The Long Haul

Since childhood I’ve fantasized about the Guinness Book of Records—some pointless achievement I’d actually want my name attached to. Never settled on what it would be.

Duracell managed it with a remote-controlled Lightning McQueen from the Cars films. They ran the thing on a Hungarian racetrack for 24 hours straight powered by six batteries. 186.24 kilometers. 3,200 laps. Beat the previous record by eighty kilometers.

There’s something almost absurdly earnest about the whole thing—a battery company proving their product’s endurance by running a Disney toy car in circles until it breaks a Guinness World Record. They even ran it against a competitor’s car at the same time. The Duracell car lapped it 156 times. Every nine minutes or so, for a full day, just kept coming around.

The numbers feel weirdly mythical in their plainness: four sets of batteries for the whole distance. Not some engineering marvel, just four packs of standard AAs that did what the label promised. The car’s tires wore down, the motor got destroyed, and the batteries kept feeding power anyway.

The part that stays with me is simpler: someone somewhere knew this toy car was going to drive 186 kilometers on four sets of batteries, and they watched it happen anyway. That’s the record I’d actually want in a book.