Speaker 4: actually pretty easy to speed and not get caught. The
Speaker 4: hard part is there's no cars running scrimmage for you,
Speaker 4: so you've got to get really tactical. I know it
Speaker 4: sounds crazy about safety, and the hardest part is not
Speaker 4: the car. It's not the driving, it's the research into
Speaker 4: the road conditions, and volume of traffic on the road,
Speaker 4: so you can pick a date for maximum safety and
Speaker 4: risk mitigation. And that was a lot of trial, expensive
Speaker 4: and time consuming trial and error because the best driver
Speaker 4: in the world, in the best car or the best
Speaker 4: equipment cannot be safe rolling through packs of pedestrians and traffic.
Speaker 4: It's not possible.
Speaker 1: So you did your run around Christmas time.
Speaker 3: Oh that's awesome, right, yeah.
Speaker 1: We're kind of we're speechless. You've run us speechless. But
Speaker 1: this was around Christmas, right if I remember right.
Speaker 4: So well, we broke the record on October seventh, eighth
Speaker 4: ninth of two thousand and six, which is very specifically
Speaker 4: chosen Columbus Day weekend because you don't you can't drag
Speaker 4: go in the summer because road traffic is three to
Speaker 4: four x higher than other times a year, and police
Speaker 4: patrols are three x higher any other time of year,
Speaker 4: so it won't work. You need a holiday weekend, preferably
Speaker 4: that is a low traffic weekend, and ideally tornadoes because
Speaker 4: most law enforcement and first responders are diverted to deal
Speaker 4: with tornado issues. So that meant Columbus Day was the
Speaker 4: perfect weekend, and so we had mapped it out, and
Speaker 4: I looked at like twenty years of data from the
Speaker 4: Federal Dot on traffic and weather determined that was it.
Speaker 4: And it turned out that was the right day. However, Hannah,
Speaker 4: you are correct, Christmas Day would be if it was
Speaker 4: not snowing and there was minimal to no ice, maybe
Speaker 4: the best day of the year.
Speaker 1: Interesting.
Speaker 4: We considered it. We considered it.
Speaker 1: So physically, how did you prepare? What types of food,
Speaker 1: food and beverages and stimulation did you plan for yourself
Speaker 1: along with and how many people.
Speaker 3: Were how many people were in the car?
Speaker 4: Three people in the car My co driver Dave Maher,
Speaker 4: who did slightly more driving than I did, and it
Speaker 4: is a better driver than I am. He was an
Speaker 4: essential choice. And in the back we had Corey Wells,
Speaker 4: who's a documentary filmmaker who was shooting at the documentary
Speaker 4: which we made about the run, which came out a
Speaker 4: few years later called APEX The Secret Race across America.
Speaker 4: And she was really essential because she had been making
Speaker 4: a documentary about the US Express for years and had
Speaker 4: not yet completed it when we met, and so the
Speaker 4: availability of the veteran drivers from that time and her
Speaker 4: knowledge was invaluable. I was physically better shape than than
Speaker 4: I am now. I smoked at the time, and I
Speaker 4: was allowed to smoke a cigarette anytime we saw a
Speaker 4: police car. Nice and which ended up being three times
Speaker 4: the whole way, But that was it, because you cannot
Speaker 4: stop to go to the bathroom. You can only go
Speaker 4: when you stop for gas, which is and a maximum
Speaker 4: five minute stop. One person's got to stay at the car,
Speaker 4: so it means one person go in, so you really can't.
Speaker 4: There are no luxuries or convenience, so minimal flavor. I
Speaker 4: tested diapers in advance, very uncomfortable, and I have also
Speaker 4: used tubes in the past on other events, but I
Speaker 4: learned that if you have a tube running down through
Speaker 4: the bottom of the car, it leaks in both directions
Speaker 4: or there comes out oh no, yeah, and it's very awkward.
Speaker 4: And so we settled on something that was the least
Speaker 4: bad of all bad choices, a device called a portagon
Speaker 4: or something. Oh it's basically it's a thing that could
Speaker 4: be used by a man or a woman.
Speaker 1: Or a woman. I've seen for a woman that.
Speaker 4: You don't want to use. And we each tried it
Speaker 4: and decided we would bring them and tried not to
Speaker 4: use them and we did not use them. It was
Speaker 4: you have to be good friends. And even the then
Speaker 4: it's not the best.
