Electric Motorcycle Cannonball Record Set

An electric motorcycle cannonball sounds like a clean, futuristic flex until you meet the real enemies: charger gaps, unreliable stations, and a battery that slows its own fast charging when the heat soaks in. We sit down with Aaron Pufal and Karry Lebel right after their coast-to-coast run from the Red Ball Garage in Manhattan to the Portofino in Redondo Beach, where they set an officially recognised EV motorcycle cannonball time of 100 hours and 17 minutes, backed by witnesses, GPS tracking, and the cannonball community watching in real time. 

We get into the decisions that made or broke the attempt: why “what’s the range?” is the wrong question, how they used A Better Route Planner (ABRP) to pick charging stops, and why they often charged to the minimum instead of topping up. Carrie breaks down how the route had to be recalculated again and again as heat, elevation, wind, and dead chargers changed the math. Aaron explains the surprising core problem on this LiveWire setup: thermal throttling, where repeated DC fast charging heats the battery and forces slower charge rates, turning a quick stop into a long wait. 

You will also hear the human side: van life stress, comms that fail inside a metal cargo van, drafting for efficiency while dodging debris and bad roads, the rain-soaked moment where quitting felt reasonable, and the weird anticlimax of finally rolling into the finish line exhausted. If you love long-distance motorcycling, EV charging infrastructure, or any kind of endurance road trip problem-solving, this one is a masterclass in what “efficient” actually means on electric power. 

Subscribe, share this with a friend who thinks EV road trips are easy, and leave a review so more riders can find the show. What part of an electric cannonball attempt would worry you most: charging reliability, battery heat, or sleep?

Transcript

Welcome And The EV Record

SPEAKER_04 0:00

Season six, episode nine. Welcome to Adventure Cannonball Podcast. I am your host, Taylor Lawson, and today I am joined by Carrie LaBelle and Aaron Puffal. Welcome to the podcast. Nice one. Thanks for having us, bud. Yeah, thank you. So I got a lot of questions for you two crazy boys who just drove across the country. Let's talk about the cannonball record that Aaron, you set and that B, you couldn't have done without the support of Carrie.

SPEAKER_01 0:28

No, it's uh the dumbest thing you can do, but we did it. And in a nutshell, it is the proper cannonball run from the Red Ball Garage to the Portofino Hotel in Rodondo Beach, California. And what made the attempt special was it was done on an electric motorcycle. So it's never really been done and officiated properly. And that was the attempt. Yeah, there's lots of the story, but that's the record that was set officially.

SPEAKER_04 1:02

All right, that's uh that's that up there. Let me start by doing a bit of a quick background here. So for those of you who aren't our seven loyal listeners, Carrie, and we want to say thank you very much for making us and holding that number two position even within our own podcast. So, Carrie, you are the host of the Wing Nuts show within the ADB Cannonball genre, shall we say? So how did you guys get? I know we've been talking and been doing this, and you were a competitor in the 2025 cannonball in the U.S. And I just wanted to find out how the conversation came about where you guys decided that this would be a good idea. Carrie, over to you first.

SPEAKER_03 1:44

Well, I think that Aaron had been stewing on this for a while on what sort of cannonball record to go for. And he had noticed, and Aaron, correct me if I'm wrong, that the Eevee motorcycle cannonball record had not been officially set yet. There were several guys that had done some great times coast to coast and did a lot of the groundwork for doing this sort of attempt, but nothing had been truly official yet. So he had actually reached out to me and asked if I'd be interested in helping support on this. And I'm like, yeah, hell yeah, man, I'm your Huckleberry. Let's let's do this. All right. Yeah, I was I was all in. Aaron?

SPEAKER_01 2:35

Yeah, and that's making yeah, he makes a very good point. And out in the onset, there is that none of these attempts, none of these cannonball attempts rarely they ever happen with just one person going out and doing it. It's usually a huge team. So even the the automobile attempts, they happen with teams of 10, 20, 30 people. And if it's just simple logistics or in the high-speed attempts, it's you know, evading the police, weather routing, traffic, yada, yada, yada. But for ours was was a lot of logistics. So we had to find a motorcycle. So we found one, you know, it was in uh Las Vegas. And I I had never seen it. So we bought it from a dealer. Uh they shipped it over to Carrie's. He was nice enough to receive it. It was late. We were actually supposed

Why Attempt An Unset Category

SPEAKER_01 3:20

to do this in June, and it was late getting there. Like all motorcycle shipping, it's always late. And he received the bike and he made sure it worked because we had really had no idea because all dealerships are like used car salesmen. And he received the bike, he tested it, he tested the charging, he rode it around, he ordered a windshield for it. We had learned from checking, you know, the experts on the internet that a windshield was important. I had bought some phone chargers, some quad lock phone chargers, and and yeah, he said the bike is good to go. So at that point, I had loaded up the big blue whale, the rally van, and I essentially drove across the country. So at this point, Carrie's really doing all the work, as you can see. And then we loaded the bike up into the van. And I made a point of never having ridden it. I wanted that story to hearken back to the the uh cannonball baker days where he would show up at the Red Bull, never seen uh seen the motorcycle before, and then he would ride across the country. So I wanted it to be as true to that old school storyline as possible. So that's really the the um the way we prepared, which is we didn't prepare.

SPEAKER_04 4:27

So I didn't actually know that. That I didn't know that that was the the history of it where he'd show up and be like first time on the bike. So I wondered why that was like part of I didn't know that that was part of the design from the outset. Crazy as it might be, I do understand that the dare we call it genius behind that.

SPEAKER_01 4:44

Yeah, and I think it's the truest form of a cannonball attempt because this is really bleeding edge technology, and especially for a dummy like me, like I've never seen an electric motorcycle, right? I've never I think I've gone to an electric charging station once or twice with my wife's ID buzz. So I really don't know how all this works, right? And I wasn't sure if you could even go across the country and hit all the chargers. And Carrie, of course, having done all the work, he used an app, he could tell you about the app, and it said it was possible. Well, if the internet and Carrie says it's possible, let's just go and I'll just be the dummy riding the motorcycle, and and Carrie and the team will be the ones who tell me where I'm going next. Uh so and like Carrie said, there was one guy who has claimed to have done this in seven days, and then there was a gentleman named Stephen Day who's claimed to have done it in 111 hours. So we knew unofficially that it was possible, but having no real experience doing it. But going back to Cannonball Baker, I thought that because when he did it on Indian motorcycles and things like that, it wasn't as true a sense a cannonball. It was about can we make it and not necessarily how fast we can we can do it. But of course, like all things, if you're heading in a direction on a motorcycle, you want to go as fast as possible, of course.

SPEAKER_04 6:06

Yeah, well, I guess in this case, I guess we'll hand this over to you, Carrie, but it's not so much about going fast in these cases, it's a matter of getting the the the maximum amount between between each charge. So let me let me hand over to you, Carrie, and just but let me preface it with this question. When I would call you guys,

Range Is The Wrong Question

SPEAKER_04 6:22

I called you guys at the, I guess it was day three, and um you said the most common question that you got sort of at the you know, at the voltage pump is what's the range on that thing? And of course, when I called you, I asked the exact same question, and then you're like, hey, you yell over the phone. Hey, this idiot on the phone with me just asked me what the range was on this. So yeah, I'm just like those idiots. So maybe you can explain why, and we'll get into this a bit more details, but if you want just deep dive in, why is that a dumb question? Why am I an idiot? It's maybe maybe just maybe it's limited. Just limited.

SPEAKER_03 6:56

We'll just we'll put guardrails on it. Let's put guardrails on that, please. So it's not that it's a dumb question. It's that it's the wrong question for what we were doing. So if you think about it, range is important if you're just going out for a day trip and you're trying to figure out what you're doing. The range becomes less important on this when you're trying to not necessarily go as fast as possible, but optimize your range. And then you have to be taking into consideration the distance between each one of the charging stations. So even though you may have, say, a hundred miles of range at 55 to 63 miles per hour, that doesn't mean that there's actually a charging station within that specific range. Does that make sense? So we may have a charging station 50 miles in, but then it's another 6570 to the next one. So you can't necessarily bypass one charging station to be able to try and hop to the next one to optimize range, or you'll just be out of juice 10 miles short of the next charger. Which is, you know, when you're with gas-powered vehicles, is something you don't have to worry about, right? You can toss a tennis ball and hit a gas station just about anywhere. And that's just not the case with the charging stations. There's plenty of charging network out there, uh, but they're they're spaced differently.

SPEAKER_04 8:26

So what I'm hearing is that if you, for example, because obviously you're you want to charge the minimum amount of time to be able to get to the next charging station with enough safety margin. And that's what you're shooting for, is the is the optimal charging to achieve that distance till the next, what you hope to be, some of your pictures are great, but you hope to be a charging station capable of actually charging the motorcycle.

SPEAKER_03 8:50

Right, exactly. And so what you find is you're not necessarily charging to 80 to 100% every single time, right? And I'll let Aaron talk about the thermal factors uh a little bit later. But what we're looking at is five, six, seven charging spots out to be able to optimize the time that we spend at each station. So we may know that it's 50 miles to this station and 65 to the next one. We had a stretch where it was over 70 miles between each one. So the less amount of time you would have to spend at a charging station, the faster you could get back on the road to the next one. Does that make sense? It does make sense. Yeah. Yeah. So so when we're, and we'll talk about the app later, that that the app would help us optimize those charging spots based on the distance, the temperature, the elevation change, and stuff like that. So there was a lot more to it than just how far you can go.

SPEAKER_04 9:54

I didn't know that you guys were planning that many stations out.

Route Resets Heat And Dead Chargers

SPEAKER_03 10:05

Yeah, and I can tell you if you you want to want to drop some numbers, I had to redo our route 22 times because of external factors. So we ran into 115, 116 degree heat. We had charger stations that were not working properly or would take longer than they were supposed to. And each time that happened, I had to go through and recalculate the entire route.

SPEAKER_04 10:32

Is there a way to make it so that, you know, when Aaron wants to beat his next record, is there a way to make it so that you could put Did you want to comment on that, Aaron?

