Planning a Cross-Country Drive In Record Time? You Need These Tips!
VINwiki has shared some of the coolest stories about automotive related adventures, as told by the people who experienced them first hand. This one, told by Ed Bolian, is easily one of the coolest car tales I’ve ever heard and it also has a nifty bit of information if you ever decide you want to try to break Ed’s New York-to-Los Angeles Cannonball Run record, which we have to assume will fall someday.
Bolian and his two friends Dave and Dan made the trip in a GPS verified 28 hours and 50 minutes, obliterating the previous record by more than two full hours. When you’re talking about a trip of 2813 miles in just over one whole day, two hours might as well be two days. Google maps says the route should take forty and a half hours, and they knocked more than ten hours off of that. I’m happy to knock 10 minutes off a trip compared to Google’s ETA, I can’t imagine shaving more than a typical factory shift off a single drive, regardless of it being all the way across the country.
While there are a litany of factors to consider, one of the most important being fuel, including capacity, mileage, and a way to actually purchase it. As you might imagine, covering 800 miles in 8 hours triggered American Expresses fraud alerts and they locked down Ed’s cards, leaving him and Dave and Dan scrambling to get a credit card approved to make the purchase. Shortly after the transaction, Ed’s phone rings. AmEx called him to let him know they’d stopped a suspicious transaction on his card, only to have Ed let them know the charge was him, and he wasn’t going into any details about the how and the why he was able to cover the “impossible” distance between fill-up, but to turn his card back on.
He had no more issues for the rest of the trip, which actually only included one more stop thanks to the massive fuel cells Bolian had installed to increase the range between stops. The trio cruised on into California to seal the deal and lock in the record time which still stands to this day.