Speaker 2: How did you I can't believe you only saw three
Speaker 2: cops going from New York to la if I have
Speaker 2: the direction correct? And did you have any legal problems?
Speaker 2: Like afterwards because you publicized it, So did any cops
Speaker 2: say like, well, we know you broke the speed lim
Speaker 2: in our state, so.
Speaker 1: We're going to arrest you, like retroactive.
Speaker 3: Yeah.
Speaker 4: So, because no one had done this successfully for you know,
Speaker 4: twenty five year or twenty seven years prior, I had
Speaker 4: no roadmap and was absolutely terrified of the consequences the
Speaker 4: you know, Brockiates wrote a book publish in two thousand
Speaker 4: and two called Cannonball It which he states the end
Speaker 4: that no car would ever cross the United States in
Speaker 4: less than thirty eight hours ever, and the canniball record
Speaker 4: at that when he did the last ran, the race
Speaker 4: was like thirty two point fifty one I think in
Speaker 4: the last Cannibal and then thirty two to seven the
Speaker 4: last Express and so he here he is, you know,
Speaker 4: twenty years later, saying can't be done. Thirty eight is
Speaker 4: the floor. And so I called my lawyer, I've got
Speaker 4: a question, and he's like, that'll be an expensive answer.
Speaker 4: So he started digging around, looking into I had a
Speaker 4: book deal at the time for the record we not
Speaker 4: yet set, and so he said, well, in worst case scenario,
Speaker 4: you could maybe get hit under Rico statutes because you're
Speaker 4: committing fel any crimes across state lines, all of them,
Speaker 4: you could, and you're profiting from it, so maybe an
Speaker 4: angry prosecutor could come. And of course there's the felony
Speaker 4: spinning charges themselves. So I had him prepare a document.
Speaker 4: It's a wonderful spreadsheet. I should send you, Hannah, color
Speaker 4: coded document with the state by state the severity color
Speaker 4: coded of the likely charges want to receive based on speed.
Speaker 4: Some states have an arbitrary felony charge trigger based on speed.
Speaker 4: My book tour I knew would go to some states
Speaker 4: and not others, so I gave the states I knew
Speaker 4: I would not ever want to go to to Dave
Speaker 4: Maher to drive, so when I showed up a year
Speaker 4: later or two years later, I wouldn't be charged because
Speaker 4: I wouldn't be going there. So Dave he's like, great,
Speaker 4: I'll take them. And I also learned that everyone's familiar
Speaker 4: with the idea of statue limitations, but they also think
Speaker 4: called a tolling law. So if you commit a crime
Speaker 4: and a state and you leave that state, the statue
Speaker 4: limitations clock is frozen until you set footnet state again.
Speaker 4: So take Oklahoma. Yeah, so leaving the state does not
Speaker 4: protect you necessarily because if you don't let spend say
Speaker 4: the full twelve months in that state, you can go
Speaker 4: back for a minute and they can just grab you
Speaker 4: if they want to. So my attorney advised me that
Speaker 4: a very cranky prosecutor could just make it his mission
Speaker 4: to take down that Roy guy. And I need to
Speaker 4: be very careful about this. So we went and did it,
Speaker 4: and we were successful. However, before we succeeded, we did
Speaker 4: have a failed drive at it was meant to be
Speaker 4: the real drive in April two thousand and six, and
Speaker 4: we broke down halfway in Oklahoma City. And this is
Speaker 4: a story I rarely tell. My teammates left the state
Speaker 4: and I had the being able to be picked up
Speaker 4: and taken to the local dealership, and then I went
Speaker 4: to the airport and I told the dealership hold the car,
Speaker 4: I'll call you in like six hours. So at the airport.
