Some eight years after the now-defunct Motive Magazine put a Smart ForTwo to work on an urban golf course, Mercedes is finally catching up to support its customers’ favorite pastime.
Revealed yesterday, the Mercedes-Benz Style Edition Garia Golf Car isn’t just a glitzed up golf cart made to look like a miniature GLE Coupe. Instead, it’s the product of a competition started in 2013 to build the best golf cart or nothing.
In true Mercedes-Benz fashion, the three-pointed-star automaker dropped a 16-page press release to promote its new golf cart, which is a collaboration between Mercedes-Benz designers, Daimler’s Think & Act Tank Business Innovation and golf-cart manufacturer Garia.
According to the release, “In 2013, Mercedes-Benz called upon golf and automobile fans from around the world to submit their ideas for a Mercedes-Benz golf cart of the future. While golf has developed into a premium sport with a modern face, golf carts have remained almost unchanged for decades.”
The Mercedes-Benz golf cart isn’t just an overly designed fairway runabout.
The showcar brings with it a design reminiscent of a baseball cap (because we know how well that analogy went last time) with features unique to the golf cart industry. A carbon fibre roof that keeps the cart’s center of gravity low, a refrigerator under its lounge-style seat, and many bottle holders for your Michelob Ultra. Drivers can operate the cart’s vehicle dynamics functions (yes, it has a ‘sport’ mode) through a large 10.1-inch touchscreen, which also doubles as a digital scorecard. Bringing it all together are 14-inch wheels, which Mercedes states give the cart the “dynamism for which Mercedes-Benz passenger cars are known,” and a carbon fiber rear diffuser to make sure you don’t tip this real sportscar in those high-speed golf-cart-path sweepers.
The electric cart has a maximum output (during electric overboost) of 11 kilowatts (14.75 horsepower) and a range of 80 kilometers (50 miles).
There are no plans to offer the Garia next to ForTwos on the right side of Mercedes-Benz showrooms.
[Images: Daimler]
Rich people have so many things to think about.
But they have so many toys to play with!
“Mercedes-Benz Builds a Golf Cart — and It Isn’t a Smart”
sure looks like one, though.
Costs 80,000! ;0p
I’m waiting for the shopping trolley edition.
Oooooooooooooooooh it has a SPORT mode.
I don’t want it if the star Doesn’t light up.
#TheBestOrWhateverLesseesAreDumbEnoughToSognTo
Does Daimler still make a Mercedes?
It looks like a previous-gen Smart Fortwo without the doors. They could have saved a lot of money by taking the doors off their unloved first edition of the Electric Drive version and calling it a golf car.
Precisely!
How to make a golf cart, the Mercedes way:
1) Remove the doors from a Smart car.
2) Add a small refrigerator.
3) Remove the gas engine and put in an electric one, complete with Sport Mode for those pesky sand traps and treacherous dirt paths.
4) Quadruple the price.
5) Hope no one notices what a joke this is, I mean, hope they all admire the clever German engineering behind this brilliant little vehicle.
On the ranch I work at (mowing lawns), they have a old retired generic Golf Cart. The thing is fun to hoon around the farm and I’ve drifted it on various dirt roads around the property and even set up a autocross course through the trees! This got me thinking I wonder how this Merc would handle through the corners/on the Autocross race.
Then again, this is why we can’t have nice things! If I were use one while hauling the weed wacker, by the end of the day, it would be covered in dirt. i’d imagine while playing golf you would not get that dirty but, still you’d treat your golf cart by a gem and, probally be paranoid of it getting damadged.
I’m holding out for the AMG version.
With an aging population cohort soon moving to retirement communities, maybe Merc has more in mind than just golf for these things.
Three words: Bubba Watson Hovercraft
Goes right over the water hazards!
Check out on youtube.
I would like to use my 74 450SL convertible as a golf cart. There’s plenty of room for two sets of clubs behind the front seats. It would be the only V8 cart on the course. Plus, you could drive it back and forth to the course.