Old Toyota Prius drives coast to coast 99% autonomously with the use of $1,000 hands-free driving tech
Published on Sep 18, 2025 at 2:00 AM (UTC+4)
by Ben Thompson
Last updated on Sep 17, 2025 at 4:58 PM (UTC+4)
Edited by
Amelia Jean Hershman-Jones
This old Toyota Prius drove coast to coast 99 percent autonomously with the use of $1,000 hands-free driving tech.
Jay and Gypsy Roberts took their 2017 Toyota Prius out west for a road trip with a difference.
Their Prius was kitted out with a Comma 3X, which was doing the driving for them.
How would things pan out on their coast-to-coast trip?
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This Toyota Prius drove coast-to-coast with $1,000 hands-free driving tech
The Comma 3X was guiding an eight-year-old Prius with a quarter-million miles on the clock.
Taking this sort of car cross-country sounds a little risky, doesn’t it?
Well, throw in some torrential rain and wind, and you’ve got yourself one rocky road trip.
Along the way, they ran into weather that no driver wants to face – namely a tornado two miles off Interstate 40 in Oklahoma.
Fortunately, Jay said that the Comma 3X took it on ‘flawlessly’.
Some cars just deal with tornadoes well – remember when this Tesla Cybertruck powered a whole gas station after a tornado took out the electricity?
For the 43 hours that the Prius was on the road, the couple touched the wheel for just 39 minutes and 21 seconds.
That left the Comma 3X in control for 98.416 percent of the journey.
This wasn’t the couple’s first time doing the drive, having previously done so in 2024.
A big difference they noticed this time came with the fuel storage.
On the 2024 trip, they had to stop six times for fuel – they only had to stop once this time around.
That was because the Prius has been fitted with a 32-gallon auxiliary tank to supplement the stock 11.3-gallon capacity.
“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 told The Drive.
Autonomous driving – is this the way of the future?
Whether it’s Tesla or Xiaomi, driverless cars are seemingly everywhere you look.
And it’s no new development either – Mercedes cracked the code back in 1994, even though it basically goes unspoken about.
In Germany, a self-driving project called KIRA looks to be the future of commuting.
Driving could look a lot different a few years from now.
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