Author: EVAI

You know you have one under your car, but if you’re lucky, you never have to think about it. It’s the catalytic converter, a component of your car’s exhaust and emission-control system usually installed between the engine and the muffler. What is a catalytic converter? A catalytic converter is a metal can containing a ceramic or metal honeycomb…

Ford created “night drive mode” and patented the idea “Night drive mode” would limit vehicle speeds after dark; it’s aimed at first responders The system would use a light sensor that limits speeds after dark Ford has developed a “night drive mode” that limits vehicle speeds after dark. The nighttime speed limiter was disclosed by Ford in a patent…

At least a couple of presidents have been drivers of electric cars, but they’re not all in the recent past.

Our 34th President, Dwight David “Ike” Eisenhower, may have been one of the first. Long before Ike became perhaps the 20th century’s most famous general, Eisenhower drove around in an early electric car that belonged to his in-laws.

John Sheldon and Elvira Doud, Eisenhower’s father- and mother-in-law, owned the car—a 1914 Rauch & Lang electric car. It had been advertised as the first EV in America with a top-mounted worm drive, and could be driven from the front or the back seat. At its top speed of 13 mph, it could be driven up to 100 miles, according to donation material supplied with the car in 1953.

Ike met their daughter Mamie in 1915 and asked her to marry him on Valentine’s Day the next year. The two courted, then married on July 1, 1916. Ike drove the car often until it was donated to his museum.

The Douds, a well-off couple who raised Mamie in Colorado, bought the car for $4,300 in 1914. That’s the equivalent of more than $135,000 today—far more than, say, a 2024 Mercedes-Benz EQS 580 sedan.

1914 Rauch & Lang electric car and President Dwight Eisenhower

The newly minted Eisenhowers drove the car on occasion, but bought their own used black Pullman roadster before they moved on to Washington, D.C. The automaker, which went out of business in 1917, barely outlived Ike and Mamie’s car, which often broke down on the military couple. 

The Eisenhowers would drive gas-powered cars for the next few decades. Mamie drove everywhere as a newlywed in D.C., down bustling lanes where streetcars shared the lanes with Model Ts and the like. “When I would sometimes take Ike to the office in the morning,” she’d recall in an oral history taken in the year of her death, “you’d run into what we called then a great traffic problem, which is nothing in comparison to today.”

The succession of cars they owned leaned heavily toward Chryslers, but only after they shipped a Model T to Panama for a tour of duty in 1922. There was a 1948 Chrysler Crown Imperial, a 1950 model, then a 1952 model. Then, while Eisenhower served as President and Mamie as First Lady—from January 1953 to January 1961—the couple drove White House Motor Pool vehicles. Most of those vehicles were Chryslers, though the President drove Cadillacs and was driven in a 1950 “Bubbletop” Lincoln in many parades.

During his two terms in the White House, Eisenhower’s grandchildren also drove an electric car—a miniature one which they piloted down the hallways on the White House’s first floor after tour groups were gone for the day. 

When they retired, they purchased two Chryslers from the White House fleet, to go with the various farm vehicles they used on their farm near Gettysburg, Pennsylvania.

1914 Rauch-Lang electric car

Eisenhower’s “death knell” for short-range EVs?

Eisenhower’s administrations preceded the modern electric car by decades, but his presidency had long-trailing effects on today’s EV market. In 1954, after proposing the interstate highway system in his State of the Union address, he advocated for a sustained gas tax to be used to build highways. In 1956 Eisenhower signed the Federal-Aid Highway Act into effect. In postwar America, “big government” had become a catalyst for a new American era of prosperity, and Eisenhower won over lawmakers with a plan to spend the princely sum of $50 billion to kickstart the construction of a much larger network of highways across the U.S.

Eisenhower christened the modern Interstate highway system. Already a half-century or more in the making—as rural dirt roads became modern state roads, then highways—Eisenhower’s massive public works project nevertheless may have rung the death knell for short-range EVs. With ribbons of asphalt promising to take Americans hundreds of miles away from home or back to it, and as streetcar systems were dismantled, gas stations mushroomed and likely erased the potential for infrastructure conceived around shorter travel distances.

Eisenhower died in 1969, long before his vice president, Richard Nixon, signed legislation to found the Environmental Protection Agency (EPA). Mamie died in 1972. It would take until the presidency of George W. Bush before electric vehicles became a better-funded national priority and at the same time, a political hot button.

Like so much of history, Ike’s legacy toward efficient transportation is complicated. At least in his day, any President could be adamantly pro-American and an EV driver.

Photos courtesy the Eisenhower Presidential Library.

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• The rear-wheel drive Tesla Model 3 Long Range has returned
• The Model 3 Long Range costs $42,490, which is $5,000 less than the AWD model
• Tesla says the Long Range Model 3 goes 363 miles—2 miles more than the Hyundai Ioniq 6 SE
  

Tesla has added a rear-wheel drive Long Range version of the updated Model 3, which undercuts the all-wheel drive Long Range model by $5,000.

First spotted by Reuters, the new Tesla Model 3 Long Range rear-wheel drive appeared in the automaker’s online configurator Thursday with a base price of $42,490 before destination. Tesla lists a 363-mile range, compared to 341 miles for the $47,490 Model 3 Long Range all-wheel drive, or 358 miles for the previous Model 3 Long Range.

That gives today’s rear-wheel drive Long Range the most range of any current Model 3 variant, and it makes this model the longest-range Model 3 yet.

Tesla Model 3 (Europe-market refresh)

It also undercuts its lead U.S.-market rival, the Hyundai Ioniq 6, in both price and range. The 2024 Ioniq 6 SE costs $43,600 and is EPA-rated for 361 miles of range—although Tesla uses a different adjustment factor for its range ratings that may mean the Ioniq 6 still outperforms it in real-world range.

A single-motor powertrain gives the rear-wheel drive Model 3 Long Range a Tesla-estimated 0-60 mph time of 4.9 seconds—about a second quicker than the Ioniq 5 SE—and a 125-mph top speed.

Tesla launched the updated Model 3, codenamed “Highland” by the automaker, in the U.S. in January. The refresh brought revised exterior styling, a quieter cabin, and additional convenience features like cooled front seats, dual wireless device charging, and an 8.0-inch rear screen for passengers. Tesla also removed most physical controls, forcing drivers to rely more on the 15.4-inch touchscreen.

Tesla Model 3 (Europe-market refresh)

In the U.S., the Model 3 Highland was initially offered in base rear-wheel drive form (priced at $38,990 before destination) in addition to the all-wheel drive Long Range configuration. The Model 3 Performance returned in April, boasting adaptive suspension, a 2.9-second 0-60 mph time, and a $52,990 base price (since raised to $54,990). So the rear-wheel drive Model 3 Long Range brings the number of Highland variants to four.

The related Tesla Model Y hasn’t yet received the Highland—er, Juniper—updates, but price cuts to the crossover in April made it cheaper than the Model 3 by up to $5,000, once the $7,500 federal EV tax credit is factored in.

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