Fore! Who remembers the crazy Volvo Golf Cart?

Golf carts are dangerous things. According to an American law firm, the top ten cases of golf cart accidents include racing or other horseplay, hanging a leg outside a golf cart and reversing downhill. And you thought the biggest risk on a golf course was getting hit by a wayward tee shot. Whatever a tee shot is.

So if you’re going to drive a golf cart, you ought to make sure it’s the safest golf cart in the world, right? So who better than Volvo to design and build your fairway transportation?

According to the sports pages, there’s a pitch and putt championship taking place at St Andrews this week, which doesn’t interest PetrolBlog in the slightest. But it did remind us of the Volvo Golf Cart of 2009, which just happened to be Volvo’s first electric car. You’ll need to remember that in case the question comes up at your next pub quiz.

In truth, we’re not sure about the safety credentials, as Volvo made no reference to WHIPS, SIPS, CRISPS or DIPS in the sales literature, but it’s got a Volvo badge, so it must be safer than the average golf cart. And it probably features world-first safety tech, including a Golfer Detection System and Active Clubhouse Braking.

It also looks a little bit like a C70, which is a good thing.

According to Volvo, the Golf Cart has a range of 37 miles from an overnight charge and has a top speed of a frankly terrifying 10mph. It even features a tow-hook, making it possible to tow a small trailer. What’s not to like about this thing?

It weighs 220kg, features three 12v batteries and can carry up to 125kg in weight. A reversing alarm and auto-brake upon release of the accelerator combine to help the fun-size C70 achieve a maximum five-star EuroGOLFCAP safety rating. At launch, the Volvo Golf Cart was priced around £4,000 and was probably a hard sell, because even the chap in this video struggled to be enthusiastic about it.

For the same amount of cash you can pick up an eight-year-old full-size C70, but don’t expect to be allowed to enter the fairway in one of those. That said, it will probably do a great deal more for your street-cred. Oh, and you can carry passengers in a real C70, which isn’t something you can do in the Volvo Golf Cart.

As you can see, the Volvo Golf Cart is a strict single-seater, so you can’t take your mates along for the ride. Volvo gets around this potential barrier to sales by claiming it makes the cart much lighter than its competitors. Nice try, Volvo. Also, shouldn’t a golf cart have some kind of roof, you know, to keep the golfer(s) dry?

All of that can’t disguise the fact that this is probably PetrolBlog’s favourite golf cart. It could even tempt us into a round of golf. Does anyone have any golf bats they can lend us?