Broughton Quarterly - Summer 2008 - (Page 16) style counsel Golf Cart Glamour Go Carts! despite humble origins and an irrepressible tendency towards portliness, the world’s most stodgy vehicle—the golf cart—is hooking off the fairway and onto the roadway. by Chris Connolly It sported a fiery custom paint job, a cigar humidor…it even had GPS capabilities in case the new owner ever found himself on a golf course of unusually massive proportions. same—when rides are “pimped;” ears, fingers, and necks drip with “bling;” and common items like bicycles and cell phones are routinely tricked out and customized within an inch of abject uselessness—it was, perhaps, no wonder that the once stodgy golf cart should come in for an over-the-top makeover of its own. And once celebrities and other high-profile types started throwing their considerable weight (and money) behind the custom cart movement, it was only a matter of time (and money) before a starryeyed public would join in the fun. Just when did the golf cart—that humble, trundling shuttler of clubs and balls—slip the shackles of its awkward youth and take a turn towards superstardom? We took a look back at the rise of this most unimposing machine. CArt ANd SOuL The golf cart, unsurprisingly, was originally designed to assist people who were playing the sport of golf. Reports indicate that golf clubs are rather heavy, and golfers who were tired of carrying them around (or of paying caddies to do so) soon began to clamor for a vehicle that could help lighten the load. In this respect, the golf cart was made to order. Faster than walking but not as fast as proper driving, the golf cart was the perfect vehicle for cruising from hole to hole without churning up the delicately manicured greens and fairways upon which a quality golf experience is so reliant. And while it served happily in this capacity for many years, the golf cart had a certain star quality that seemed to fate it for loftier 16 Broughton Quarterly Summer 2008 I n an era when having iT and flaunTing iT are one and The things. Its merits as a fast-but-not-too-fast, big-but-not-too-big, inexpensive, lightly-polluting vehicle were soon recognized and harnessed by grounds crews, traffic cops, and mobility-challenged air passenger transporters the world over. However, as versatile as it was, the golf cart didn’t truly come into its own until it fell into the hands of an unlikely group of trendsetters: retirees. CArt AttACK According to a recent story in the New York Times, over the last decade, while the sale of golf carts to golf courses has increased only slightly, the sale of carts to private citizens has doubled. Proliferating mostly in retirement and gated communities, the rise in private usership of golf carts for personal transportation has been explosive. In fact, one company, which manufactures around 3,500 carts per year, recently estimated that an astounding seventy-five percent of its fleet was now being sold for private non-golf-specific uses. The rise in golf cart popularity has been so explosive, in fact, that in the late 1990s the National Highway Safety Administration established a new category: Low-Speed Vehicles. Now, while the name “low-speed vehicles” doesn’t exactly conjure up images of highflying fun, the owners of these yeomanly carts—designed to travel between 25 and 35 miles per hour on public roads—immediately set about finding ways other than blazing speed to individualize them. This quest naturally led to customization, and these days the only thing increasing faster than the use of golf carts for personal transport is their owners’ desire to have the coolest cart on the block.
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