Speaker 4: I called my girlfriend, my mother, my attorney and told
Speaker 4: them what happened. And then I flew to uh forget
Speaker 4: tell some other city to stop over. And it was
Speaker 4: a message from the dealership that the state police, Oklahoma
Speaker 4: State Police were already there looking for me. Hours later. Yeah,
Speaker 4: And so it turned out that behind me in line
Speaker 4: at the Oaklahoma City airport was the Lieutenant Governor of Oklahoma,
Speaker 4: and he had overheard my entire conversation with my lawyer
Speaker 4: where I said, now, BMW, we escaped. They didn't catch us,
Speaker 4: They can't catch us, and he they deployed the entire
Speaker 4: state police academy to go find the guy in the
Speaker 4: blue BMW. They thought I was a drug dealer whose
Speaker 4: car broke it down, and a judge ordered the vehicle
Speaker 4: held for several days as they figured out what was
Speaker 4: going on. And on, like the second day the car
Speaker 4: was being held at BMW, an off duty district attorney
Speaker 4: who had no idea about the investigation, happened to be
Speaker 4: shopping for cars and spotted my blue BMW, which he
Speaker 4: recognized from Gumball three thousand videos, and got in the
Speaker 4: car and turned on the police lights and started playing
Speaker 4: with the systems, and as a result, I got my
Speaker 4: attorney to contact the court to declare evidence had been
Speaker 4: tampered with, get the car released returned to me, and
Speaker 4: six months later we went back and that attorney, that
Speaker 4: district attorney, years later became my friend and we're friends
Speaker 4: to this day. And I'm also great friends with the
Speaker 4: now retired Oklahoma state trooper led the investigation and to
Speaker 4: whom I sold my second BMW five stickred as a
Speaker 4: German police car.
Speaker 1: Can you go back to Oklahoma now? Are you banned
Speaker 1: from the city?
Speaker 4: Absolutely? No, No, I'm fully welcome because the da who
Speaker 4: was there, who found the car is his family's very
Speaker 4: close with I think the current governor. So I went
Speaker 4: back more than once and had dinner with a bunch
Speaker 4: of these officers and we had a lot of laughs.
Speaker 4: It pays to be nice to people.
Speaker 1: Yeah, I was gonna say, yeah, your career is a
Speaker 1: natural charm. Does work to your advantage?
Speaker 3: How do you prove the run? Like, uh, do you.
Speaker 2: Sort of take a picture of yourself with the newspaper
Speaker 2: in New York and then the next day's edition in
Speaker 2: LA or what do you do?
Speaker 4: So there was no playbook for this and the people
Speaker 4: who had the record previously were accused of cheating, And
Speaker 4: so I contacted Ernst and Young and Deloyde and every
Speaker 4: company I could think of, asking if they would send
Speaker 4: witnesses and if I could pay. I contacted Guinness. Everybody
Speaker 4: all declined because it's illegal. So I got Jelopnik to
Speaker 4: send Mike Spinelli, who was the editor chief at the time,
Speaker 4: to the New York Start and Davy Johnson, who was
Speaker 4: one of the famous writers there rest Bless your Heart,
Speaker 4: Davy recipes. He went to the finish line, and then
Speaker 4: we had a guy. We had a turnalist from the
Speaker 4: New York Times review all the evidence. We recorded all
Speaker 4: of the GPS devices, and then we had Charles Graeber
Speaker 4: from Wired magazine go through the evidence. And we also
Speaker 4: had uninterrupted video off of two cameras on front and
Speaker 4: rear bumpers, as well as video recorded from the spot
Speaker 4: er plant. And then we had receipts from the tolls,
Speaker 4: receipts from the gas. So by our standard, we had
Speaker 4: multiple corroborating, overlapping, redundant witnesses and evidence, and more evidence
Speaker 4: that had ever been compiled to any prior team. But
Speaker 4: I do want to have a shout out right now
Speaker 4: to the guy who broke my record, Ed Bullion, who
Speaker 4: broke it seven years later, because I was so convinced
Speaker 4: that we had raised the bar and evidence on evidence
Speaker 4: that anyone who came after us would have to meet
Speaker 4: or surpass it. And years later, when I heard that
Speaker 4: this record had been broken, I didn't give it the
Speaker 4: credence that it deserved. Now, of course everybody right now,
Speaker 4: everyone recognizes that the record was broken. But I didn't
Speaker 4: jump all over it to recognize it. And I feel
Speaker 4: bad about that because they had something we didn't have,
Speaker 4: which is they had high quality real time vehicle tracking,
Speaker 4: and every vehicle's gone after us just puts in what
Speaker 4: you see in every truck now, which is a real
Speaker 4: time transponder that you can watch progress on a password
Speaker 4: protected site, which is what goes on today. Anytime someone
Speaker 4: wants to set a record.
Speaker 1: Well, seven years is a really long time in terms
Speaker 1: of technology advances. I mean seven years is a long time.
Speaker 2: Well also it is he beat your record in a
Speaker 2: gas powered car, but you have set another record in
Speaker 2: an electric car, right.
