Warren
Custom Golf Car Maker
Crafts Detroit Tigers’ Bullpen Cars
U
ber, Justin Lokotar, and
his colleagues had just
three weeks to transform
a couple of stock golf carts into
custom-designed bullpen cars in
the shape of 1949 Mercury Eight
coupes for the Detroit Tigers.
The team unveiled the two-seat
cars on Friday for their game
against the Yankees at Comerica
Park, marking the Tigers’ nostal-
gic return to a baseball fad that
peaked in the 1970s but is slowly
becoming a trend again.
Lokotar, 26, is general manager
for his dad Keith Lokotar’s War-
ren-based Michigan Golf Cart
Sales, which is a subsidiary of
Keith’s Auto & Golf Cart Sales &
Service but now has grown to
become almost the entire busi-
ness over 20 years. They got the
request from the Tigers in March
with the short turnaround time
for delivery.
Michigan Golf Carts
31639 Mound Road
Warren, Michigan 48092
www.migolfcart.com
20
WWW.GOLFCAROPTIONS.COM
No problem. The firm, with a
25,000 square-foot work and
showroom space along Mound
Road, do 10 to 15 custom golf
carts annually atop sales of
about 300 to 500 units. Lokotar
said the company has provided
carts for the Detroit Red Wings
(owned, like the Tigers, by the
Ilitch family), the Detroit Lions
and Woodward Dream Cruise,
and for celebrities that he said
he cannot disclose.
The Ilitches are a longtime client,
so it made sense they’d turn to
Michigan Golf Cart Sales for the
bullpen cars.
“We’ve done work for them
before. They were looking for
something unique,” Lokotar said.
“They wanted something differ-
ent and eye-catching.”
What they wanted was as close
to a ‘49 Mercury as possible, with
Ilitch-owned corporate sponsor
MotorCity Casino’s name and
flame paint job adorning the
carts. The home team’s cart,
in its blue base color, has the
Tigers’ Old English D emblazoned
on the side and an orange flame
job. The visitor car is black with
yellow flames.
Lokotar said he and two col-
leagues took a pair of carts from
Georgia-based Club Car (a divi-
sion of Ingersoll Rand), stripped
them down to the frames, and
rebuilt everything inside to the
exterior bodies that were fab-
ricated from fiberglass in the
shape of the Mercury. The flame
paint job was done in-house, too,
he said.