On Friday, December 13, 2019 at 9:36:54 AM UTC-7, Tom wrote:
Reaching out to query about golf carts - we use them to tow gliders (not on a flat surface, plenty of inclines) and transport people. I know there are a lot of different opinions but generally I’m curious what is the prevalent type in use out there - gas or electric?

Both have their ups and downs - I’ve seen some electric ones have problems towing stuff but I’m told that poor battery maintenance was a major factor. We’ve always used gas but because the majority of carts are electric the supply and demand issue causes the gas ones to be more expensive. This is causing me to consider electric.

The prices on these things seem outrageous to me either way (I’m famously frugal or as my friends say “cheap”). But, we use them every day and they are critical to the operation so i don’t want to be dealing with constant problems with old crappy ones.

Thanks for your input.

Regards, Tom

We used a gas golf cart for several years. Annual maintenance cost was around $600 for drive train repairs. At our location, the grass and dust was really hard on the air-cooled engine. A larger, richer club started using John Deere Gators, which at the time were around $6000 new. They did point out that after a few years of use of three of them, they weren't putting $600/year into maintenance. So the capital cost was a bit of a show stopper for us. We did buy a Suzuki Samurai for $1500 which had a lot of towed miles, but not so many running miles. It's been serving us pretty well for at least 15 years now, with occasional maintenance issues, perhaps even longer. We use it for towing gliders, retrieving winch ropes, and general transport between the launch point and hangar. We should have bought a second one once we figured we had a winner. Now they go for $4500-$14000, with project examples for about $2000-$3000.

Frank Whiteley