This all started because in our neighborhood, there is a public pool that we are members of. We are too far to walk, but not far enough to justify driving a car. I wanted a golf cart…though the wife did not. Finally I talked her into it. I looked around on all the regular outlets: Craigslist, Facebook marketplace and many others, but couldn’t find what I wanted. So I bought a cheap cart that I knew I was going to tear down and rebuild the way I wanted, to serve the purpose we needed.

I did not need our cart to be street legal to get back and forth to the pool. I “needed“ my cart to be street legal so that I could drive it virtually anywhere I wanted with confidence, using any of the city streets with a posted speed limit of 35 mph or less (that pretty much describes 95% of the roads in Charlotte). It had to be functional, so that we could use it around the house to do yard work, move mulch, move plants around, etc. But it also had to be fun - I still wanted a fun way to get back and forth to the pool. At the time of completing my first golf cart, we had a 1-year-old boy. I would take him on very short rides near the house and some of his first words were “golf cart ride”. He loved it, I loved it, the dog loves it. My wife tolerates it, but she has come around to enjoy taking it to run errands, and out to dinner, when the weather is nice.