Enlarge / Burt Reynolds as JJ McLure, and Dom DeLuise as Victor Prinzim in The Cannonball Run. Alex Roy is neither of these two characters. But it did give our office a chance to reminisce over how much we all loved the movie. (credit: 20th Century Fox)

It must be the season for electric vehicles and speed records. Jonny Smith turned a long-forgotten 1970s electric city car into the world’s fastest street legal EV. Venturi and The Ohio State University just set a new EV land speed record. And to that list we can now add Alex Roy, Warren Ahner, and Franz Aliquo’s cross-country “Cannonball Run,” the trio having set a new fastest time for a coast-to-coast dash in a Tesla 90D.

An affable chap prone to automotive adventures, Roy first came to notoriety in petrol-fueled Cannonball and Gumball rallies. These days, as Editor-at-Large for The Drive, he’s a big proponent of both electrification and autonomous driving, particularly when the two meet as they do under the shapely metal-and-plastic form of a Tesla.

On August 24th, Roy, Ahner, and Aliquo settled into the cabin of one such machine—a 90D, note, rather than the ludicrously fast P90D model—in Redondo beach. Just 55 hours later the trio pulled into the Red Bull Garage in New York City having covered 2,877 miles (4,630km), besting the previous fastest transcontinental EV crossing by two hours and 48 minutes.