Coast-to-coast in 57 hours with Tesla's Autopilot taking the wheel!

Michael Graham Richard
Michael Graham Richard Michael_GR
October 23, 2015
Tesla Autopilot
Promo image Tesla

2,995 miles electric journey

Ever since Tesla expanded its Supercharger network enough to make coast-to-coast driving in a relatively short amount of time practical, various EV enthusiasts have been trying to do the trip as fast as possible. A team from Edmunds first did it in 67 hours and 21 minutes in the summer of 2014. Then last spring, Carl Reese and Deena Mastracci drove 3,011 miles between Los Angeles and New York City in 58 hours and 55 minutes, crushing the previous record... But that wasn't good enough, especially now that there's a new tool available to would-be record holders: Autopilot.

While it is still early days in public testing of this technology and there's some controversy, it appears to work quite well on the highway, which is perfect for such a long trip.

For this attempt, Reese and Mastracci had a third person on board, Alex Roy. Here's the team (minus the invisible driver that is Tesla's Autopilot):

It took them 57 hours and 48 minutes to drive the 2,995 miles between Redondo Beach, California, and NYC. The Autopilot drove part of the way, providing a good real-world test of it in a long road trip.

They live-blogged the trip on Twitter. Here are some highlights:

Charging:

Elon Musk seemed impressed:

Via Jalopnik

Coast-to-coast in 57 hours with Tesla's Autopilot taking the wheel!
A team of three drivers broke a record that they had set in a non-Autopilot EV earlier this year.

Related Content on Treehugger.com