He Drove From New York to Los Angeles Before There Were Highways. His Record Stood for 40 Years

In the summer of 1916, a man loaded a car with twelve gallons of gasoline, a canvas water bag, and a tool roll built for a V8 engine that most of the country had never heard run — and drove west with a number written on a strip of tape on the dashboard. That number was seven. Not miles. Days. The car was a 1916 Cadillac Type 53 Touring, the first production V8 automobile in American history. The road was the Lincoln Highway — painted fence posts and intermittent gravel, largely unpaved, with long sections impassable after rain. There was no transcontinental highway. There was no infrastructure designed to receive an automobile traveling this distance. There was only the continent, and whatever the ground offered. Edgar Hollis drove from New York to Los Angeles alone, logging every hour in a handbound book, sleeping in four-hour intervals, solving mechanical problems in the field. He crossed the Alleghenies at night by acetylene headlamp. He waited out a nine-hour storm in an Omaha feed warehouse repairing a drive chain. He had a magneto rebuilt from bar stock by a Norwegian machinist in Salt Lake City before crossing 180 miles of Nevada desert. He nursed the radiator across the Mojave with a water bag carried since New Jersey. He arrived at Los Angeles City Hall on July 16th, 1916, at ten thirty-seven in the morning. Seven days, nine hours, forty-four minutes. New York to Los Angeles. No highway. The Los Angeles Times ran a single column. Page seven. The record stood for forty-one years. This channel tells the stories of the cars that carried Americans across roads that were not ready for them, and the people who drove anyway. Every episode is built around a real machine, a real route, and a life that changed somewhere on the asphalt. Subscribe to keep watching. And tell us in the comments: what car have you driven that made the road feel like it had no right to be there. #vintagecars #americanroads #vintagecarstoriesusa #goldenageamericancars #americancarhistory #retroamericanlife #postwarroadculture