A $1,000 Arms-Free Driving Gadget Drove an Outdated Prius Coast-to-Coast 99% Autonomously

The largest automotive information and opinions, minus the BS

Our free every day e-newsletter sends the tales that basically matter on to you, each weekday.

Roughly 1,500 miles into their Cannonball Run try heading west, Jay and Gypsy Roberts bumped into bother.

“We were going through Oklahoma, and it was legitimately a tornado [that] had hit just less than two miles off of Interstate 40 while we were on the drive, you know, blowing driving wind,” Jay instructed me over the telephone. “There was standing water on the road, limited visibility, and it was at night, which made it even worse. My wife Gypsy was driving at the time, and we just slowed the speed down and got down to where I think she was doing about 50, 55 miles an hour.”

Dangerous climate might put a pin in any cross-country expedition, however focus and cautious driving wouldn’t actually assist Jay and Gypsy get by this episode. That’s as a result of their 2017 Toyota Prius was geared up with a gadget referred to as a Comma 3X that was doing the driving for them. This $1,000 gizmo connects to a automotive’s OBD-II port and mounts on the windshield just under the rearview mirror, giving it expanded semi-autonomous capabilities. According to Comma, it really works in additional than 325 totally different fashions.

In this case, it was guiding an eight-year-old Prius with a quarter-million miles by torrential rain and wind.

Jay instructed me that the Comma 3X navigated the storm “flawlessly,” the place different built-in, subtle driver help methods—like Tesla’s Full Self-Driving—would have disengaged. And that was necessary, as a result of Jay and Gypsy had launched into a semi-autonomous Cannonball Run: a model of the coast-to-coast driving problem that’s as a lot a check of limiting human involvement as it’s a race in opposition to the clock.

Setting a New Kind of Record

Jay is a Cannonball veteran at this level, having accomplished the journey each manually and assisted a complete of 5 instances earlier than this most up-to-date semi-autonomous try in April of this 12 months. In 2024 he and Gypsy logged a time of 43 hours and 18 minutes, some 12 hours sooner than record-chaser and The Drive contributor Alex Roy managed along with his two companions almost a decade in the past in a Tesla Model S.

Of these 43 hours, the husband-and-wife pair reported that they’d touched the Prius’ steering wheel for simply 39 minutes and 21 seconds—that means the Comma 3X piloted the Prius for 98.416% of the journey. In December, Roy accomplished a 45-hour and 36-minute run in a 2025 Model S, reporting a good greater engagement fee of 98.52%.

Of course, there are basic variations in the best way a plug-and-play system like Comma operates in comparison with a built-in stack, and Cannonball and autonomous-driving fanatics are free to pore over the info and categorize all of it how they see match. For Jay, he knew he’d left one thing on the desk, and there was room to enhance. During the 2024 try, a critical accident in West Texas saved site visitors in gridlock for 3 hours. Additionally, Jay hadn’t altered the Prius’ gas storage in any means for that run, that means the pair needed to cease for gas six instances.

“What we found out, you know, every time there was a fuel stop or a driver change, it added two to three minutes of our hands-on time to the system,” Jay mentioned. For this 12 months’s bid, the Prius was fitted with a 32-gallon auxiliary tank to complement the inventory 11.3-gallon capability, that means the pair solely needed to cease at a fuel station as soon as, simply east of Amarillo, Texas. That saved them each time and get in touch with with the wheel.

“Going from six fuel stops to one, you know, there just that alone cut out 10 to 15 minutes of hands-on time right there,” Jay mentioned.

You would possibly marvel how Jay deduced hands-on time; Comma doesn’t file such info, so he needed to get inventive. His resolution was ingenious: Jay wrapped the steering wheel with electrically conductive tape and had Gypsy and himself put on a jacket and gloves that have been additionally conductive and linked to an influence provide every time they have been within the driver’s seat. The variety of situations of contact, in addition to the whole time the circuit was accomplished, have been recorded and displayed on two dash-mounted LCD readouts.

As far because the protocol on the highway, it was easy. The Comma 3X, utilizing its inventory OpenPilot software program, was set to cruise at 91 mph, and the Prius saved to the left lane. If a automotive entered its path, the Prius slowed to match its velocity and comply with till it went away. Jay and Gypsy by no means flashed their excessive beams at automobiles forward, they usually modified lanes solely when completely crucial, as a result of the system can’t do this with out some human interplay.

The upshot of all this? With only one cease for gas and no main accidents to stall progress, Jay and Gypsy beat their 2024 time by 5 hours, making it from Darien, Connecticut to Los Angeles in 38 hours flat—no minutes—with hands-on time diminished to 19 minutes and 57 seconds. Do the maths, and Comma was calling the photographs 99.125% of the time.