Speaker 4: Yes, So the current gas record actually even Ed's record,
Speaker 4: which is incredible. Twenty at fifty was has been beaten
Speaker 4: multiple times now. But you know, people always ask me
Speaker 4: why don't go out and set gas canniball records anymore?
Speaker 4: And the answer is, I'm not remotely interested in them
Speaker 4: because the canniball originally in teen fifteen Irwin Baker was
Speaker 4: always intended to be a proof of onset for new technology.
Speaker 4: So in twenty fourteen, and I've been watching the Tesla
Speaker 4: story kind of evolve, and I wasn't totally convinced that
Speaker 4: the cars were great. In twenty fourteen, when Tesla released
Speaker 4: autopilot as a software update to all their cars, I
Speaker 4: immediately was like, I need to do this because whoever
Speaker 4: is going to inherit the mantle of Erwin Baker has
Speaker 4: got to go and test new technologies. It's going to electric, hydrogen, hybrid, autonomy,
Speaker 4: whatever it is. Someone's got to do that. No one
Speaker 4: was doing it, and so that is what God means
Speaker 4: the EV records. So in late twenty fourteen went across
Speaker 4: and broke the EV record and also set the first
Speaker 4: driving assistance record using Tesla Autopilot, which I think we
Speaker 4: did it like ninety eight percent engaged across country and
Speaker 4: then broke it two more time in Tesla's and subsequent years,
Speaker 4: and that was far more intellectually challenging than the gas
Speaker 4: records because what is known, like what one has to
Speaker 4: know and learn to set a gas record, is known.
Speaker 4: There is nothing more to be learned except weather forecasting
Speaker 4: and potentially incremental improvements entire technology, because weather and and
Speaker 4: your tires ability to survive road surfaces at high speed
Speaker 4: are the only limiting factors. Is setting a record in
Speaker 4: a gas car whereas an electric vehicle, It's like nineteen fifteen. Again.
Speaker 4: In nineteen fifteen, there were no gas stations. You have
Speaker 4: to buy gas at a hardware store pharmacy, and over
Speaker 4: the years of the teens and twenties, gas station networks
Speaker 4: began to get built out, but they still weren't consistent.
Speaker 4: Pump speeds were different, pumps didn't always work. It's exactly
Speaker 4: like electric vehicles today. So to anyone who thinks that
Speaker 4: EV's not inevitable, ask yourself what is the rate of
Speaker 4: improvement of EV's today in their ability to get cross
Speaker 4: country quickly versus one hundred years ago? And the answer
Speaker 4: is it's the same, if not slightly better than it
Speaker 4: was at the dawn of internal combustion, so EV's are inevitible.
Speaker 4: And in fact, I would encourage anyone, any car company
Speaker 4: that wants to save billions go drive cross country or
Speaker 4: hire me to go a cross country for you, because
Speaker 4: every problem that's occurred in the EV sector, software, hardware, reliability,
Speaker 4: we saw this five six years ago.
Speaker 3: By the way, I want to I want to keep.
Speaker 2: I want to keep on the EVAH train right now.
Speaker 2: But before we get too far away from your cannonball
Speaker 2: run in Gas, I just am curious, how much of
Speaker 2: the time were you breaking the speed limit and how fast.
Speaker 3: Were you going, like average and top speed? And was
Speaker 3: it fun?
Speaker 4: It's it's work. It's not fun at all. Every moment
Speaker 4: talking about it after is fun, but doing it is work.
Speaker 4: And the reason so a few people do it is
Speaker 4: because it is work. Everybody in the cannibal community is
Speaker 4: bonded by something that people outside just don't understand. You
Speaker 4: have to do some math, a lot of math, and
Speaker 4: be a good driver and be really committed. And most
Speaker 4: people who call themselves car enthusiasts are not actually car
Speaker 4: enthusiasts at all. They're not They are as much enthusiasts
Speaker 4: of ours as someone who buys a really beautiful dress
Speaker 4: and wears it once and gives it back. Just you
Speaker 4: have to eat. This is a task. You can't go
Speaker 4: mountaineering in couture. You have to bring the gear the day. Yeah. So,
Speaker 4: but everything has its place. And so we I mean
Speaker 4: we were speeding. I'm guessing ninety nine point nine percent
Speaker 4: of the time. The speed limit was inwhere from fifty
Speaker 4: five to seventy five, and we're our Our driving average
Speaker 4: was ninety two point seven and our average including stop
Speaker 4: time was ninety point four. So we're stopped for approximately
Speaker 4: thirty thirty one minutes just to refuel, and then you're
Speaker 4: just as fast as you can. Our toss speed was
Speaker 4: one sixty, but most of the time we're in the
Speaker 4: one twenty range, and we would have been an hour faster,
Speaker 4: except that I am a more cautious driver than my
Speaker 4: co driver Dave, who really was flat out most of
Speaker 4: the way, and I slowed down.
