Watch This Time-Lapse Footage of the Tesla Record Run Finish in Manhattan

A madcap end to an electric cross-country record.

byAlex Roy|
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Only two kinds of dashcam videos are any fun: 1) an expert lap of the Nurburgring and 2) the end of a Cannonball Run-type drive cross country. The biggest difference between them? The best Nurburgring videos are all under eight minutes, but the last eight minutes of any record run always depict two breathless men stopped at a series of red lights, looking for a bathroom.

Those days are over.

In a world where people claim such records without video, I present to you the final leg of our latest (ahem) achievement: the new Electric & Autonomous Cannonball Run records, as depicted in a gorgeous high resolution time lapse, compressed into less than 60 seconds.

This clip depicts the end of our journey, from Eastern Pennsylvania across New Jersey, through the Holland Tunnel into Manhattan, then our battle through downtown traffic to reach the Red Ball Garage.

Many navigational mistakes were made in the final hour, all by me, which will be obvious to any New York native who analyzes the reflection of the Tesla’s GPS in the windshield. The final minutes were spent, as feared, stuck behind gridlocked traffic by the mouth of the Midtown Tunnel. Why I chose to go that way, well, three GPS units disagreed, and I had to make a choice.

How much time was lost to such errors? At least 15 minutes.

There’s always a next time, because records were meant to be broken, and the new Tesla Model S P100D should have a little more range than the 90D we used, and Autopilot 8 just came out, and new Superchargers are coming, which allows for a shorter route. You get the picture.

Alex Roy is an Editor-at-Large for The Drive, author of The Driver, and set the 2007 Transcontinental “Cannonball Run” Record in 31 hours & 4 minutes. You may follow him on Facebook, Twitter and Instagram.

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