SPEAKER_01 10:41

No, there won't be another record. Yes, there'll be another record if someone were to pony up, right? So the biggest disappointment was we had reached out or I had reached out to everyone. And no one person in the manufacturer of the motorcycle even said luck. So in my mind, to jump ahead temporarily is yeah, I would love to get on one of these cutting-edge motorcycles that cost $30,000, $40,000. And now our range is 200 miles, right? And now it makes it so much easier or at least safety margin, right? I would love to have a bike that didn't have heat throttling as the battery got hot throughout the day for charging. I would love to do something cool like have smaller bikes and do a solar-powered one if we could find a bike with removable batteries. There are so many cool things that can be done. But, you know, this stupid thing that we did just to get in the record books, just so I could tell rally goers, suck it up, buttercup. Look what I did. That's really the purpose of all this, right? Is during our rally, when people start complaining about the rain, I'll go, yeah, okay, let me tell you about rain and cannonballing, right? And shut up and let us get it done, right? That's that's the real point of this. It costs like $25,000 to do this attempt. So that doesn't even cover the cost of one of these high-end motorcycles, right? So to answer the question, yeah, there's awesome attempts that can be done. And that's really one of the side effects of this, is because the cannonball attempts are so fast now, and you're into the realm of very criminal speeding, you know, reckless driving, that this has opened up 10 years of attempts. Let's all go break Aaron and Carey's record because it is really attainable if you have grit. And cash. Well, it's not a whole lot of cash. You can go buy, you know, as far as attempts go, it's not a $150,000 car, you know, that you've spent a year building and you have $20,000 of countermeasures in it, and there's 12 people involved. As far as attempts go, it is the cheapest attempt that you can do. Unless, of course, you wanted to do it on a 50cc scooter, which is its own special kind of stupid.

SPEAKER_03 12:52

And I haven't fair enough. I haven't checked yet, but I'm willing to bet that it is the slowest cannonball record written on that spreadsheet.

SPEAKER_01 13:00

There are slower ones from, you know, historically, but I think it's right in line with someone has Ed has written slowest modern attempt or something like that. So you're absolutely right. In the in the in the modern realm, it is it is the slowest one. Yeah.

unknown 13:16

Yeah.

SPEAKER_04 13:16

There was an attempt back in 1947. There was also a hundred hours.

SPEAKER_01 13:23

And actually, Gary mentioned something in Jess, but it's what makes it difficult. You know, I'm over 50, we're all over 50. You know, we shouldn't be doing this. I'm out of shape. The, you know, even though the Ozempic is working, it's not working fast enough. And the attempt, we were wrong about everything. I we we had thought that, well, we'll go to a charging station and we'll plug it in and I'll get in the van. That's why we brought the van. I'll go in the van and I'll have a nap. And I'll have a power bar and a Red Bull and we'll be off. No, completely wrong. During the stops, it's the most busy of time because we had we had no idea what we were doing. Well, I specifically had no idea what I'm doing. When I left Manhattan, I'm on the highway, I'm doing 80, 90 miles an hour, and the guys will catch up to me because they were stuck in the Lincoln Tunnel, of course, with the with the van. And I'm like, this bike's fast. This is fun. I'm like flying, I'm racing with cars. I I have I have some footage. There was some cops on the side of the road, and I was like playing with the cops. I'm like, this is this is fun. I made it to the first charging station. They finally showed up, and we're like, well, that was wildly inefficient, right? And then we started getting serious about it, and we can talk about that, but there's no time to have a nap. You know, I have to get myself sorted out. There's rain that came along. It was a nightmare with rain. It was a nightmare with heat. There's stuff going on in the van. I can't, I can't really rest because, you know, there's things happening. We have to learn about the bike, recalculate, as Carrie said. There was, it was more busy at the at the charging than it was while we were riding.

SPEAKER_04 15:00

Yeah. That's one of the things I could. I mean, that's when we talked about this at the outset, you're like, yeah, I'm gonna ride and take care of myself on the brakes. Yeah, it doesn't happen that way. I totally get it. It's a bit like when uh Lyndon Poskett talks about when he's running the uh the Maliamoto and he gets back after a full day of riding, he's got to change the oil on the bike, he's got to fix what he broke, he's gotta set up his tent, he's got to make his food, then it's got to pack everything back in the trunk in the morning so he can get back on the van and show up at the next spot so he rides the next day. So it sounds a bit like everyone in your spouse was a bit like a little Mali moto going on, except you had a team.

SPEAKER_01 15:34

Yeah. And, you know, you think we had three, four guys. We had four, and one guy left, and and uh, and you know, some were more helpful than others, some treated it like a frat party. And, you know, by by the end of the second day, we realized that, hey, we need to all, you know, take this a little more seriously because there's there's tasks for everyone to do. And we kind of had a reset after being on the road for 22, 23 hours and being awake for like 30, 40 hours because of the timing of it all, because we left at midnight. We're like, I really need to get some sleep. I can't sleep in the van. And by the way, we all need to get some sleep because I thought it's my opinion that the person, Carrie, Carrie's basically team leader, right? So when he's driving the van, uh that's the most dangerous thing. Because if it's three o'clock in the morning, cruise control is set 63, 65 miles an hour, I'm a foot or two off the rear bumper, they're more likely to fall asleep than I am, you know, because I'm constantly modulating my throttle and not wanting to light the roads on fire because they're they're so rough, like a third world country. The

Van Life Stress And Team Roles

SPEAKER_01 16:40

guy in the van is going to fall asleep. So we had to have a reset and then we had a strategy meeting saying, how can we make this more efficient? And really only by day two did we do have a real plan and have real data. And then that's why Carrie talks about resetting the root planner so many times. Because maybe a good way of answering your previous question is if we were to do it all over again right now, we would blow that time of a hundred hours out of the water. Yeah, fair enough.

SPEAKER_04 17:08

Carrie, let me ask you in the van. So Aaron talked about what he envisioned it being. What was it like being in the van? So your team leader, you guys are trading, were you guys, for example, as as Aaron was saying that, I was thinking, yeah, I'd imagine that maybe one of you could be sleeping while the other one is driving. What what was the reality of that there?

SPEAKER_03 17:29

Um I would say that the reality of it was is that I was worried 90% of the time. And not like frecozoid type of worried, but just like I know that Aaron's right there. I know that he's a couple feet off that bumper. Um, I know that I need to be eyes up, panning and scanning a quarter mile out, keeping track of what's going on. You know, I was watching for deer. At one point we were passing antelope, and you know, people weren't even seeing the stuff. You got those truck gators in the middle of the road, and you know, he can't see any of that stuff. So, you know, the the original plan was you've got a driver, you've got a spotter. Whoever's in that passenger seat is spotting. They're watching the road, they're keeping an eye on the driver, and then you and you've got one person wrestling in the back and you rotate. That kinda worked.

SPEAKER_02 18:25

It didn't totally work. But I put a smile on your face, say it. Don't hold it back, just say it.

SPEAKER_01 18:32

Say it. So what he's trying to say is my buddy Steve shows up in Manhattan, and he had just flown from Toronto, and of course, he's been flying all day, so he's been drinking all day, and he shows up to the van, he goes, This is really cool. I'll see you guys in eight hours. And he went to sleep in the back of the van, like a frat party. So, you know, we were a man down overnight. He didn't realize how, you know, if you're not a motorcycle guy, you don't realize what we're trying to do. And he didn't even know what the red ball garage was, you know. He he was he didn't know what a cannonball was. Right. He was just there to support me in spirit and didn't realize that, you know, people could die doing this. You know what I mean?

SPEAKER_04 19:10

So, Carrie, how long before you guys got how long before Aaron rocked up with the van to pick you up before you headed for New York? Did you realize that Steve was coming?

SPEAKER_03 19:22

I think I realized it in Virginia Beach.

SPEAKER_04 19:26

After you had already been two days together and headed north to pick up Hunter.

SPEAKER_03 19:31

Yeah. Yeah. I think I think that's right. I I could be remembering it wrong. I am old. So way to prep the team, Aaron. Way to prep the team.

SPEAKER_01 19:40

Well, the truth is, you know, people always make promises, but until someone's on the airplane, I'm like, you know, I don't believe anything, right? Like everyone knows me as Mr. Reliable, but you know, and now we know Carrie's Mr. Reliable. But until that point, someone's in the van or someone shows up, I'm like, it's just a pie in the sky, right?

Helmet Comms And Drafting Reality

SPEAKER_04 20:00

All right. I got a question about communications between the motorcycle and the van. How'd that go? And then Aaron, I mean, Carrie, I want you to start, and then I'm gonna hand it over to uh to get the reality of it. So how did the how did the communications work between the drivers, anyone in the van, and Aaron? I think that it's really interesting that you're starting with me.

SPEAKER_03 20:20

Start because I think my opinion's gonna be vastly different than Aaron's.

SPEAKER_02 20:25

That's the reason for the question, baby. Go with it.

SPEAKER_03 20:29

So it's really funny, right? So Aaron did a great job planning this out. So he got comms for like regular headsets, like you would see a pilot wear, that we could wear inside of the van. And he got two sets, one for the driver and one for the passenger. So that at any given point in time, three people could be communicating and knowing uh know what's going on. And so we could shout out about debris or anything else, right? Or if he's getting tired, we could we could be planning and thinking about what we needed to do next. I think there were two challenges, and one is sort of a Mac versus Windows war, right? I'm a hardcore Cardo guy, and Aaron bought all this Senna shit. I was I was dying. I thought I can't believe I have to put this shit on my head. But you know, it is it is have to work, it does have to work with his helmet. So it we did what we could. What was interesting was is that through the doors in the back of the van, he would cut out a lot. Like we were we were having some communication issues through the steel of the van. When we were following him and he was in front, and then all we had to do is deal with was the windshield glass for the most part, the sound quality was significantly better. But if he dropped back more than say 50, 60 feet, it was almost unusable. So it was great. That he was uh following us so close and drafting to try and extend our range. But overall, they worked fine. I know that we pissed off Aaron multiple times where we would be switching our headphones on and off or passing them to the next person, and someone's tapping the microphone and it's blasting inside of his helmet. But uh yeah, we got through it.

