70 Hour Cannonball Race Across Europe In A Tesla, With Autopilot Doing Much Of The Driving

3 years ago Johnna Crider 0 Comments
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Who says you can’t go on long road trips in a Tesla? Guillaume Castevert, who goes by TeslaStars on Twitter, and Romain Hédouin, aka TeslaOwls, just went on a cannonball race across Europe. The trip was inspired by the Cannonball Run in the US, which is a run from New York City to Los Angeles and covers a distance of around 4,677 kilometers.

The two drove a total of 5,887 kilometers in 70 hours and 49 minutes across nine European countries. They began with the goal of dispelling myths about EVs, Teslas, and range. They also wanted to showcase the evolution of electric cars. So, they went on a coast-to-coast trip across Europe.

TeslaStars kept a daily blog, which you can read here. On the first day, they wrote:

“In March 2020, we were excitingly following live the Transcanadian 🇨🇦 Lightning Run that took Ian Pavelko & Trevor Page in their Tesla Model 3 from Vancouver BC to Halifax NS (6,131 km) in 73 hours and have been planning to do a Transeuropean 🇪🇺 run ever since.

“Of course, plans have been disrupted by the pandemic 😷, but 18 months later, now seems a possible time. We are both fully vaccinated, the 9 countries that we will cross are open and we will mostly meet people in the open air where the virus transmission is much harder. Our aim is to set the record time to drive in an electric car at road-legal speeds, from Cape Saint-Vincent 🇵🇹 to Cape North 🇳🇴, with Aldébaran, a 2019 Tesla Model 3 Long Range.

“We hope to drive those roughly 6,000 km in under 72 hours and meet the awesome electric car community before, during, and after our Cannonball Run.”

The countries they traveled through along their journey were:

  • France.
  • Spain.
  • Portugal.
  • Belgium.
  • Germany.
  • Denmark.
  • Sweden.
  • Norway.
  • Finland.

For the drive, they used a GoPro that recorded a 4K timelapse of the entire run with a view of the Model 3 screen and a view of the road behind the windshield. They plan to publish the unedited video when they return home. They used Teslamate which is an open-source free data logger software that runs on a free Oracle server. This recorded their driving speeds, charging speeds, and battery state of charge — graphs will also be published once they return home.

Most of their trip in France was driven in rainy conditions, which reduced their speed some. However, when they reached the German Autobahn, they made up for that. Castevert wrote in his post, “Autopilot was a fantastic help during the run, handling most of the driving tasks and allowing us to concentrate on monitoring the road conditions and the behavior of other road users. This is a life-saving technology, especially on such a demanding road trip.”

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Johnna Crider

Johnna owns less than one share of $TSLA currently and supports Tesla's mission. She also gardens, collects interesting minerals and can be found on TikTok

Johnna Crider has 1996 posts and counting. See all posts by Johnna Crider