Speaker 1: What happened to the car that you set the record in?
Speaker 1: Do you still have it?
Speaker 4: I still have it. It's in semi storage in New York.
Speaker 4: It's being restored to two thousand and six Cannibal record
Speaker 4: setting and condition. As I consider selling it, so it's
Speaker 4: period correct everything period correct six. I any time I
Speaker 4: took it out in the years subsequent to going public,
Speaker 4: it would be recognized, generally by a police officer, and
Speaker 4: I'd get pulled over and they'd want to talk about it.
Speaker 4: Never got in trouble subsequently, but came close when I
Speaker 4: was pulled over for speeding in it in Upstate New
Speaker 4: York by an officer who recognized me in the car
Speaker 4: and stated that he gave a copy of my book.
Speaker 4: I tell all of this to every student in radar
Speaker 4: class at the New York State Police Academy, and he
Speaker 4: couldn't wait to see me in court to defense where
Speaker 4: I would try to defend myself. So that story is.
Speaker 1: To show, okay, well you're here with us.
Speaker 4: Now. That story is too long for this show, but
Speaker 4: I tell the extended version of it on ed Bullian's
Speaker 4: Vinwiki car channel. It's called the evidence story, and it's
Speaker 4: it's hard to believe. So today I drive like a baby,
Speaker 4: an absolute baby.
Speaker 1: So going back to Tesla, though, did Tesla help you
Speaker 1: at all when you were setting records in their cars?
Speaker 1: Did they assist you do support in any way in
Speaker 1: the spirit of r and.
Speaker 3: D did Elon call you and say yes, dude, okay?
Speaker 4: Elon never called me. However, I I had a good
Speaker 4: relationship with Tesla's Tom's team which existed at the time,
Speaker 4: and there were some terrific people there. And you remember
Speaker 4: that there was a woman that kill Silprizio. Keiley was
Speaker 4: very supportive and helped me learn a lot about Tesla
Speaker 4: to autopilot and charging and put me in touch with
Speaker 4: senior people still. Stirling Anderson was the head of Autopilot
Speaker 4: at the time. She connected me with him, and so
Speaker 4: I learned a lot and they let's just say that
Speaker 4: they lent me the first let's see, the second record
Speaker 4: I set was set in a Tesla press car. They
Speaker 4: did not have advanced notice of what we were doing.
Speaker 4: They did know that we would pick it up in
Speaker 4: New York and drop it in La. They didn't ask
Speaker 4: and I didn't tell them, uh, And I did receive
Speaker 4: many likes and retweets from very important people in Tesla
Speaker 4: at the time. That's no longer the case as in
Speaker 4: the years since. I've lobbed some criticism at Tesla for
Speaker 4: some safety issues around autopilot. But there was a time
Speaker 4: when they gave let's just say tacit indirect approve.
Speaker 1: That is wild because I freak out about dog hair
Speaker 1: and press cars. So this is putting a whole new
Speaker 1: perspective on what we do what we do with press cars.
Speaker 4: If you consider the irony of it all is that
Speaker 4: one hundred years ago, car companies would literally pay for
Speaker 4: people to set records in their cars. And today, I mean,
Speaker 4: what is the dream headline for any EV maker today?
Speaker 4: The dream headline and every car company making a TV
Speaker 4: today is five days from having this headline is company
Speaker 4: X beats Tesla. Because there's almost it's almost a possible
Speaker 4: to get that headline in any category of performance or metric.