SPEAKER_01 22:24

No, so thank you for that. Over to you. Over to you, Aaron. Sorry, I'm looking on Cardo right now, and the only headset they have is a $529, like big, big puffy headphone set, right? And the Senna ones were a hundred and change. They were quite reasonable. And I had Senna in my helmet already. So to switch the Cardo would have been, you know, another $2,000. I know we all like to spend, you know, Aaron's money, but it was very expensive just to change the brand name. But yeah, that's one thing we didn't know, we didn't realize is that essentially the van is a is a Faraday cage. I have a cargo van. So the whole back of it is metal. And and we never thought that, you know, A having to be behind the van, which by the way, let's just preface by saying we didn't really, that wasn't really the plan. We knew it was a possibility. So if you look at some of the footage or or pictures when we first started, I was in front of the van. And our original plan was Aaron's going to do 55 miles an hour in front of the van at night, and the van was going to be like a blocker. So we had these funny little signs in the back of the van. Well, big signs in the back says official testing, caution U of C B, University of Cannonball, Department of Energy. And we had these magnetic LED amber, you know, tow truck lights on the back of essentially. So that was our original plan was the van was going to be the physical blocker, and I would ride out front. And everything, all the communication actually worked great during that. But then we realized that as we continually ran the numbers, we realized this wasn't the most efficient thing. So we did a bunch of testing where I started drafting. This is only like on an hour 20. We're like, how do we improve this? Right. And only then did we start drafting. And that's only then we realized the communication had a challenge going, getting outside of the outside of the Ferritic. And yes, I have in-ear monitors. So I have my Senna and I've jerry-rigged it to use uh shure in-ear monitors, and I stick those right in my ear holes. So that acts as earplugs, and you have better quality. I think Carrie does the same. He's actually one up me. He has uh actual musician grade, custom-made in-ear monitors. So yeah, when someone, and I realize someone complaining about it is not the same as experiencing it, but when someone would take off a headset and throw it on the dashboard, that microphone slamming was literally putting an ice pick in my ears. And, you know, when you continuously tell someone, it's just human nature, right? Like as a as a manager, you realize that if you keep telling someone that that really hurts and it's hurting me, it doesn't matter. They're not going to think about it until they have the hurt, right? It's uh no one, no one ever learned the lesson. And I kept on getting my ears, you know, bleeding every, every hour. So I I want to go back to one thing, Aaron.

SPEAKER_03 25:20

You're talking about the view of CB magnets and the lights. I want to point out that I think that that worked fantastically. Like it it did exactly what it was supposed to do. Do you want to talk about where you got that idea from?

SPEAKER_01 25:34

I don't remember where I got the idea from. Maybe you can remind me.

SPEAKER_03 25:37

Well, you had talked to somebody who had had their support car rear-rented.

SPEAKER_01 25:43

That's right. Yeah. So Stephen Day and his counterpart, they have a video, it's called Charging Across America. And one guy left on, they were on different kinds of bikes. I forget what they're the Italian ones, uh uh, Energica motorcycles. So one guy left from East Coast, one guy left from West Coast, and they crossed each other. And they were doing that, that's what they did. The bike was up front and they had the escort vehicle in the back. And because they were doing 55 miles an hour, there was a trucker who rear-ended that guy, the escort vehicle, at like 80 miles an hour. So I thought, well, how do you prevent that? So I thought, well, you know, emergency lights make you much more visible when you're an I-80 at three o'clock in the morning. I get it, you got re-rear-ended. And that's where the idea came from. And then it had the secondary effect of kind of, you know, making you look kind of official and not just what are these weirdos doing on the side of the road? So you didn't have the Karen's calling the cops or people yelling at you. Instead of, instead of people being angry at you, people are like, oh, this is some serious testing going on here with this clearly awesome motorcycle and these handsome guys. They're clearly doing some official testing. And then it had the secondary effect of when we realized we should be drafting by like hour 30, it became even more important because we had passed a ton of cops, and surely there was a bunch of Karen's on the road, and especially those Karen truckers. When we were a bike length off the back of the bumper, no one thought anything of it. People are like, those guys are doing official testing because they have Amazon lights on and the sticker that they printed from, you know, banners.com. So no one ever bothered us doing clearly dangerous things on the highway. So yeah, the it was a hundred percent effective. And also keeping the van clean and keeping the bike clean and looking proper as opposed to Muppets, even though we were Muppets. No one, no one ever bothered us. We passed a ton of cops. That's really good.

Making A Cannonball Official

SPEAKER_04 27:42

I want to go back to us for a second. What actually consists of an official cannonball run and how do you make it official? And I want to I want to the second part of that question is how did you manage to get yourself into that fraternity of people? So maybe you can hit that two-part question.

SPEAKER_01 28:01

I guess I guess I'll take it too. I feel bad talking and doing too much talking. But um, yeah, first of all, to be clear, it's called the fraternity of lunatics. And how dare you degrade them by calling them people? I guess. I apologize. Yeah, yeah. Don't you know? Oversight. Totally open oversight. Uh and actually one of the coolest things, and it seems silly, is that one of the actual cannonballers at the end of it called us. Well, they they called us and said, Welcome to the fraternity of lunatics. And that's really the only prize you get. You know, play stupid game, get stupid prizes. The only stupid prize you get is an invite to a cannonball reunion and other like-minded lunatics calling you a lunatic. And that's the only only prize you get. But to answer your question, it's actually quite complicated because, you know, over the years, every cannonball, back in the day of gumball and all this stuff, gone are the days of just doing something and saying, well, I did it. You know, everyone thinks, oh, you're cheating and this and that. So it's you start off by making contact with someone who is a cannonball record holder. So we obviously all three of us know Bo Ernest. He holds the motorcycle cannonball record 32 hours, 32 minutes. You can listen to the podcast episode, you can you can read my book, and or you can buy the audiobook just plugging, just saying if you want to buy the audiobook and get in there, get it in there. And so that's step one is saying, this is what I'm thinking of doing. Can you contact, you know, the VinWiki guys and see if they'll even recognize the attempt? So once you have the blessing to do it, then a few days out, you have to go on the secret Facebook page and say, I'm thinking of doing this. I will start at the Red Bull Garage at this time. And then someone and a cannonballer has to show up and physically see that you were there. So uh we had a wonderful couple show up. They're called the the uh cuddlers, and they showed up with their awesome Mercedes, you know, sports car, and they're wearing the cannonball jacket, and you're like, oh, this is really happening, right? So that's that's the next step is having actual witnesses, human witnesses. And then you you you get on several apps. You start a Spot Walla page and you get on an app called Joiner J-O-I-N-R, and then you get the secret code. In our case, we didn't make a secret because we're not breaking any laws really. And then other cannonballers will watch that that GPS track. Then people will do community spot checks along the way. Normally they'll come do a spot check because it's really awesome that there's a car flying down the road and they just want to see that or they want to run block for them, which is a whole nother conversation, or they will look at traffic cameras. So if you watch some videos of other cannonball attempts, uh central command will record traffic cameras. They're all all over the place. So there's that aspect along the way. So people will drop in a check on you, and then people will officiate the arrival. So other cannonballers will show up, or at minimum, everyone is watching the joiner app and they're commenting, right? They're so supportive, right? These guys are just great. They're like, ah, come on, you can do it. We're cheering for you. I realize that's a hundred hours and whatever minutes, but we think you we think we think you can make it, go on and get it, right? So, yeah, it's a really complicated thing to get into the record books. And then the funny thing is the actual time, which I learned, I thought it would be different, but it's what the driver, in this case, the rider, has on their stopwatch is the official time. And when everyone agrees that's a reasonable time, then that's what gets submitted to the VinWiki gods, and then they entered into that into that famous spreadsheet, that Google spreadsheet. What was that time? It was 100 hours and 17 minutes.

SPEAKER_03 31:44

Carrie, you had a different time. Yeah, my time doesn't matter. I had 100 hours and 11 minutes. Um, but you know, I was following him on Joiner and on the uh Find My Rally Master app on my iPhone. And so that's what I came in at.

SPEAKER_01 32:03

But you know, official is the rider, so yeah, we were un Yeah, we were unclear about that. So the evidence they want is the timer. And they actually say they prefer an old school like egg timer on your dashboard. Obviously, that doesn't work for a motorcycle. But the tradition, I think it's more of, you know, and I wasn't rushing to press stop on the stopwatch, you know, let's let's be honest. So that's probably what happened is I took some pictures and I'm like delusional, and everyone's saying congratulations. I'm like, oh, I gotta press stop. So, you know, who who really cares? And the cruelty of the time was I had arbitrarily picked under 100 hours. It was purely arbitrary. And because of the freaking charging and little mistakes we made along the way, we missed the sub 100 hour. I know it's just symbolic, but it was just because of small inefficiencies. But yeah, you could easily get under 100 if you just follow, follow the formula.

SPEAKER_03 32:59

Well, to your point about the small inefficiencies, some of it was completely out of our control. A lot of it wasn't. But I I'm a Tesla owner. Um I'll own it. Like I drive an EV too. Um but the Tesla supercharger network is fantastic. They have an entire operations team that maintains those things. And what we ran into, and part of our challenge was you'd go to a bank of six to eight different chargers, and maybe one or two of them was actually operational. It was brutal. So you'd spend a ton of time just trying to find uh a charger that worked. If we had there's one charge that I can think of in particular that if we had had a charging station that worked the first try, that one stop would have had us down into double digits instead of triple. Uh, but we had that happen at least seven or eight times where the charging stations were completely undependable. Like I at this point, until things get better on that side, there's no way I'd buy another EV outside of a Tesla or one that can use the Tesla superchargers because it they're just not reliable enough. The cars have gotten fantastic, but the infrastructure just isn't there yet.

SPEAKER_04 34:22

What was the closest or the tightest margin you ever rolled into a station with? How many percentages left in the in the battery did you have at the lowest amount?

SPEAKER_01 34:32

Yeah, there was a there's a video of of us making a left turn, and I had stopped, it was nighttime, and I had stopped. I don't care if I missed the light because it was 1%. And, you know, having never ridden the motorcycle, I don't know what the truth of the bike is, but it starts getting really angry at 7%. Like the dashboard turns red and says, You're stupid, it's 7%. But at 1%, it gets really angry. And I had stopped and I I could see that. Well, if I have to push it, I'll push it, right? Because I'm not gonna, you know, you know, I'm not gonna die in the middle of the of the intersection. So I had stopped. I said, Well, I'll get enough. I had planned for the bike to die. So I don't want to die in the middle of the intersection, but I stopped and I took the quick video of saying how stupid this is. But essentially, we were so good at estimating the next uh the required energy to get to the next charging station. Whatever the guy said is we had a running joke was that we need 63% to get to the next place, but let's put 65% in. So that's how accurate our data and our consistency and energy consumption was, is that we would only put one or two percent extra in to make it to the next charging station because that's the efficiency of it.

