Born To Ride
We take golf carts for granted. They’ve become a familiar accessory, allowing more golfers to enjoy the game and allowing golf to be played on lands once off limits to a traditional golf course. We pull up to the bag drop on a weekend, hop into a cart, toss a bag filled with cigars into the front console and enjoy a pleasant ride around the links, sipping a cool beverage that sits handy in the cupholder between our shots.
But then Tiger Woods and Jack Nicklaus, of all people, created some serious cart buzz.
Nicklaus was on a podcast with Nick Faldo in March, talking about a story he shared with Woods. Nicklaus told Woods he could ask the PGA Tour for permission to use a golf cart under the Americans with Disabilities Act. Woods’ ability to play has been severely limited by injuries to his right leg suffered in a catastrophic car crash in 2021, and walking nearly 20 miles over a four-round tournament is just too much for his injury-riddled body. “I can hit a lot of shots but the difficulty for me is going to be the walking going forward,” Tiger has said. The use of a cart might allow him to play a few more events.
But Woods isn’t interested. Said Nicklaus of Woods’ response: “I’m not going to do that. When I get to the senior tour, I will.”
That perked up a bunch of ears. Golf fans savored the possibility of watching Tiger the Champions Tour, playing alongside the other 50-year-olds, chugging along in a cart and rejuvenating the Tour. At the Masters in April, Woods—47 years old and three years away from his Champions Tour eligibility—validated his intention. “I’ve got three more years [before] I get the little buggy and be out there with Fred [Couples],” Woods said, “But until then, no buggy.”
Despite his adamant stance against “buggies,” a golf cart could one day be a part of Woods’ professional life, a way to extend the career of a true American icon, the man who holds 15 major championships, second only to Nicklaus. But no matter how familiar they are to amateurs, seeing a pro in a golf cart is just not familiar territory.
Golf has been played for more than 700 years, far longer than man has driven, so it began, of course, as a walking game. The origin of the golf cart is a bit fuzzy, but one Lyman Beecher of Clearwater, Florida, is given credit for coming up with the concept in the early 1930s, though his original invention was more of a rickshaw than a cart. Beecher, an electrical engineer, had a summer home in North Carolina and he played a nearby hilly course. Finding walking the hills increasingly difficult, he came up with a non-motorized cart designed to be pulled by two caddies. Within a few years, Beecher figured out how to add power to a cart using an electric motor that required six batteries, enough to last 18 holes. It was awkward and heavy, and not necessarily approved by clubs and courses for a game traditionally played by walking.
Around the same time that Beecher was bringing the golf cart to life, John Keener Wadley, an Arkansas businessman, found a new use for three-wheeled electric carts that he saw being used in Los Angeles to transport elderly patrons to grocery stores. Wadley is said to have bought one of the carts and used it on the course, a move that remained unknown to Beecher.
After World War II, Texas oilman R.J. Jackson received the first patent for a gas-powered golf cart. Jackson created the cart—which he dubbed “The Arthritis Special”—for older players such as himself, extending the time he could play the game. Gas carts originally received about as warm a welcome as the Rodney Dangerfield character in Caddyshack. Courses hated the noise, the smoke and the odors emanating from the engines. But despite the grumblings of purists, the demand of older and infirm players created a niche. Then people began to embrace the convenience of riding a cart while playing golf. Demand has expanded ever since.
Those pioneering inventors and small businesses behind the first carts led to the establishment of major cart makers such as E-Z-GO and Club Car in the 1950s and early 1960s, both (coincidentally) headquartered in Augusta, Georgia. E-Z-GO was founded by brothers Beverly and Billy Dolan and Club Car was established by Bill Stevens Sr. in 1962. Both companies were buoyed by the increased popularity of the game of golf, riding the wave of Arnold Palmer’s popularity in the 1960s.
Flash forward a good 70 years and we find ourselves in the glory days of the golf cart universe. Beyond the basics shared by every golf cart (a roof to shelter you from rain and sun, straps to hold a pair of bags and maybe an ice chest), modern-day carts can come with a host of amenities, such as custom seating, custom wheels, custom paint jobs, whatever a club or an individual owner can think of.
There are golf carts with solar s on the roof to extend their life and range, carts made to look like sports cars, carts with seating for four (or more), carts with souped-up engines that speed around the course. GPS units are now quite common, showing the layout of the course (and also prohibiting you from areas you shouldn’t be such as steep slopes or right around the green). Those who live on private courses buy carts of their own to travel around the grounds and move from course to restaurant to home. And golf carts have even become a hot new amenity to use far off the course, in upscale communities around the United States—whether road legal or not. People can’t seem to get enough of them.
Club Car expanded its luxury offerings roughly a year ago, acquiring luxury golf cart maker Garia, based in Denmark. “It’s the world’s only luxury golf car brand,” says Jeff Tyminski, Club Car’s vice president of product management, the man at the steering wheel of the company’s rides. “Very unique style. Appointed with fine quality materials. For the individual who has achieved a level of success, it’s a very unique vehicle. Custom colors, custom stitching, your name stitched in the seat. Comes with coolers.”
Prices start around $30,000 and go up. A version made in partnership with Mercedes-Benz goes for nearly $100,000. “All of those vehicles are low-speed vehicles that can be driven on the street. They come with seat belts and can go as fast as 25 miles an hour,” says Tyminski. “A Garia is the Lamborghini of golf carts.”