“I was ecstatic,” Jay instructed me. “I knew 99% or better was possible, and I was ecstatic to do that to prove the technology.”

The Modern Cannonball Run

Jay is a veritable Cannonball pupil and historian. His dedication to those feats of long-distance driving suggests a lifelong pursuit, however you is perhaps shocked to be taught that his Cannonball profession solely began in 2021.

“I’m of the age—I remember seeing the [1981] Cannonball Run movie, you know, in the theaters. But I really wasn’t aware at that time that it was a real thing that really happened. And so I started going down the rabbit hole of ‘Wait, this is a real thing! They do this.’”

Just earlier than COVID, Jay acquired hooked on consuming as a lot Cannonball media as potential, from watching YouTube movies to studying books written by the likes of Brock Yates, Ed Bolian, and, unsurprisingly, Alex Roy. But, to listen to Jay inform it, it nearly looks as if he was making ready for this problem for for much longer than that—he simply didn’t comprehend it.

“The more I read, the more I realized and was convinced that this was something I was capable of, because my entire adult life, my working career has been around transportation. From the service industry and the pest control business to [being] a driver for FedEx, all my work has always been involved with driving. So driving, you know, 10-, 12-, 14-hour days, was nothing to me.” While doing his homework, Jay began working as an emergency supply driver, successfully training learn how to lengthen himself and his automobile’s endurance and effectivity.

If you’re an automotive fanatic on any degree, you may need an thought of the Cannonball Run and the individuals who do it. My assumption, up till not too long ago, concerned reckless dashing with a cavalier perspective towards self-preservation, not to mention anybody else’s security or the legislation. Maybe some Cannonballers have acted that means—I wouldn’t know—however Jay couldn’t be farther from that stereotype. And whereas talking to him didn’t flip me right into a Cannonball evangelist, it did assist me see what this problem means to fanatics like him, and the way autonomous driving suits into that puzzle.

“If you go all the way back to 1903, when people first started driving across the country, that’s when Erwin George ‘Cannon Ball’ Baker became famous. You know, he made over a hundred drives across the country,” Jay mentioned. “And he did it to prove the technology, to prove that the motorcycles and the cars and the trucks that he was driving were capable of driving across this country. Remember, automobiles were new at this time. We hadn’t even—in 1903, man hadn’t even flown in an airplane yet.”

Jay mentioned that he and the group are “trying to show the world that you have to take this technology and put it out there and use it, and prove it to show the people that it’s viable. Because, how many times [do] you hear people say, ‘I’m not going to let a car drive itself, I’m scared’ or ‘I don’t feel comfortable with that’?”

“Here I did a drive from one side of the country to the other in 38 hours and touched the steering wheel for less than 20 minutes, right? And I did it at, you know, slightly above the speed limit, and did it safely.”

His good friend Alex summed up that sentiment fairly properly after his efforts in December, calling the Cannonball Run “the Nürburgring of Autonomy.”

“The world’s most disciplined Cannonballers don’t speak of horsepower or top speed,” Alex Roy wrote in a LinkedIn blog about setting a brand new FSD file late final 12 months. “Their language is situational awareness, fuel economy, battery efficiency, powertrain software hacking, OTA updates, radar detection, laser jamming, NOAA, Google Earth, real-time maps, FAA data integration, real-time weather & traffic, crowd-sourced data, apps, mission control, synchronizing external spotters, thermal cameras, image stabilization, ambient temperatures, power management, charger handshakes, voltage regulation, thermal management, range optimization, weight savings, redundant communications, and Starlink.”

As for Jay, I requested him if he’d strive the run once more and if there was any level, contemplating he’d crossed the 99% threshold.

“I could improve on it a little bit,” he mentioned. “But the thing about a Cannonball Run, though, is you know you can run it 10 times in the same car and every time is going to be different.” Jay quoted Andrew Pieper, who as soon as set the file for motorbike riders: “He said, when you’re prepping for a Cannonball Run, you can solve 500 problems before you get to the starting point. But you can have one problem that’s totally out of your control during the run and completely kills it.”

Jay additionally believes that he’s “just about reached the maximum” of the Comma system’s potential, and the following step is a completely autonomous run. “It’s going to happen, and it’s going to happen sooner than people realize,” he mentioned.

As for as we speak, you should purchase a

,000 gadget that plugs into an ideal many fashions—even an eight-year-old Prius that prices ,000 on the used market—and depend on it to cross the nation with restricted bodily involvement, for those who’re so inclined. It seems like one other one in all Big Tech’s empty guarantees, or a pipedream, however it’s neither. That know-how exists proper now.

Got a tip? Let us know at ideas@thedrive.com.