Thermal Throttling Changes Everything

SPEAKER_01 35:48

And if you want to get really geeky, the true battle was keeping the temperature of the battery manageable. So, you know, we thought it was so boring when people ask, oh, what's your range? It has nothing to do with the range. What it turns out with this particular battery technology, and again, I I don't know a lot about it, but it turned out that keeping the battery temperature as low as possible was key. And to really get in the weeds here, when you're charging the battery, it gets warm. And the live wire is particularly good at managing heat, apparently. The Energika was the other option. We basically wanted a bike that could have level three charging. And there's really only two of them out there, right? I'm sure there's geeks yelling at the computer right now, saying, no, there's this one. But these are the only reliable ones you could just go buy without being a millionaire, right? And so don't go Google it and send me hate mail, just go away. So as you're charging it, it's it's getting warm. And as it gets warmer, the charging speed essentially, the amount of energy, the amount of kilowatts of energy you're shoving at the battery throttles. So as you repeat this, normal users don't do, as you're in charger number, you know, 62, the internal battery temperature is getting higher, higher, and higher. So it's a bad battle to keep the battery temperature down. Counterintuitively, you are not charging to 80-90%. You're charging to the absolute minimum, just so you can get rolling again so the air can flow over the radiator, uh, the liquid cooling system, which removes the heat out of the battery. Because remember, as the battery gets warmer, it throttles the charging down. So when the battery was cool, like at 80, 90 degrees Fahrenheit, you could charge at 20 kilowatts. So when you first pull into a charging station, boom, plug it in, 20 kilowatts. Wow, that's amazing. You're just throwing energy into it. And as it gets hotter, like if you had to go to a charging station that was 60, 70, 80 miles away, and you had to put 82% in there, it throttles all the way down to five, six kilowatts. So you're standing around going, oh, this is taking forever. And instead of being 20 minutes, you're there for 50, 60 minutes, right? So this was the game that we were playing. It wasn't how much energy we can shove in there. It's what's the minimum amount of energy we can shove in there without the battery getting hot, without the thermal throttling slowing that charging speed. And that was the real game.

SPEAKER_04 38:10

You know, as you're saying that, I'm thinking, how cool would that be just to like the van's there and you roll into like an ice bath for the bike while it's getting fueled? Like it would probably just crack everything would just crack. It would be popping and breaking because it would be cooling it too fast.

SPEAKER_01 38:25

But well, actually, the guys who did the energika challenge, they have uh less they have more of a problem with thermal throttling. That bike doesn't handle it so well. Again, these bikes were never meant to do this. And they had done that, they had got bags of ice and and attached it to the side of the bike. And it really didn't do a lot because the the thermal was inside the battery. The battery's a huge block. It's like a 400-pound block. And the only way to remove the heat was through the internal liquid cooling system. So think of it as an internal combustion engine. You have the water jacket around it, and there's an electric pump pumping the fluid around to a radiator. That's really the only way to remove the heat from the battery pack, is with their very well-engineered heat removal system. But by slapping, and again, everyone had the same the same, you know, answer, just get a fan or put water on it. Or, but no, it really didn't have much of an effect.

SPEAKER_03 39:27

But to your point about the engineering, I was actually really impressed with the bike. I thought it looked great. I thought that it did what it was supposed to. Um, would I ever take it on a cross-country trip like that? Not a chance in hell. That's not what it was designed for. At least in my opinion, it's not what it was designed for. It was designed for scooting around town, hustling ass, having a lot of fun, taking it up in the mountains, grabbing some lunch, and then heading back down. It's wicked fast. It's it's like a typical EV with those instant torque motors. It's really fast. I commuted on it for about a week up until Aaron showing up. So I was riding it and I was doing my own like reference consumption testing. Just like, all right, I'm I'm like texting Aaron while I'm commuting in rush hour traffic, headed into work. I'm like, all right, man, I've got it set at 55 miles an hour and 22 miles. This is this is how much charge we lost. And so we we did start doing some reference testing even beforehand, so that we had a minimum baseline. But then all of that got thrown out the door when I took the bike to go get serviced. So we took it to the local Harley dealership here, who is actually, interestingly enough, it's like 20 minutes from my house, but one of the largest live wire dealerships in the entire Southeast. And they completely went through the bought bike end-to-end. We put the new tires on, uh, but they also did a series of firmware updates. And when they did the series of firmware updates, it obliterated all the original reference data. So by the time we got to New York, we were we were starting from scratch.

SPEAKER_04 41:15

But did the new did the updates did it change any of the performance of the machine or did it give you any any advantages?

SPEAKER_03 41:24

I think it was a lot of uh bug fixes and there were a few feature additions uh that were added. So one thing that we noticed actually right before we loaded the bike into the sprinter to head north was that Harley on all their new bikes have a pin code to unlock and ride options so it's you don't have to have the key fob on you. Um and the bike had an older version of firmware that didn't have that. So he had been asking me if I could set that up so that, you know, uh just in case, Safety Net, if somehow we lost the fob as we were going across the country, could I set that pin code up? And I'm like, dude, it's not in the menu system. I can't find it. And then we we bring the bike back from the dealership, and lo and behold, we'd look one more time and it's in there now with the new firmware. So that was kind of nice. So you did set that up?

SPEAKER_02 42:17

Yeah, we got it set up. Zero, zero, zero, zero. I can take it. No, it's one, two, three, four.

SPEAKER_04 42:24

Fast word. All right, so when I heard that you guys were planning this, the two questions here. One to you, Carrie. How many months in advance did you plan this? And did you start crunching numbers about the data crossing the country, you carry?

SPEAKER_03 42:38

Uh it was at least two months. Because uh man, when did when did we start? You bought the bike in May, I want to say, right, Aaron?

SPEAKER_01 42:48

Wasn't it in May when you actually weeks to get picked up, and then it took months to come across the country, and then the one time you were away from the house, they tried to deliver it. So it took, you know, three months to get there. And, you know, we had no, it wasn't my plan to do this in August. So I, you know, my fat ass would bake in the in the sun, that's for sure.

SPEAKER_03 43:11

The 115 degree heat in the Mojave. Yeah, yeah, yeah. So it was at least a couple months. Once he actually bought the bike and I knew exactly what bike we were going to use for it, then I could start doing the research. So I was on the live wire groups and I was looking at uh actually there's a bunch of really interesting battery technology reference papers that that use the live wire and all kinds of stuff.

SPEAKER_04 43:41

When I first heard that you bought a Harley Davidson to do this, of course, this is when you guys, the other time you guys really laid into me when I was like, so I did a little internet search with my chat bot AI, and I found out that out of the top 10 motorcycles that are capable of this, this was number 10 on the list. Then I went back and Refined that search after I got so much heat and pain from you guys. So much hate. And then the bike that I did see is something that you mentioned earlier, Aaron, is the Energika Experia. And it says it'll do about 150 miles between charges.

SPEAKER_01 44:16

Yeah, that's nice that it says that.

SPEAKER_04 44:18

It says but you talked about experiment. You said two guys ran an experiment. What was that about?

SPEAKER_01 44:23

Two guys ran an experiment. I'm sorry.

SPEAKER_04 44:24

They ran so there was two guys that did a test with the Energika. They had done some.

SPEAKER_01 44:28

No, they actually did a run. They went coast to coast. They had an accident. Anyways, it was a whole thing. But if you if you absorb what what we were talking about going from charging station to charging station, that Energika motorcycle, you can't find one for under $20,000. Okay. So it's only going to give you 20 extra miles. And by the way, so it says on paper. I don't believe anything anymore, right? And that's what it says on paper. So what would that have got us? Maybe we could have skipped one or two charging stations for the next one. Remember what I just said. You're not going to charge to 100%. So if you're standing there at a charging station in Nevada and it's 115 degrees and the battery is thermaling out of control, I'm not going to charge it enough to utilize that claimed 150 miles of range, right? Because I want to keep the bot the temperature down. So again, we're circling back to the range of the motorcycle means very little, all just a red herring, right? Yeah. And then you'll have someone that'll message you, well, I found this motorcycle that has 350 miles of range and it has a solid state battery. They've never been delivered. These are just these tech bros that are putting out, you know, press releases. That's the Finnish company.

unknown 45:48

Yeah.

SPEAKER_01 45:49

So they're the Finland company. Yeah. They're they're inflating their investors. And then he's going to say, sorry, can't deliver it, and he'll take off. You know, this is where you have to admire the Chinese EV companies because they don't press release anything. They'll just go, oh yeah, by the way, we have something called flash charging now. And you can charge your EV car in six minutes. They don't press release it, they just deliver it, right? So the rest of the world is just behind. So all that technology that you can Google and the extra 20 miles range claimed by another motorcycle, remember, I paid $9,000 for this motorcycle and it has level three charging, you know, sold to me as new, even though it had over a thousand miles on it. And of course, Carrie did all the work and he took it to get service because there is a service interval at 1,000 miles. Plus, meetass was nice enough to give us some, some, some tires. So yeah, that's how we ended up with the bike. And that's how, that's why I have to reiterate, it doesn't matter what the range is. I suppose if I was super rich dude, I would have bought an Energika. But now that I've done it, I think the heat throttling is such an issue. I still would have preferred the live wire. Maybe, Carrie, what's your opinion on that? Did did did we have the best bike for the mission?

SPEAKER_03 47:02

I think we did. Like with the research I was doing too of the bikes that were available, I think you were spot on with the live wire. I think that at this point, until the battery tech changes, anybody that beats these records, it's simply based on endurance and how much they prepare. You could just as easily take your bike and rerun it again next week and break that record with the learnings that we've had over that course. And so it's it's really going to come down to the rider. You don't have, like you do with the gas vehicles with cannonball attempts, you don't have the um big differences of, oh, I put in a 45-gallon fuel cell that took up my entire trunk, and you know, I'm I'm pushing over 800 dependable horse to the rear wheel and blah, blah, blah, blah, blah. You don't have that option in EV bikes. There's no hacking the firmware. There's no changing out the electric motors, there's none of that tweaking. So if Verge Motorcycles, who's uh the one that I think that you were talking about earlier, uh being press bros, like they're saying supposedly that they'll start releasing those bikes at the, I think, fall of 2027. If that's true, if that does materialize and if they do actually have their first gen bikes come out with solid state batteries, like they say they're going to, they will be well down into the 70s with that bike hours-wise, if somebody were to redo this with that, I think.

