Einstein never learned to drive.
As you might imagine of the man whose name is synonymous with genius, Albert Einstein was a tad eccentric. In addition to sleeping at least 10 hours a night and not wearing socks, he also never learned to drive.
This mostly came down to preference rather than inability, however. Born in 1879, six years before the first gas-powered automobile was invented and many decades before cars became commonplace, Einstein loved to walk. His daily constitutionals were important to him, and not just for physical fitness — like many people, Einstein used his walks to clear his mind and make sense of whatever advanced equation he was working on at the time.
Einstein was also an urbanite, having lived in Munich, Zurich, and Prague before settling in Princeton, New Jersey — which is to say that public transit was widely available throughout much of his life. That doesn’t mean he never got behind the wheel, however. During a visit to the Warner Bros. soundstage on February 3, 1931, Einstein “drove” a stationary car with his wife Elsa in front of a rear-projection screen displaying everything from Los Angeles and the Rocky Mountains to his native Germany. The footage, which was unearthed in 2017, is delightful.