Speaker 4: Lucid could do it for efficiency, but no one can
Speaker 4: do it with front page headlines setting time unless it's
Speaker 4: done literally a canniball record is set, and they are
Speaker 4: of course, are all concerned about legal legal issues. So
Speaker 4: what is really interesting about Tesla and EV's and charging
Speaker 4: is that if a car company wanted to beat the
Speaker 4: EV record in it that was set by in a Tesla,
Speaker 4: the window when it could be done opens every year
Speaker 4: for a few months and then closes. The first generation
Speaker 4: portion tychon technically well the range is shorter than the
Speaker 4: best the longest range Tesla. However, the battery technology and
Speaker 4: some of the EA chargers that it could connect to
Speaker 4: are better. So there was a window when a portchit
Speaker 4: Tychon could have broken the record. That window closed with
Speaker 4: multiple software updates from Tesla and the improvement of the
Speaker 4: Tesla chargers. Lucid currently is probably the only ev that
Speaker 4: could be used to break the Tesla record. The Lucid
Speaker 4: longest range air battery pack five hundred and sixteen miles
Speaker 4: is twenty percent longer than a Tesla, but it would
Speaker 4: require that the chargers have an uptime i'm equivalent to
Speaker 4: the Tesla charging network, which they do not, and so
Speaker 4: there is an arms race among evy manufacturers to enable
Speaker 4: a third party like myself to go do this. But
Speaker 4: currently the record is basically sitting. I think it's forty
Speaker 4: two hours in the Tesla and it will sit there
Speaker 4: until the charging networks available to non Tesla companies achieve
Speaker 4: a level of liability that Tesla has always had.
Speaker 1: What about an electric hypercar like a Nevara and yeah,
Speaker 1: the Rimac Navara, And also is that a liability just
Speaker 1: because it's so much flashier than something like a Lucid Sedan,
Speaker 1: which blends in yeah.
Speaker 4: The own, yeah it is. Any any sports car looking
Speaker 4: car is a liability. You have to have an innocuous
Speaker 4: vehicle and it must be with the largest battery pack
Speaker 4: and the best efficiency combined with a network with uptime
Speaker 4: as equivalent to a gas station, or you're just not going.
Speaker 1: So it's not about to all.
Speaker 4: Really, it's pure math. So right now, the battery, the
Speaker 4: power density of electric batteries of any technology is less
Speaker 4: than that of petroleum. So until those lines cross, and
Speaker 4: they will cross, uh, you are at the mercy. You
Speaker 4: are hostage to the inexorable, terrible devil's math of power
Speaker 4: and efficiency. There's no way around it. I have tables,
Speaker 4: like calculation tables that just about this. Every time an
Speaker 4: EV manufacturer releases anything, I enter the car and the
Speaker 4: table and to determine if it can be done. But
Speaker 4: the choke point today is not the cars. It's the chargers. Uh,
Speaker 4: it's the chargers, Alex.
Speaker 3: I wonder about the.
Speaker 2: You obviously are a super enthusiast and you like interesting
Speaker 2: and uh sort of niche cars, the Morgan three wheel
Speaker 2: are being one of them. But also you like, you know,
Speaker 2: everybody likes.
Speaker 3: An M five.
Speaker 2: Can you be passionate about an EV like like the
Speaker 2: driving experience?
Speaker 3: Do you enjoy it?
Speaker 1: So?
Speaker 4: Ideally drive a Tesla. It's my fourth I love it.
Speaker 4: So evi's have gotten a bad rap in terms of
Speaker 4: driving enthusiasts because we have not yet really seen an
Speaker 4: EV with soul that is productized in the way that
Speaker 4: a cor enthusiasts want it to be. So let me
Speaker 4: just unpack that. So there are Tesli Model three performances
Speaker 4: like on paper like the perfect car. Why do car
Speaker 4: enthusiasts not like it? Well, no sound, so I would argue, yes,
Speaker 4: lack of sound is a thing because we equate. Analog
Speaker 4: cars are not great just because they're analog. They matter
Speaker 4: to us that we connect with them. Because we are analog.
Speaker 4: Our heart beats, we can hear it. We run faster,
Speaker 4: our heart beats faster, we get scared, heart beats faster,
Speaker 4: We can feel the blood pulsing in our veins. So
Speaker 4: we are connected as our own bodies with exert Hannah
Speaker 4: used to be a runner. You know this, Yeah, I
Speaker 4: mean athletes understand that people who understand exertion and physicality
Speaker 4: understand cars. In a way different from others, And so
Speaker 4: a vehicle that when we change gears, it is analogous
Speaker 4: to the psychological decision to I will now know that
Speaker 4: the final sprint in a marathon, like I'm changing gears
Speaker 4: now you do in a car. It's the same decision,
Speaker 4: and the noise changes in the same way. The noise
Speaker 4: changes in our heads and when our heart rates that
Speaker 4: much faster. So an EV that lacks that doesn't have
Speaker 4: a parallel set of sounds and feelings to what we
Speaker 4: feel inside ourselves, because that's what we do in a
Speaker 4: car too. When we get scared and excited, we react,
Speaker 4: and EV lacks that bridge connecting the driver, the organic
Speaker 4: human analog driver, to what the vehicle does. Now, the
Speaker 4: corrollary to that is that an EV, because the power
Speaker 4: it comes at is linear and the noise floor is
Speaker 4: lower in a way, connects us much more deeply than
Speaker 4: any analog vehicle to the actual act of driving, because
Speaker 4: the outputs of driving fast are quicker, less time, and
Speaker 4: an EV will do those things that analog cars can't do.
