Uber driver breaks record with 638km journey from Virginia to Brooklyn

The Uber driver drove a passenger just from Williamsburg, Virginia to Brooklyn. Photo / Google Maps

An Uber driver has clocked up what is believed to be the longest in the company's history when Janis Rogers drove a passenger just under 640km from Williamsburg, Virginia to Brooklyn.

It was a romantic mission with a young woman wanting to visit her boyfriend in New York.

According to the New York Post the odyssey started outside a branch of Ben & Jerry's with Rogers, 64, being asked to take her passenger to Bedford-Stuyvesant.

The 396.58-mile (638km) trip was rather a departure for Rogers. The average of an Uber trip is 5.4 miles (8.6km). The previous record is believed to have been set in 2014 by Joe Strandell, who took a woman 320 from Santa Barbara to Palo Alto in California. When she picked up the fare, the passenger asked how far Rogers was willing to drive. Without any other customers on the horizon, she volunteered to go the whole way.

She was pretty. She was sitting outside with a suitcase and a bag," Rogers said. "I did not get her name. I think she had been Ubering up the coast."

She completed the seven hour and 42 minute drive without even stopping for a comfort break. The trip cost a surprisingly modest US$294.09 ($412).

Then, in a remarkable feat of endurance, Rogers turned round and drove straight back to Virginia, getting home at 3.45am.

A train trip would have cost $95 and a bus $45, Even a flight would have set the woman who, Rogers said, looked about 19 or 20, back around $188.

Given the amount of time she spent on the road, the trip was hardly a money spinner, earning Rogers about $9 an hour.

"This was not lucrative," she said. "I did it because it was an adventure."