SPEAKER_01 48:39

Yeah, and again, point I think of that bike is not about the range. Okay, you'll have a little bit more range, but I just want to hit the nail on the head here again, is the fact that a solid state battery, you'll roll into a charging station, you'll charge it in seven minutes, and you're on your way with zero uh heat soaking, right? The battery's not gonna get hotter, hotter, hotter as you move along. So I'm not excited about what the new range is of a solid state battery for another cannonball attempt. I'm excited that you'll you'll you'll charge the battery in minutes, just enough time to use 40. Exactly. Plus, it's not gonna get hotter. You can just then your next charge along the way is not so much calculation involved. The calculation is amazing. It's Carrie's thinking about 10 charges along the way, and your hardest charge is going to be at four o'clock in the afternoon because now the battery's at this estimated temperature and it will take this long to charge. It's it's it's such a complicated equation to be efficient, and it's all about the heat and not necessarily about the range.

ABRP Planning And Manual Data Tuning

SPEAKER_04 49:41

Carrie, how did you can you talk a little bit about what that looks like? Because I've got this in my mind. It's like, yeah, there's a couple things to worry to think about to put all this together. But as you guys are talking, there's more and more data that comes into this. Can you talk about what it what goes into figuring out? Like, how do you figure out what the temperature of the bike's gonna be at four o'clock in the afternoon with Aaron sitting on this thing riding through, you know, 110 degree temperature in the desert? Like, how do you how do you crunch those numbers? What goes into that?

SPEAKER_03 50:10

Well, I would like to claim that I'm super smart, but I'm not. That's okay, we'll claim it for you. What I'm good at is research. And so, like, especially on the tech side, like figuring out what to use when there's a lot of people a lot smarter than me who have already figured this stuff out. And what I needed for us was the reference data. I didn't need to redo any of the calculations because all of that stuff already existed. So, one of our primary tools for the planning of the route and the charging stations and stuff like that is a app called a better route planner. ABRP is their little shorthand. And that worked out great. So it was actually originally designed by an engineer who lives in Sweden. And recently that app got bought out by Rivian. And so it was so good and so effective that Rivian bought it out because they wanted to use it as a baseline uh technology inside their SUV in their truck. The app is just exposing the formulas and equations that this guy had originally started uh building out into the better route planner. And then Rivian's just been tweaking it and tuning it over the last, what, three years or so. So that app did a large majority of the work. So what I ended up having to do was the data entry. So, like I mentioned earlier, with all of our reference data inside of the bike getting wiped out by the firmware update, that first two days, part of what was a little chaotic about it was getting that new reference data while you're in the middle of doing the cannonball attempt and figuring out which charging systems were going to be the most reliable and what the spacing really needed to be, right? Because there were times that people were pushing, like, well, we can get another 20 miles out of it. Like, no, I don't want to get another 20 miles to that additional set. Like, I am working with this app to optimize the charging so that we spend as little time at those chargers as possible. And so the app does a really great job of it. You go in, you plug in reference data, you've got like your reference consumption. So for us, I think the bike, we ended up averaging about 135 watt hours per mile. We put in a reference max speed of like 65 miles an hour. And then the interesting part is that after it calculates the fastest route utilizing the charging stations along that route, it also starts taking into account headwinds, weather conditions, station changes, all these things that could end up impacting how much how much performance you get out of and range you get out of that battery. So it was incredibly complex. And I just sat back and I just trusted it. So a lot of what I needed to do was the data entry and then validation of the charging stations. It was a nightmare. Well, remember we got the remember we got the comms too. So there would be times when I'd be calling out, let's say I knew that we were 50% of the distance that we needed to cover to the next charger. And I'd I'd ask Aaron, what percentage battery life do you have left? And what's the battery temperature right now? Because the app will tell you in real time what it thinks it should be. So as I would get that data back from him, I would tune the bike in a little further and a little further. Now, the reason that we actually had to do that is because in true Harley fashion, they did not have any ODB connection so that we can actually pull the data off of that bike. And of course, as we're getting ready to do this attempt, they release a new module that's their IoT module, so their Internet of Things, so that you could connect the bike. But ABRP actually allows you to pull real-time data out of a car or other EV vehicle, and it'll automatically update everything as it goes based on the information it's getting from your bike. But since the live wire didn't allow that, I had to be manually updating this thing. And so what I would do is I'd probably I'd hit them up at about the 50% mark. If we were burning through battery faster than I thought we should, I'd ask them at about where we should be at the like the 75% mark, and then we would check it again when we'd get stopped at the charger.

SPEAKER_04 55:23

It's really cool. As you're as you're saying that, Aaron, I'm thinking about the time when we did a uh an ice road rally. Not in a name, nothing. How much fuel left? How much fuel left. And I was thinking about in terms of so I had uh I had the computer on my yeah, computers are iPhones, right? I had the the iPhone on my on the clipboard, I had an iPhone, two iPhones on the dash in front of me, and then Aaron had one in front of him with a needle that went two seconds behind or two seconds up. And every time we'd pass a point, it'd be like this stop sign, and then I'd enter where we were in meters or time, and it would be within, you know, three decimal places. And then that I go new information coming, and I press send, and then it would come to his dash, and he'd go, Oh shit, we're we're gonna slow down. We've been you know going too fast now, or have to slow down to catch to catch that so that you come into the next waypoint at zero. But it sounds like as you're as you add these little bits, this incremental information into it, you get tighter and tighter on your time to the point where you can actually line them up. But as you say, with the technology getting better and better, and of course you guys missed the update there, is that with the IoT, the Internet of Things, you have the ability to then capture that information automatically and it seamlessly does those updates for you. That'll be the next permutation.

SPEAKER_03 56:42

Yeah, that's that's a great comparison.

SPEAKER_01 56:44

Well, I I I remember it's funny because I have so much to say, right? But it's I'll just ramble. But in that ICE race that we did, I remember that the first two days of this 8,000 mile race, we were simply figuring out fuel economy because I had supercharged that car. We didn't know. And at the end of two days, I had a post-it note on my dash that said, at this speed, this is our range. At this speed, this it took us two days to figure that out. And same holds true with this attempt. It took us a whole 24 hours to go, this is the way we're riding, and this is our efficiency. It's my fault for being a stupid guy and just wanting to go fast. But it went from 190, what's it called, watt hours per mile or whatever it's called, all the way down to 10, I think nine, we saw at one point, if I really got close. And then it became a game of, you know, I don't want to harp on it, but I could get really close to the bumper on a good stretch of road. But if it was a bad stretch of road, or if it was night, or God forbid it was raining, now I have to go in front of the van. So it's such a variable. Once the road got dangerously bumpy, I I couldn't get close. So the efficiency would change. So to carry would have to recalculate based on the road condition. Based on you breaking the wind as opposed to the van breaking the wind. Right. And that dramatically changed. It went from 109 watt hours per mile to 140 to 120, depending on what happens. We had to recalculate in real time. And I gotta tell you that as an actual motorcyclist, you know, the wheels are quite small. The diameter of the wheels

Rough Roads Kill Efficiency And Safety

SPEAKER_01 58:20

are quite small, and the wheels are aluminum. Uh, and we had originally overinflated our tires to like 50 psi to get less rolling resistance. And that was a mistake because if the roads were fine, you could do that. But the reality of the roads are just crap. Like there's either potholes, physical freaking potholes on the side that will swallow a van tire to, and I don't know why it happens, but the roads are buckling and there's like these little mountains. Ice heaves. And yeah, I don't know because I don't know, you don't know how to build a freaking road at this point, but you don't know how to build a road at this point, right? I I don't know. You run around and say, Oh, we're the best, we're the best, but your road is crap. Uh, anyways, whatever. Maybe check yourself before you run around and say that you're the best. But, anyways, the interesting phenomena was, which they had to listen to my complaining, was I was riding in the center of the van. I was less likely to be in a pothole in the center. But because all the cars would flatten out the ice heaves or the the wrinkling of the road, it would push it into the middle like a volcano. So I'd be riding along, and there's nothing you can do, whether it's a a bridge uh expansion joint where it connects to pavement to a bridge, or like we talk about these, these, these heaves, these wrinkles. It was extraordinary large in the middle because no one ever rides in the middle. So to try to be most efficient, I was trying to be as close to the van I was possible, but I got stuck with these bumps and I would literally become airborne. So dangerous. Really so dangerous. You know, the reason why the efficiency changed so dramatically was I can I can't do it, guys. I gotta back away from the van for a little bit until the road improves, until whatever county wanted to have some pride in their roads and flatten the road out. It was just it was so maddening to go from beautiful road in one section to a as if we were riding through Srinagar in India and then another road. It was just, it was so it the reason why I'm harping on it is because it was so difficult, it was so hard to do this for hundreds of you know over a hundred hours and just suffer through literally all of a sudden just jumping in the air and getting, you know, literally being airborne all of a sudden there's nothing you could do about it. It was honestly frightening and dangerous.

SPEAKER_04 1:00:43

Yeah, that sounds like it. And I I can catch that reference to uh us riding the Himalayas in India. Yeah, I totally get that. All of a sudden, you you're on this beautiful, you know, freshly paved sweeper, and you're driving around, you've got a mountain to one side, and you've got the raging river to your right, you know, a hundred meters down. And the next thing you know, it comes to a screeching halt, and what was the road is now covered under three meters of the mountain, which is now caved in from the left-hand side, and you're in a one-lane single track and you're trading one one-on-one with uh trucks on coming. So all of a sudden you go from that, but maybe not quite so extreme as that.

SPEAKER_00 1:01:22

Ladies and gentlemen, can I please have your attention?

Support Break Coffee And Patreon

SPEAKER_00 1:01:26

I've just been handed an urgent and horrifying news story, and I need all of you to stop what you're doing and listen. Cannonball!

SPEAKER_06 1:01:38

Hey cannonballers, thanks for subscribing to our podcast. We appreciate it. If you're not a cheap Canadian and want to buy us a coffee, head on over to buymeacoffee.com. Or better yet, buy us a case of sweet asscraft IPA. Relist it on patreon.com. Links are in the show notes. Now, back to the riveting podcast in progress.

SPEAKER_04 1:02:03

So, how many how many hours into this hundred-hour run was it until you

Trusting The Process Under Fatigue

SPEAKER_04 1:02:10

guys a gelled us in team and also recognized that Carrie had done a lot of work behind this and that his computations were accurate and they were getting the job done. Aaron, that question is actually too much.

