ADVANTICS powers an electric cannonball run

This year’s Current Affairs kicks off with the Cannonball run showcased last month , an enthusiast’s race against the clock from the Red Bull garage in New York to the Portofino hotel in California – spanning 2813 miles, or 4527 kilometres. While the run is unofficial, the fun is real.

One of our customers, Ryan Huber, and his motley crew challenged themselves to break the EV Cannonball run record with a heavily modified Rivian R1T. The current cannonball record time by a combustion vehicle, Audi S6, is 25 hours and 39 minutes, while that of an EV, Porsche Taycan, is almost 40 hours. Typically, for petrol or diesel record attempts, the vehicles are usually altered so they can travel farther without stopping. This is often done by installing a larger or extra fuel tank. In contrast, all electric vehicle range records so far have been achieved using the stock vehicle, standard production cars, without modifying the battery, drivetrain, or energy storage.

So, for this trial run, Ryan brilliantly decided to fill the bed of his truck with two old Rivian battery packs (about 10 thousand extra battery cells or 180 kWh).

There were a few ways to connect this second pack. Directly wiring it in parallel with the vehicle’s traction battery would have required limiting the added pack to around 130 kWh so the voltages matched. That would have meant leaving roughly 50 kWh unused, not something you want for a timed run where every minute counts.

The alternative was to use the two battery packs independently. This approach would require pulling over to the side of the road, fully powering down the vehicle, physically switching to the second pack, and then booting the vehicle back up again. While this method allows all the energy in each pack to be used safely, it is clunky because it interrupts the drive, adds complexity, risks voltage mismatch during reconnection that could overvoltage the vehicle, and ultimately wastes valuable time.

Ryan, much to our surprise, found another solution.

Instead, he installed one of ADVANTICS’ modules, ADM-PC-BP25 DC/DC power converter in the gear tunnel, with a little fan on it for cooling.

This DC/DC converter actively managed the power flow between the two packs while driving, and the vehicle was fully functional within its normal voltage range, without extra stops or reboots.

Now with the added superpower of over 310 kWh capacity, they theoretically had close to 620 miles, or 998 kilometres, of range on a full charge, in a pickup truck. However, that energy would need to be recharged. If they relied solely on the factory charging, they would be limited to around 200 kW. After the first full discharge, this charging bottleneck would largely negate the advantage of carrying extra batteries if they can’t be recharged faster.

Usually, the KISS rule–keep it simple, stupid–is the best approach, so Ryan just added a second DC Fast charge port out the back!

With two charging stations combined, the system could be charged at 500 kW. To get a Combined Charging System (CCS) connection working on a vehicle is typically a feat of engineering, and the team chose to also use ADVANTICS’ electric vehicle charge controller, ADM-CS-EVCC , for charging the extra battery pack. The full integration of ADVANTICS charge controllers was straightforward, with higher interoperability than observed with charging on the other end of the car. To be fair, there were many changes the team had made to the core vehicle to get it to work, and likely, many opportunities can impact interoperability.

Ryan discovered ADVANTICS through word of mouth and had been working on this project for quite some time without our knowledge. We take this as a compliment that, between the ADVANTICS modules’ user manuals available online and development software, very little support was needed. But we did show up to the livestream to cheer them on. Robert Dunn from Aging Wheels also documented the team’s efforts on this quest in two videos, mentioning us .

While the run may have ended earlier than the last EV record, it feels like a full circle to us. ADVANTICS also started with a similar passion for tinkering in some of its initial days, including being the first to hack a Tesla powertrain , back in 2015.