Tatra Präsident

The Präsident was an automobile built in 1897 by the Nesselsdorfer Wagenbau-Fabriks-Gesellschaft, the firm that became Tatra in 1919, and it was the first practical, factory-produced petrol engine automobile in Central and Eastern Europe. Leopold Sviták and Hans Ledwinka built it, taking the Benz Viktoria bought from Mannheim as a model without copying it, and fitting a flat two-cylinder four-stroke Benz engine by the rear axle with a two-speed transmission driving through a flat strap. It was more a carriage without horses than a car in the modern sense: a wooden body on an iron frame, handlebar steering, four seats with a hood over the rear pair, and a top speed of 30 km/h. It was named for Count Gustav Pötting-Persing, first president of the Austrian Automobile Club, and in May 1898 it drove the 328 km from Nesselsdorf to Vienna in 14.5 hours. The first car, factory number 50, is in the National Technical Museum in Prague and is still drivable, and a replica built in 1977 stands in the Tatra factory museum in Kopřivnice.