SPEAKER_01 1:02:23

Okay. Well, because it's so counterintuitive and we're doing it during this recording where we keep on talking about range and all these things. It is so difficult to trust the data that Carrie's saying this is the next stop. And we're like, no, we should put some more energy in. Like it was very difficult. It was literally only the last day, the last 20 hours where we're like, yeah, obviously this is working. Stop trying to hit the next charging station because that's wrong, right? Trust the damn thing and it's working. And trust that our job is simply to do a few things, which is continually update the consumption and more importantly, refine our list of preferred chargers. So as you went across the country, our only job was to say, right, this red E, whatever charging network is pure garbage. That needs to be on the do not, you know, charge list. Or we really like Flying J because Flying J treats you like a human and you have a cover like a gas station does, because it's 115 degrees, and it would be nice to have the bike undercover. We actually had a little sun cover we would put over the bike. So our job was A, to start trusting the app and refine the app by taking our experiences and fine-tuning it. So yeah, only to the last day did we start trusting it. And even then, you're like, wow, should we really not just shut up and trust the trust the data, remove the meat sack brain out of it and trust the data and continually improve the parameters by all those things I just talked about.

SPEAKER_03 1:04:03

Yeah, I'd agree with that. Um, you know, we're all running on very little sleep, and sometimes it was getting really hard. You know, you're a little bit foggy and stuff like that. But there were lots of opinions, lots of ideas, and lots of trying to reinvent the wheel. And I had researched the app enough and had read so much about how it was built that I just I'm like, I just gotta trust the tech. But yeah, I'd be a little more generous than Aaron was on that. I'd say it's probably the last two days. I think it got to the point where I like had to threaten to throw dead bodies to the side of the interstate if people didn't start trusting the app because it it got bad. It's like we gotta we gotta stop testing this, you guys. We we gotta stop playing and trying to recalculate and you're and overthinking this and just trust the process. And then once that happened, we just kind of fell into a zone. Um, and it was just wash, rinse, repeat. Everybody knew their jobs, we knew what we needed to get done. And I think that's probably when it finally clicked. And if we had done that from the get-go, I'll always give day one a pass because it was a shit show getting out of New York. But like if we had done that from say day two, we we definitely, I'm I'm guessing we probably could have been 85, 90 hours if if if we'd done that.

SPEAKER_01 1:05:32

Also being disciplined in rules. So we even came up with a policy, let's say we're in the middle of nowhere. We say there's a charging station down this dirt road next to an RV park, and then they'd send the address over to me. And then we come up with a policy by saying, No, no, no, don't send me an address. One of you guys, the passenger's job, is to switch to satellite, find the actual goddamn charging station. And then send me that pin. And then also send that to the actual pin, like the longitude and latitude, not the address. Because the address is State Road 2479, which is a mile down the road, right? Because we all know rural addresses don't work that way. Right. Right. Or the charging company is run by morons. And we had a situation where the charging station was actually on the other side of the interstate, some of these gray market chargers. So if we were to apply roles like in a military fashion and go, every time we leave, this is your job, and you can't get distracted because you have to go for a number two and you're hungry, you have to come back to the van and you have to execute on your responsibility, we would be even more efficient. There were times where I was down to one or two miles of range, and because no one had checked where the charging station physically is, we were driving around in the dirt trying to find a charging station, or that one time where it was on the other side of the road. And then it gets even more nuanced than that is okay, the app says to go to this charging station. And then it has to be someone else's job to go, we're going to use another app and we're going to check when was the last time that charging station was used. What was the user review on it? Is it online right now? There were very good, reliable charging stations. One of our favorite was Electrify America. But then we went in the middle of, you know, redneck country and only one of them was working. We pulled up to a charging station. I forget where it was. I can't remember anything. We pulled up, there was one guy charging. He had a tow truck on the way because he had apparently been there all day trying to get a charge. The charger was only charging at like 20 kilowatts. So thankfully he took mercy and we're like, well, I have a tow truck on the way because he used to says a screw it, I'll just get a tow to the next one. I think he was a little bit of a strange guy. He probably could have just made it. But it was worked for us, which was fine because we only needed, you know, 10, 20 kilowatts an hour of charging speed. So it worked for us. So there were situations like that where if we had a regimented thing where I'll check where it is, I'll check the reviews, triple check it as we're moving, and then we can call an audible if possible, we could be even more efficient.

SPEAKER_04 1:08:20

It seems like if you guys, well, maybe you guys have already done this. Have you done like a lessons learned and a checklist of what people's roles should be? So for the next attempt, you can be like, you can either hand that information to somebody who's going to make the next attempt, or next time you guys go for this with a different machine, the same machine, whatever. You got like here's a reminder. Your job is this, your job is this, your job is this. These are the apps we use. It seems like these lessons learned shouldn't just disappear.

SPEAKER_01 1:08:50

No, that's that's well and good, Taylor, because that's again, like we talked about rally racing, that's a nice academic lesson. And you can sit around with a pint of nice IPA and have that discussion. But as Carrie just said, it's three o'clock in the morning and we're exhausted. Uh that, you know, person A's responsibility is to check the satellite image, and he didn't because we're all exhausted, just want to get freaking moving. Or it is torrential raining, and I have a pond in my boots, right? And I'm not thinking about, you know, whether or not that Electrify America is in the middle of nowhere, and we should check the last review. That's well and good. And you're absolutely right. And these are just friends helping a dummy out with a challenge. So we can't say your orders are that you need to check this and you're an asshole for not doing it. All those prescriptions are great, but uh, we're all just human and supposedly doing this on a lark, you know, to help out their buddies. So it's very hard to implement policies. So you can write them all all you want, but people are there to have fun, and you can't say, hey, dude, you forgot to check where that charging station was. You're gonna get a demerit point on your, you know, on your ride report. That's not the way it works, right?

SPEAKER_04 1:10:05

I'm gonna think back to a moment when I did a rally with you, sir, and I believe that we had a fairly thorough checklist that had to do with charging equipment, et cetera, et cetera, entering the the GPS waypoints in the app the night before. We we nailed the checklist. It was, you know, I think it had seven or eight points on it. But the the problems that we had is when we when we screwed up, is when we didn't we're like, what did what did we screw up like? Well, all of it, because what we the main thing we didn't do is we when we didn't use the checklist.

SPEAKER_01 1:10:34

That's well and good, but that particular rally, that was Al Can 5000. Dude, that's a walk in the park compared to what we're doing. You're in a car, you're worried about what snacky snacks you have. You know, should we have IPAs tonight or a steak? That's nice. That's that's a walk in the park, dude. We're talking about a cannonball here, man. Like Carrie just said, like, you know, the van stopped working at one point as a limp mode. I'm worried about my hundred thousand dollar van that they're just driving through the mountains like it's a goddamn Porsche. You know what I mean? Like they're worried about efficiency. I'm worried about not breaking it. It went to limp mode at one point. They went to bed. I it's three o'clock in the morning. I haven't slept in 24 hours. I got my computer right. I'm trying to clear codes. You know, I'm like, should we continue? Should we not? Like it's so grueling that that's well and good to have all those checklists and policies. But good luck when it's three o'clock in the morning and I'm freaking out because my my van's in limp mode, and Steve's passed out and he's had a six-pack of beer. You know what I mean? There's like, you know, it's not so easy, is what I'm trying to say.

SPEAKER_04 1:11:38

All right. But I'm going to maintain that the reason that planes land safely on a regular basis, and you know this too, because you have a pilot's license as well, is that checklists work. Simplified checklists.

SPEAKER_01 1:11:48

They work, but also a pilot will time out if, you know, they've been in the air for 14 hours and they plan to plan like, sorry, your flights canceled because I've timed out and the stewardess can go check into, you know, the four seasons, right? We're talking about we're talking about the complete opposite, where the enemy is sleep. I think I wrote that in my in my article. The enemy was fatigue. And none of that matters when it all falls apart because I'm grumpy and I, you know, and I haven't eaten anything. You know what I mean? Or I've had 16 Red Bulls. You know what I mean? On that checklist should have been, do we have Adderall? You know what I mean? It's harder than you think, you know.

Sleep Strategy And The Enemy Fatigue

SPEAKER_04 1:12:31

Carrie, how many? Since I don't want to I don't want to talk to Aaron anymore. I'm gonna go over to you. How many?

SPEAKER_03 1:12:38

I feel like we should we should uh mute Aaron at this point. I think we're gonna have to shut him off. But for my PTSD is coming through from this.

SPEAKER_01 1:12:45

I'm like, I don't want to see that bike. Let's not talk about charging stations. I don't want to talk about it.

SPEAKER_04 1:12:50

Let's talk about sleep. I know you talked about the the enemy is lack of sleep or sleep depth. So, Carrie, how many hours of sleep did you get from the time that you guys, let me, from the time your like your last sleep before you guys took off and started the event? Because you don't like get up and go, whoop, it's 12 o'clock, 12.01, we're on the road, and I've just woke up. You obviously are wake for some hours before that. And then after. So in that hundred plus hour window, how many hours did you sleep?

SPEAKER_03 1:13:24

Maybe 12 hours, I want to say. So the we did get hotels a couple nights, but the first night we got a hotel, we didn't roll into the parking lot until I want to say 2 45 in the morning. And we were back out the door at 6 a.m. And so yeah, you we would get in there and we'd we'd get some sleep. Um, and that was definitely required because to Aaron's point, right, it was much easier to fall asleep driving the van. Uh, what he didn't realize was the van was on autopilot several times. No, I'm just kidding, Aaron. But uh But yeah, yeah, we did we didn't get much sleep at all. Well most of us didn't get much sleep at all. I think that was just one of us slept as slept for like 14 hours straight at one point. But uh yeah, yeah, but not a ton, and that and that was really the problem, right? Because then when we needed to rally and be a team, everybody was at wits end and tired. And it was like it was never anything personal, but we were at one point think ready to kill each other because there was just a lot of frustration. But we made it, we got it done.

SPEAKER_02 1:14:40

Yeah, no, that's obvious. Aaron, how many hours did you sleep?

