Golf Cart
Powered
by the Spirit
(and Engine)
of a Truck
Reprint: www.popsci.com
One day late last year, Bill Rulien decided
he’d had enough of people boasting about
how they had modified their golf carts
with hotrod paint jobs or monster-truck
tires. “I thought, I’m gonna build some-
thing that will say, ‘Well, top this.’ “
Rulien owns several golf-cart sales shops
in the Midwest, so he had his choice of
bodies. What he needed was a bigger en-
gine. He picked out a cart that he’d been
selling for parts and yanked the electric
motor, transmission and drivetrain. Then
he bought an old International Harvester
Scout truck that had been rusting in a yard
nearby and brought it to his shop.(The
brakes were shot—when Rulien backed
the truck off the trailer, the Scout immedi-
ately rolled through a fence and halfway
up a berm.)
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Rulien kept the V8 engine, drivetrain,
steering and transmission from the Scout
but removed all the other parts, and he
began cutting up its chassis to fit the tiny
cart’s body so it wouldn’t just look like a
toy car sitting on top of a truck. He short-
ened the Scout’s driveshaft as well, but he
still had to connect the two vehicles. With
steel he had lying around, he fabricated a
frame that joins the cart’s body with the
truck’s chassis.
The two parts seemed to get along with
each other, except for one serious glitch:
the cable from the gas pedal didn’t reach
down to the engine. “I figured that would
be the easy part,” Rulien says, “but it end-
ed up as a lot of going back and forth.”
Once he had finally mated cart and truck