Cars of our presidents

For more than a hundred years, Czechoslovak and Czech presidents have been driving cars. This book attempts to map the diverse range of several hundred cars from two dozen domestic and foreign brands that have made a significant mark on our history thanks to their users. In addition to well-known cars, it also commemorates some almost forgotten ones.
The founder of Czechoslovakia T. G. Masaryk not only drove Laurin and Klement, Praga, Škoda Hispano-Suiza and Tatra cars, but in 1919 also an Austrian limousine Gräf und Stift. In 1936, Edvard Beneš had an armored convertible Praga Golden built, in which he drove through liberated Prague after returning from exile in May 1945. In 1945 and 1947, he purchased two English Daimler limousines. In the German-controlled protectorate, Emil Hácha served as the so-called the state president, in the summer of 1942 he received an armored Mercedes 770 from Berlin for his 70th birthday. The first communist president, Klement Gottwald, used the eight-cylinder Daimler after Beneš from June 1948. However, he soon exchanged it for a domestic armored VOS. Antonín Zápotocký also drove the same one, then switched to Soviet ZIM and ZIS cars. Antonín Novotný was proud of Soviet ZIS and ZIL cars from 1957 to 1968, while his successor Ludvík Svoboda was content with the more modest GAZ 13 Čajka. From 1975 to 1989, the ruling Gustáv Husák enjoyed the comfort of a number of large ZIL cars, but he did not disdain the Tatra 613 either. The Velvet Revolution brought dissident Václav Havel to Prague Castle in December 1989, whose first presidential car was a Renault 21 TSE. The head of state' s fleet also consisted of BMW 7 Series and Mercedes-Benz S 600 limousines. In the castle carriage of Václav Klaus from 2003 to 2013, the Audi brand ruled. President Miloš Zeman' s decade from 2013 to 2023 belonged exclusively to the Škoda brand, his successor Petr Pavel prefers BMW 7 Series limousines.
The book is supplemented with technical descriptions of individual cars. The text is accompanied by two hundred mostly period photographs, some of which are published for the first time.