SPEAKER_01 1:14:44

Well, I think you were hinting at something at the beginning, which was we would do things a lot differently just talking about sleep strategy. You know, we can have a four-hour podcast here, right? Which is even how you start the rally. So I had driven, I had done a cannonball to get to Cary's. I had driven from Port Angeles, Washington to Carrie's. And of course, I'm poor, so I just slept in the van where I could. And then we got to Carey's, we had a little bit of respite there, and then we went up to New York. And then that alone is dumb because we wanted to symbolically start at midnight. So we were awake since 6 or 7 a.m. And then we started the cannonball at midnight. So do the math, you're awake, and then we didn't get sleep for 22 hours later. So realistically, I was awake for what 36, 40 hours or something like that, right? So that was dumb. So the real way to start a cannonball, of course, because we all have lives and we're not, you know, millionaires. So the real way to start a cannonball is to go to Manhattan area, sleep, do a proper night's sleep, and then wake up at midnight and go. That's the smart thing to do. Not be awake for 30, 40 hours by the time you get to a hotel. And really, I had to call that and I said, guys, we're not sleeping, you know, from times on, you know, working on a boat my whole life is we need to go to a hotel. And even if we sleep for four hours, and that's generally what we did, we have to go sleep for four hours. And I have to give everyone credit. When we said we're leaving at six, I of course was down there before six because, you know, I'm awake, I can't sleep anyways. I was prepared to leave, even though if they weren't there, but everyone was adult and everyone was bright-eyed and bushy-tailed with a cup of cheap hotel coffee, and we were on the road exactly at six. So everyone really came through in that respect, which was which was great. So, yeah, so how to start it, how to manage sleep, how to call the audible and say we are getting hotels no matter what, so we can get quality sleep for four hours. Because four men are not sleeping in that van for four hours for quality sleep. No, that's true.

SPEAKER_03 1:17:00

You know what that Ozempic though, Aaron, you could have been the little spoon.

SPEAKER_01 1:17:03

That's true. That's true.

SPEAKER_03 1:17:04

That is my goal of losing weight is to be to be little spoon.

SPEAKER_02 1:17:08

Be your little spoon.

SPEAKER_01 1:17:09

Yeah.

The Rain Charger Breaking Point

SPEAKER_04 1:17:11

So was there any point during this when uh I know, Carrie, you mentioned throwing bodies on the side of the road. You didn't mention in particular whose bodies, but was there any point, or shall I say, how many hours in, if there was a point, did you guys go, this is stupid, we're out. Let's throw in the towel. At what point?

SPEAKER_01 1:17:28

Carrie, tell me tell them at the flow charger where you guys had to talk me out of it. It was pouring rain, and you guys had to rally me to keep going. I honestly wanted to stop at one point. Yeah. Yeah.

SPEAKER_03 1:17:38

I was wishing at that point, Aaron, that you had not pulled the ADV weenie sticker off the tank that I put on there for you. Yeah, you're right. So, because I knew we were gonna need it at some point. There was a flow charger that how long had we been in the rain?

SPEAKER_01 1:17:55

I want to say two, three hours at that point. It was brutal raining. We're just tracking the cells and it would just come down and I would it was wave after wave. And just to quickly just to quickly talk motorcycles, boy, did I miss my GSA. This bike is terrible. There's no protection at all. It rained so hard that within a minute it just seeped into the into the gear, and I had pools of water under my thighs. And then when those pools would fill up, it would go down my calf and fill up my boots. It was just bloody terrible. And then we got to this flow charger, and then Carrie will take it from there. I'm like, guys, this is freaking stupid. I hate this right now.

SPEAKER_03 1:18:37

I feel like we needed to crowbar him back onto the bike at that point because there were lightning strikes within probably a mile of where we were at and everything else. And I I'm finally just like, cannonball, boys, get her done. Like the we gotta keep moving. Um, because we were 10% overcharge, 15% overcharge, and then 20% overcharge. I'm like, oh man. And I felt for Aaron. I definitely did. I could tell he was miserable. I could tell that, you know, he had goldfish in his boots by this point, um, which is amazing because he had full high-end Gore-Tex riding gear on. Uh, but the bike, you know, it's it's it's an EV motorcycle. It has no protection, to his point of the GSA. It's super narrow and it's designed for city street use. It's not designed for touring. So yeah, it uh took a little bit of leverage and a little bit of shaming, but we we got him back on the bike. I don't think he was real happy about it. I think he was stomping his feet like a five-year-old as he walked back to the bike, but he he got her done and kept going to the bike in the rain.

SPEAKER_01 1:19:48

And we were just we were demoralized because that freaking charger, that was one of the chargers that went on the no-go list was flow. We were sitting there, it was some community project, and it was a fast charger, and it was just going so slow, and it was pouring rain and the lightning. And one of the things that that I didn't consider was the first night we stopped in a hotel, again, I didn't get right to sleep because I had to dry my boots out. And I had taken my socks off. And you know, I've had these socks on for 40 hours, and you know, my gross feet, and now they were swimming in water and my feet hurt, like the skin on my feet were like, oh shit, like I have trench foot, right? Like my role, my my goal was not really sleep that first night, which was I need to take care of my feet. So while Steve was passed out, he took his THC pills and you know, smashed two IPAs and was snoring away. I'm running a hairdryer trying to dry my feet out and take care of my feet, hop in the shower and wash my feet and throw those socks out, those disgusting socks. And thankfully, I was in the sprinter van and I keep clothes in a sprinter van, you know, so I was like, shit to myself. I'm like, this is nasty. Like, I need to service my feet. So I really only had a few hours sleep that night. But thank goodness we had a quality hotel with a hairdryer where I could service my feet. And then by the way, we did a cheeky little charge. So when we pulled up to the hotel, I went right to the front entrance with the bike, and I had the onboard level one charger. So we got a good few hours of free, free charging in front of the hotel with the extension cord, which was cool. Right out the lobby. Yeah, exactly. I don't care. I'm just plugging this thing in whether it pops a breaker or not. And I came out, it was still charging. We got some good charge out of it. Nice. Yeah.

SPEAKER_04 1:21:36

It seems like in the from what you're saying, I was like, yeah, this would be a good thing. It's like you have a full two, you know, again, if it was down to having a really fat budget, you could have like two or three sets of gear in there. Oh, the weather's changed. I need that gear. Oh, these boots are what I need those boots, right? You just keep changing out your gear and rotating through it.

SPEAKER_01 1:21:56

Yeah, if I had the the wish list of things, it would be a hundred thousand dollar budget. And truthfully, I was hoping, like when I reached out to like LiveWire and these other manufacturers, like, come on, guys, we're not just morons. Like we have like a good podcast and we actually run a rally. I realize you get bombarded with emails all day with someone promising to do something. But if we just had, if we had phone a friend, if we could phone a live wire engineer, like when the bike was getting super hot in the sun and like the charging physically wouldn't start, for instance, is one example because there's a little pin that pops out and retains the charging pin. We didn't know what was happening. If we had like phone a friend to call a live wire engineer, not just post it to the forum and have, yeah, there were helpful people on the forum, but you also get bombarded with nonsense. But if we had that, if we had access to the data in the live wire, if we just had some support, we really could have blown this out of the water and we could do it again. But uh, but yeah, to do it correctly, you need a full team, you need proper gear sponsors, you need a van that's set up properly, you need you need all the things to do it, uh to do it a little

Escaping New York And Early Mistakes

SPEAKER_01 1:23:10

bit better.

SPEAKER_04 1:23:10

The things I thought was interesting is when you talked about sort of leaving New York, and you you mentioned a moment ago, you like you blasted out, and when the van finally caught up with you, it was very inefficient in terms of how you first ran. You were like, ah, first time riding this bike, I love it, it's fast. But one of the things I thought was interesting, and also I think it's interesting because I have been l reading or listening to the Neil Peart series, who's a drummer from Rush, and there was a Rush concert letting out in New York City, from what I understand, which was one of the reasons why you had such a hard time getting through because of the traffic. And I thought, what a paradox. Like Neil Peart would have not been pleased about that. That his that him, his concert ending, I know he's not with us anymore, but his concert ending would have caused delays in this cannonball run.

SPEAKER_03 1:23:58

What's funny about that with the the rush concert is that some very good friends of mine that live down in Miami just so happened to be in New York City for that rush concert. So when they had seen my social media posts about us heading up to New York to do this, they're like, When are you gonna be here? Right. So they actually met us at the Red Ball Garage to see us off, and they hung out and waved and took videos and stuff like that as we took off. And as we're getting ready to go, Matt, who's actually registered for the cannonball this year, was like, hey, by the way, the rush concert's just letting out, so uh be ready. So here's Aaron on his super narrow live wire bike just buzzing through traffic, and he was gone. It took us an hour just to get to the mouth of the Lincoln Tunnel. One right turn that we had to make. People were coming from three lanes across trying to cut in. Like I I learned how to drive in the Chicago traffic. New Yorkers are a whole nother level. It was pretty crazy. And here I am, right? I'm driving Aaron's baby, the blue whale, right? And so, and I've got all these hyper-aggressive New Yorkers all around me. And so I'm trying to be aggressive to the point that's acceptable that I won't get us into a fender bender, which was incredibly stressful because I'm also tracking him on the app and I can see how fast he's pulling away from us. And I'm like, oh shit, he's he's hauling butt. And so I'd given him the first charging point based on the time and speed that we had originally calculated. He was not going that time or that speed. So I'm like, all right, well, I hope he gets there okay, because if he doesn't, we're not gonna be around to support him. Because yeah, we we basically were an hour behind him at that point, just getting out of the city.

SPEAKER_04 1:26:09

So Aaron actually sat and had to wait an hour for you guys to rock up, or you sat there, you were already charging Aaron.

SPEAKER_01 1:26:15

Yeah, I was charging. So this is my first level three charger in my in my life. I don't know what I'm doing. Like, I just I guess I shoved this thing in, and then I'm like, like I honestly didn't even know. Do you give it your credit card first or do you plug it in? Like, thankfully, it's got, you know, instructions for a Muppet on the thing, right? So I'm like, okay, it says plug it in. So I plugged it in, and then I had to realize which way you should point the bike. Like there was a whole, thankfully, there's no one around because I felt really stupid, right? Uh there was it was like 1.30 in the morning. So there were people like meeting after the nightclub, and they were like doing it in a car, like a couple spots over. So that was entertaining. So I'm like, I'll try not to look, but I'm like, come on, guys. You know what I mean? At least turn the headlights off. We know what you're doing, right? Any, anyways, so that so there was me doing something super geeky and people having a really awesome time. So I had to learn how to do all that, and I just let the thing charge until they showed up. Because by this point, we really didn't know how much to even charge it to. We were just kind of figuring out. But talking about strategy, the right way to do it, again, is to leave the bike in the red ball garage. They have a level three, two, two charger in there. So to do it all right with all the sponsors is the bike goes into the red ball garage. The support van goes to charging station one or halfway there. And at midnight, you leave alone. You catch up with your support vehicle, and then you continue on your way. And we know by that point to draft, and we know all the things. Well, that road is pretty shitty, so probably wouldn't have drafted there. But but even just the start and the getting to the start and leaving the start, we would have done it completely differently.

Electra Joins The Support Crew

SPEAKER_01 1:27:57

After you guys travel through Vegas, the picture.

