At least a few presidents have driven electric cars, but not all have driven electric cars in recent times.
Our 34th President, Dwight David “Ike” Eisenhower, may have been one of the first. Long before Ike became the most famous general of the 20th century, Eisenhower drove an early electric car owned by his wife’s family.
John Sheldon and Elvira Doud, Eisenhower’s father and mother-in-law, owned this car—a 1914 Rauch & Lang electric car. It was advertised as the first electric car in America with a roof-mounted screw drive and could be driven from either the front or rear seats. With a top speed of 13 mph, the car could travel up to 100 miles, according to the 1953 brochure that came with the car.
Ike met their daughter Mamie in 1915 and proposed to her on Valentine’s Day the following year. The two courted and were married on July 1, 1916. Ike drove the car often until it was donated to his museum.
The Douds, a well-to-do couple who raised Mamie in Colorado, bought the car for $4,300 in 1914. That’s the equivalent of more than $135,000 today—much more than, say, a Mercedes-Benz EQS 580 2024 Sedan.
Rauch & Lang Streetcar in 1914 and President Dwight Eisenhower
The newly crowned Eisenhower family drove occasionally, but purchased a black Pullman convertible of their own before moving to Washington, D.C. The automaker went bankrupt in 1917, barely outlasting Ike and Mamie’s car, which frequently broke down when the military couple were away.
The Eisenhower family continued to drive gasoline-powered cars for the next several decades. Mamie drives everywhere as newlyweds in DC, on crowded streets where streetcars shared lanes with Model Ts and the like. “When I sometimes took Ike to the office in the morning,” she recalled in an oral history recorded the year she died, “you would have what we called a major traffic problem, nothing compared to what it is today.”
Their car lineup leaned heavily toward Chrysler, but only after they shipped a Model T to Panama for duty in 1922. There was a 1948 Chrysler Crown Imperial, a 1950 model, and a 1952 model. Then, while Eisenhower was President and Mamie was First Lady—from January 1953 to January 1961—the couple drove cars from the White House Motor Pool. Most of those cars were Chryslers, although the President drove a Cadillac and was driven in a 1950 Lincoln “Bubbletop” during many parades.
During his two terms in the White House, Eisenhower’s nephew also drove a streetcar.—a miniature plane that they fly down the first-floor hallways of the White House after the tour groups have left for the day.
Upon retirement, they purchased two Chryslers from the White House fleet to use along with a variety of other farm vehicles they used on their farm near Gettysburg, Pennsylvania.
Rauch-Lang 1914 tram
Eisenhower’s “death knell” for short-range electric vehicles?
The Eisenhower administration predated modern electric vehicles by decades, but his presidency had a lasting impact on today’s electric vehicle market. In 1954, after proposing an interstate highway system in his State of the Union address, he advocated for a sustained gasoline tax to fund highway construction. In 1956, Eisenhower signed the Federal Aid Highway Act into law. In postwar America, “big government” became the catalyst for a new era of American prosperity, and Eisenhower convinced lawmakers with a plan to spend a whopping $50 billion to kickstart the construction of a much larger highway network across the United States.
Eisenhower named the modern federal highway systemMore than half a century later—as rural dirt roads became modern state roads, then highways—Eisenhower’s massive public works project might have sounded Death knell for short-range electric vehicles. With stretches of asphalt promising to take Americans hundreds of miles from home or back, and as the electric car system is dismantled, gas stations are springing up like mushrooms, potentially erasing the potential of the infrastructure built around shorter commutes.
Eisenhower died in 1969, long before his vice president, Richard Nixon, signed the law creating the Environmental Protection Agency (EPA). Mamie died in 1972. It wasn’t until George W. Bush’s presidency that electric vehicles became a better-funded national priority and a political sticking point.
Like so much of history, Ike’s legacy on efficient transportation is complicated. At least in his time, any president could have been a staunch advocate for American And electric car driver
Photo courtesy of the Eisenhower Presidential Library.