“It’s an exciting time for golf carts,” says Adam Harris, vice president of E-Z-GO. “We’re going to see continued improvements and pace of development. A lot of it is taking leads from automotive, the creature comforts and features that individuals expect when buying a vehicle. Additional seating options, upgrading of tire and wheel combinations. More digital gauges so it looks more automotive than the old-school golf cart. On the fleet side of things, we want these vehicles to become more and more connected. And imbedded with more and more functionality.”
One level of functionality comes from better batteries. “The evolution into lithium is really a game changer. For both fleet and consumer golf carts,” says E-Z-GO’s director of strategy Matt Zaremba. “The lithium batteries have extremely long life spans and allow the fleet operators to operate more efficiently over their whole lease, be more flexible with lease . For our consumer operators, lithium is hands off. All you really need to do is plug it in and go. There’s no maintenance to the consumer and it will last the life of the vehicle.”
An estimated quarter of a million new golf carts go into the greater golf pool each year, with Club Car and E-Z-GO leading the way followed (at a distant third) by Yamaha. The Covid-19 pandemic was a boon for golf and also the cart business.
“For the decade before the pandemic demand was very steady. Call it flat volume as some courses closed,” says Tyminski. “When Covid hit, the number of people playing golf went through the roof. At the beginning of Covid, there was single rider [mandate] so a facility that used to need a fleet of 70 cars, all of a sudden you needed a fleet of 140 cars. Usage of carts accelerated, fleet cars expanded. Now that we have exited from the pandemic and the number of rounds are at a high, the state of the industry is really healthy. The demand for golf carts is really robust.” He says his company churns out more than 100,000 carts a year.
“As a whole, I would say the golf cart industry is in a really healthy place,” says Harris. “Some unintended but positive consequences for the golf cart business throughout the pandemic, you had more people taking the time to play golf.”
Golf carts, originally designed to make it easier to get around a course, have expanded the types of terrain that can be used for golf and the courses themselves.
“The golf cart became a vehicle, from my point of view, that meant you could use terrain that was previously not golf terrain,” says golf course architect Robert Trent Jones II. “If you define golf terrain as a gentle, rolling, well-draining landscape. Golf carts revolutionized the landscape and I think created three-dimensional golf architecture. By three-dimensional I mean mountains, building in the mountains.”
And for real estate developers, it created the possibility of spreading golf courses over vast areas of land, allowing for more sites, more sales. If you’re walking and humping your bag on your shoulder, the next tee box better be fairly close to the green you just finished playing. In a cart, you just take a little drive.
“They increased the golf course from the developers’ point of view to extend the holes and therefore sell more real estate, which had nothing to do with an ideal golf course,” says Jones.
Golf cart paths now have to be taken into when deg a course and they aren’t always attractive. “Some people don’t like the looks of them on a course,” says Jones. “Tom Fazio has been quite adamant about hiding the golf carts, the paths.” Not to mention how a hard path can change the game, either giving you extra roll or perhaps making a ball that would have landed safely bounce out of bounds.
Cart paths come into play on PGA Tour courses, but carts themselves never did until Casey Martin forced the issue in the late 1990s. Martin, who qualified for the Tour, suffered from Klippel-Trenaunay-Weber syndrome, which atrophied his right leg. He could hit a ball just fine, but walking was an issue. He asked the Tour for an exemption to use a cart in 1997. He was denied but in a series of court cases, Martin was given the right to use a cart by the Supreme Court in 2001, playing in two U.S. Opens (he last played in 2012). Larger than life golfer John Daly and Eric Compton are two of the rare PGA Tour players who have been allowed to use carts, Compton having had two heart transplants.
When the Senior Tour (which is now known as the Champions Tour) was founded in 1980, the Tour made golf carts legal for the players who are age 50 and over. But even though carts are legal on that Tour, old habits persist—they are seldom used. According to the Tour, only about 10 to 20 players a week in a 78-player field use carts, with Darren Clarke being the most notable. The 65-year-old Bernhard Langer, who just broke his tie with Hale Irwin to have the most wins on the Tour with 46, does not use a cart. Neither does Irwin.
The golfing public gladly uses them, profusely. Some courses just can’t operate without them. “We make carts basically required,” says director of golf Shawn Cox, director of golf at Grand Del Mar Golf Club in Del Mar, California, which is on 380 hilly acres, with significant distances from greens to tees, a solid example of how carts allow golf to be played on nontraditional golf terrain.
For Bill Carson, general manager of the public Windsor Golf Club and Rooster Run Golf Club in Sonoma County, California, carts are an important source of profit.
“They are a big financial part,” says Carson, who leases his fleet of E-Z-GO carts. “You have the fixed cost of leasing the carts and you need so much rental time a month to break even, but that’s usually never a problem,” says Carson. “It’s not as lucrative as a busy tee sheet but carts and the driving range are pretty close [as profit centers]. As percentage of gross, it’s around 15 to 20 percent.”
Profits aside, some courses just say no to them, particularly when it comes to some of the world’s great courses. At Mike Keiser’s magnificent Bandon Dunes complex of courses in Oregon, and his newer Sand Valley facility in Wisconsin, it’s walking only with a caddie. Carts are only available if a player cites a medical reason. The Old Course at St Andrews, Bethpage Black and Chambers Bay are three other well-known courses that prohibit golf carts for most players.
Despite those high-profile examples, courses that don’t throw out the welcome mat for golf carts are outliers. As with Woods getting ready for a future where he tools around in a golf cart, just like the rest of us, the state of the cart in the world of golf has never been more solid.
