Electric Golf Cart

Overview

An electric golf cart is a small, quiet, low-speed vehicle built first for moving players and bags around a course and, increasingly, for short trips inside resorts, campuses, and gated communities. It carries two to four people on bench seats under a canopy and runs on battery power, so it produces no exhaust and little noise, important on a course and in pedestrian areas. The whole machine is deliberately simple: a steel frame, a single drive motor, one forward gear, and a few large batteries. That simplicity makes it cheap to run and easy to maintain, and it is why the basic layout has barely changed in decades even as the batteries and controllers have modernized. Speed is capped low by design and often by regulation, which lets the cart use light brakes and skip the safety equipment a road vehicle needs.

How it works

Energy is stored in the Battery Pack, a series string of deep-cycle batteries that make up a 48 V supply; an onboard Onboard Charger refills them from a wall outlet. When the driver presses the pedal, the Motor Controller meters current from the pack to the Traction Motor, a DC traction motor, using a microcontroller and a bank of power switches plus contactors for forward and reverse.

The motor drives the Transaxle, a single-speed reduction with an integral Open Differential and Helical Gear Pair that turns the rear wheels. Each corner rides on a simple Suspension Corner with a Coil Spring or leaf spring, and the driver steers through a rack-and-pinion steering. Cable-operated drum brakes slow the cart, and a small lighting set provides head and tail lights.