Here’s a great old advertisement from the Sunday Washington Times, on Halloween, 1909. Interested in buying an electric car? Well it’ll only take $1,500 and you could be the proud owner of a Rauch & Lang Electric. I apologize, but the thumbnail photo for this post is actually a 1914 Rauch & Lang. I’m sure you already knew that. I just wanted full disclosure.
They only made about 500 cars per year — Ford currently makes about two million a year — so if you owned one today, I’m sure it would be worth quite a bit. The cars were originally manufactured in Cleveland between 1905 and 1920, when they moved their factory to Chicopee Falls, Massachusetts (cool town name, read about it here). That was the year they were acquired by the Stevens-Duryea company and it was the beginning of the end. They made their last car in 1928.