Speaker 4: And so for someone to drive an EV faster better
Speaker 4: than they do an analog vehicle, they have to be
Speaker 4: willing to give up that bridge but intellectually connect with
Speaker 4: a vehicle that will do more of what they want
Speaker 4: better than any ice vehicle. And the community does not
Speaker 4: really recognize that that what few professional drivers have raised
Speaker 4: in formulae. They get it, but everyone else doesn't get it.
Speaker 4: And I think that the enthusiast community will have to
Speaker 4: age into it, and then the next generation of kids
Speaker 4: after that will just take it for granted. But the
Speaker 4: other half of this is something that I'm very disappointed
Speaker 4: to see, which is that virtually every car company in
Speaker 4: the planet working on EV's and there's a few exceptions.
Speaker 4: Rimok Wull be an exception. Everyone else is shoehorning electric
Speaker 4: power trains into internal combustion thinking, and they've made it
Speaker 4: with this concept of the software defined vehicle. And their
Speaker 4: notion is, oh, well, we'll offer subscription services with these evs.
Speaker 4: People will love it just like a phone. That's just
Speaker 4: not true. The only thing we want an EV to
Speaker 4: do is be cheaper and more reliable than an ice car.
Speaker 4: Than that, we most people just don't care. The missing piece,
Speaker 4: the piece that will connect with enthusiasts, is there's only
Speaker 4: one company thinking about this really well, it's Hyundai. So
Speaker 4: Hyundai's new Ionic five n the racing of the I
Speaker 4: five has fake engine sounds. Many companies have done this,
Speaker 4: but most of them are terrible. But Hyundai's did it
Speaker 4: with a purpose. They offer not just fake engine sounds,
Speaker 4: but a fake synthetic gearbox paddle gearbox with synthetic gears
Speaker 4: that mimic actual driving gears. You can redline the car.
Speaker 4: So now the car sounds and feels closer to an
Speaker 4: ice vehicle, and you have all the benefits of learning
Speaker 4: how an ice vehicle drives, and other downside is potentially
Speaker 4: damaging it. So you actually have a vehicle which you
Speaker 4: could learn to drive an ice vehicle better. And this
Speaker 4: and this is tip of the iceberg because ultimately, and
Speaker 4: I wrote about this ten years ago, every legacy car
Speaker 4: maker that has a brand or a model whose brand
Speaker 4: is more powerful than the parent brand. As an example,
Speaker 4: the Corvette is worth more than GM, are worth more
Speaker 4: than four now nine to eleven is probably worth more
Speaker 4: than Portia. Every company but he has one model like
Speaker 4: this Jeep is worth more than Stilantis. So each of
Speaker 4: these companies has a fifteen hundred year library of sound
Speaker 4: and feel and enthusiasts who want that sound and feel.
Speaker 4: And in the future, because no one those cars aren't
Speaker 4: made anymore, people will want that sound and feel. What
Speaker 4: is the future of software defined vehicles? The only future
Speaker 4: is one where you can buy a future nine to eleven.
Speaker 4: It's a skateboard that looks like a future nine to eleven,
Speaker 4: but on board you can subscribe to the sound, feel,
Speaker 4: and physics of every nine to eleven ever made. Pick your year,
Speaker 4: portable download physics, model, sound, the field into the car,
Speaker 4: and the car's chassis itself. They'll need some kind of
Speaker 4: actual dynamic chassis that's very far more evolved than anything
Speaker 4: we've seen yet to actually mimic oversteer, understeer and while
Speaker 4: doing all these things inside a software defined boundary that
Speaker 4: prevents a crash. The dream of everyone is to have
Speaker 4: a sports car that does whatever you want that will
Speaker 4: never hit anything. We're very far from this, but that
Speaker 4: is the dream and we'll only get there Biosolvin vehicles
Speaker 4: from oatims that have legacy. So because the new ones
Speaker 4: have no.