SPEAKER_04 1:28:00

That you posted seems like you picked up an extra team member. And I just wanted to ask if her name was Electra. And who was the brainchild behind that debauchery?

SPEAKER_01 1:28:12

We didn't we didn't ask her her name, okay? You don't ask questions. Yeah. She was behind the charger and she needed a ride.

SPEAKER_02 1:28:23

And then in the end, she's like, Audio Audio didn't need a ride.

SPEAKER_01 1:28:26

Yeah.

SPEAKER_02 1:28:27

Hey.

unknown 1:28:29

Yeah.

SPEAKER_01 1:28:29

Anyways, we we needed some comic relief by by that point.

SPEAKER_04 1:28:33

Whose idea was that? I mean, okay, so for those listeners who did who haven't seen this, they ended up with an inflatable doll. Did you guys I mean it was I saw the picture show up right after you went through Vegas and I imagined that it it came from there.

SPEAKER_01 1:28:44

Is that an accurate assessment or no actually It was my wife's idea actually, and we had it Yeah, it was in the van. I had I had her in the van since the beginning. We just had to roll her out and inflate her. Yeah.

SPEAKER_03 1:28:57

Well the other part that Aaron doesn't know about it is that it was everything that we could do to keep Steve from using it beforehand.

SPEAKER_02 1:29:07

You know, we're gonna have to have Steve on the podcast just to defend himself.

SPEAKER_03 1:29:12

Yeah.

SPEAKER_02 1:29:13

Well, where's the fun in that? Yeah, that's a good point. Yeah. Steve, you'll never be here.

SPEAKER_01 1:29:18

Yeah. So, anyways, that

Mojave Heat Water Tricks Phone Failures

SPEAKER_01 1:29:20

my last thing about the riding, because at the end of the day, there's a lot of actual you know, motorcycle riding here. And kind of to to cap off the conversation is the heat in the in Nevada and California. First of all, the state was on fire. There was smoke in the air. It's it's literally and figuratively on fire. And it was getting so hot and I'm not exactly a pinnacle, you know, of health here. What I would do is I would get two bottles of water. Thankfully we had a case of water in the van. I would put them in my I had just wearing a rally jersey at this point in my running shoes, and I'm just down to nothing. And I would ride along, put it in cruise control, and I would start to drift away from the van, and I would ration out the water that I would douse on myself. And a weird phenomenon was happening was that as the water hit the jersey and went onto my skin, it was for the first second, it was superheated. So it was as if I was getting a kettle put on me, and then within a second or two, it would start to affect me at cooling. It would, it would, it it would, it would cool me. So I would ration out these two bottles of water for it was about an hour I was on the bike between charging in general, and it was so hot I would ration out the water. Okay, I got 20 miles left, I can use another half a bottle. Okay, I got 10 miles, I can use a quarter of a bottle. And that's how I just didn't pass out. And I pulled the helmet off and it was just soaked with sweat. It was so stupid, right? And then we ended up going to a charging station in Las Vegas that was in a garage or something. We had to separate the vehicles. Like it was the whole thing was like a hot nightmare. And then when we charge, we put a sun cover over it just to physically reduce the amount of heat, and then the phones would overheat in the sun. At one point I had to put the phones in the van and just trust the van was going the right way and follow them because they were just shutting off. It was just the heat was just outrageous. Yeah.

SPEAKER_04 1:31:20

It's interesting. The cooling by evaporation. The first thing is that the uh the the water matches the temperature of your body before it actually and then the wind starts to to uh to make the cooling happen. Interesting. I had never never really thought about that aspect of it.

SPEAKER_01 1:31:32

Interesting. It was cool. It was bad, but it was cool.

SPEAKER_04 1:31:34

Did you ever get so close when you talk when I saw the video of you dumping the water on yourself, I thought, oh, you must have just gotten close enough to the van that you just eased on up and reached up into the window and got a fresh bottle. Did you guys did you ever get that close that you had any communication like that where you handed something off besides a doll?

SPEAKER_03 1:31:52

We never got to that point. I honestly I don't think it would have been that safe because the the van is so big and creates so much turbulent air. Him going one-handed uh and us trying to give him something would have just been a recipe for disaster.

SPEAKER_04 1:32:08

Yeah, fair enough.

SPEAKER_03 1:32:09

Yeah, it was bad enough that he was right off the tail end of the van to draft in.

SPEAKER_01 1:32:15

I think it would have been even worse on the side of the just to kind of in case the Karen's want to start sending emails, the van has a radar cruise control and we had real-time communications, right, between all three of us. So the van, they're very good drivers, right? We're talking about experienced adult drivers here, right? Like experienced mo and everyone's a motorcyclist, right? So yes, it was risky, but there was no extraordinary risk. When it got dicey, I went away from the van, right? So at no point was the van not on cruise control, on radar cruise control. And then if someone was getting close, Carrie would just say something and I would just, you didn't have to say anything, you had to say something, and I would just back away. So, you know, whether it was something intensely dangerous, like, you know, an antelope jumping out or a tire on the road or a muffler on the road, okay, it's debris, debris, debris, and I just hit the brakes, right? But even then I would never be close to the van if all I was doing was looking in my mirror and looking at the van. Right? So there's all these factors involved in in in the drafting operation uh that we made it as safe as as entirely

Last Charge And The Portofino Finish

SPEAKER_01 1:33:25

possible.

SPEAKER_04 1:33:25

I'd like to wrap up by asking you what it was like after your final charge and then you are headed towards Los Angeles to the final marker. Talk to me about that final stretch. How did that go for you? What was in your mind?

SPEAKER_01 1:33:42

Yeah, so Carrie had said how much charge I needed, and it was somewhere in the ghetto in in Los Angeles, right? It was near Compton or whatever whatever it was. It wasn't Compton, I'm I'm speaking my ass, but it was somewhere on on the outskirts. And we were we were charging and then we did a live on the Facebook page. Guys, we're leaving, this is the last charge. You know, it's it's late now, right? There's very few people awake, but they're still officiating it. And I'm like, let's put a little extra charge in. We're not gonna meet the the hundred hour thing. So let's do this righteously. Because in my mind, a cannonball attempt is ripping through LA, going down the surface streets, and just like Carrie did in the last ADV cannonball rally, you know, I wanted to have Carrie's experience, right? Is uh maybe we gotta go through a red light. You know what I mean? Maybe we gotta do a little wheelie down the street, you know, maybe we have to, you know, we have to be cannonballish for Christ's sakes, right? It shouldn't be this geeky experiment. So we put a little extra charge in, and you know, on my way I raced a few motorcycles, but the truth of the matter was the bike has such small wheels and the roo roads were such crap that I was just holding on for dear life. You couldn't get you could get over a hundred miles an hour once in a while, but the minute the road started getting bad and you were literally airborne in this little motorcycle, okay, we gotta slow down. And then I would play this game of let's go up to 100 miles an hour, let's slow down to 60 and see where the battery is, and then let's estimate if I'm gonna make it. So I didn't want to be a douche and and be left on the side of the road a mile from the Portofino, but I also wanted to, you know, pay homage and be respectful to the cannonballers before me and put a little heat in the tires for Christ's sake for the last few miles. So that was the game I played by myself. And then, of course, as all cannonball attempts end, you pull into the Portofino and it's just you and a few picture taking and a few congratulations over the app, and that's it. And then you waited 20 minutes for the van to show up, and they're like, We're really tired. Let's load the bike and go to the hotel and pass out. But we we did pick up a few beers, and we had a celebration beer in the lobby of the Hilton, not the Portofino, because we couldn't afford to stay at the P at the Portofino. And the Hilton across the street, and we uh we had our little celebration, anticlimactic celebration, and uh and we passed out for uh for 12 hours. So, yeah, that's how all cannonballs end is uh a little bit of fanfare and it's anticlimactic and uh you pass out from exhaustion.

SPEAKER_04 1:36:15

Yeah, to finish that last that last chunk of non-sleeping to add to the first 40 hours plus your hundred, plus that. It sounds like a hell of an adventure you guys had, and I have to say that um on your final run, it was I was at the office here in Stockholm because of course I'm nine hours ahead of you. So that morning I was watching you, it's like it was you know, I was watching you blast down through LA and I was like, Oh, he'll be there in about an hour. And it's I was like, ten minutes later, I was like, you were there. So um I did, I was following that last bit, and it was super exciting. Um and with that, I just want to say to both of you, thank you very much for coming on. It's really interesting to have both of you guys who are normally, you know, integratedly an integral part of this podcast, um, and to have you on as guests this time. So it was really a pleasure to have that sort of role switch. So with that, is there anything else you guys would like to add?

Would We Ever Do It Again

SPEAKER_03 1:37:11

Don't anybody try it. Don't do it. Or if you do do it, just yeah, just but if you do do it, just realize you're only gonna try once. So do it right. Because uh I'll tell you what, if somebody asked me to do this again, there's no way in hell I'd do it again. It was fantastic fun. It was exhausting, but it's all a one-time thing. For sure.

SPEAKER_01 1:37:35

Well, unless we do get our hands on a three-wheel vehicle and we go after Alex Roy's three-wheel cannonball record, which I think can easily be beaten if we could just get a hold of a Morgan three or something similar, and a little bit of a budget and put some countermeasures on that and set up a central command. But I'm just getting ahead of myself. But the only cannonball attempt that I that I would record I would go after is is something like that. Less grueling, more fun, and more in the traditional spirit of cannonball. But I'm just saying I'm willing to be a copilot. I'm an amazing co-pilot. I can I can spot with binoculars, I'm there for you, Carrie. Carrie, we're not buddy.

SPEAKER_02 1:38:22

You know, you you can't give away the punchline. It's coming. All right.

SPEAKER_04 1:38:29

And with that, gentlemen, I want to say thank you very much for spending the last hour with me. And uh if there's nothing further, ADD Cannonball Rally news will be back next week. And with that, we should roll the outro.

SPEAKER_07 1:38:46

Adding a little something to this month's sales contest. As you all know, first prize is a Cadillac, El Dorado. Anybody want to see second prize? Second prize, a set of steak knives. Third prize is your fine.

Outro Reviews Thanks And Sign Off

SPEAKER_08 1:42:00

We didn't go.

SPEAKER_05 1:42:05

We just all thinking a five-star review really helps the podcast and satisfies the algorithm gods. All hell the algorithm gods. A special thanks to our Patreon supporters. You're keeping this thinking chip afloat. Thanks for listening to the ATV Cannonball Podcast. Keep your right hand cranked and your feet on the peg.