Speaker 1: Legacy, I'm so curious. You know, all day to day
Speaker 1: and this week we've been looking at earnings and you know,
Speaker 1: so many automakers have walked back their predictions and their
Speaker 1: estimates for EV's and their production goals. How does that
Speaker 1: strike you are EV's It sounds like you're saying EV's
Speaker 1: are still the future, even though it seems like there's
Speaker 1: quite a stall in demand.
Speaker 4: So when I say evs are inevitable, you know, like
Speaker 4: like fight Club. On a long enough timeline, every technology
Speaker 4: success rates one hundred percent. However, it is very likely
Speaker 4: that there will be in an interim phase where hybrids
Speaker 4: supersede internal question and that that will play out over decades,
Speaker 4: after which ev will supersede hybrid. However, the other issue,
Speaker 4: which is a political one. China has most of the
Speaker 4: rare earth's required to build evs, so they can churn
Speaker 4: out EV's all day long that are better than anything
Speaker 4: made in the West except maybe a Teslam and sell
Speaker 4: them throughout the world. And they have already started. And
Speaker 4: so if the United States wants to compete in these
Speaker 4: markets expert vehicles anywhere in the world, they need start
Speaker 4: trading out EV's, And so, in the absence of a
Speaker 4: supply chain that could support you know, EV's sold at scale,
Speaker 4: something else must be done. Hopefully some of the sources
Speaker 4: of these rare earths, some buish in the United States
Speaker 4: and some elsewhere. Well, many of them are locked up
Speaker 4: for environmental reasons, some of them for political reasons. Will
Speaker 4: be unlocked so American car makers can compete with Chinese
Speaker 4: ev makers. And the second thing, which I'm very optimistic about,
Speaker 4: is that you know, formerly of Tesla as a company
Speaker 4: called Redwood Materials and they recycle batteries and they are
Speaker 4: just starting to scale. So between the pressure to compete
Speaker 4: with the Chinese ev companies and the potential of Redwood Materials,
Speaker 4: I think they'll be both a stick and a carrot
Speaker 4: to get American car companies on board with evds. But
Speaker 4: hybrids are going to become a bigger thing first. And
Speaker 4: you know, really, all this is it's tiresome because these
Speaker 4: things should not be politicized. The market should have to decide,
Speaker 4: and the market has already decided that if we don't
Speaker 4: compete with China, our car companies are going to be
Speaker 4: not going to go away, but they're not going to
Speaker 4: be what they were. Alex.
Speaker 2: We have to wrap it up because of time. But
Speaker 2: I have to say, dude, you have blown my mind. Yeah,
Speaker 2: I mean, I mean the the amount of insights that
Speaker 2: you have. I just haven't heard anything like this from
Speaker 2: any of the top car executives that we talk to,
Speaker 2: and it all makes sense.
Speaker 1: So where can people find your work now? I mean,
Speaker 1: where to get more of you? Where should we send
Speaker 1: our listeners?
Speaker 4: Well, I have published very little in recent years, but
Speaker 4: I have a podcast called the autono Cast with Kirsen
Speaker 4: Corsek and Niemeyer, and I suggest following me on Twitter
Speaker 4: or LinkedIn on Twitter. I'm Alex Wroy one forty four.
Speaker 4: If I mean to say one last thing to everyone
Speaker 4: who ever said that driving would go away and that
Speaker 4: people are kids aren't getting driver's licenses, I worked at
Speaker 4: a self driving car company for four years. All of
Speaker 4: them are wrong, and human driving will never die, even
Speaker 4: when autonomous vehicles are available at scale cheaply love it.
Speaker 3: I hope you're right about that.
Speaker 1: I'm on board with that for sure.
Speaker 4: I know I am. I take way Mos every day,
Speaker 4: but I'm always going to own my old Morgan, my
Speaker 4: old Porsche. So thanks for having me.
Speaker 1: Thank you, Alex than thank you so much.
Speaker 2: I hope we can have you back because that was
Speaker 2: really incredible. So I truly appreciate it.
Speaker 3: And uh anytime, Thank you very much.
Speaker 2: That's all we have time for unfortunately, Hannah, but we'll
Speaker 2: see you back here, same time, same place, next week.
Speaker 1: I'm Matt Miller and I'm Hannah Elliott, and this is
Speaker 1: Bloomberg