Hummers and escalades were once the must-have vehicle for well-to-do suburbanites, but in the past couple years a more compact, yet no less extravagant, four-wheeler has rolled into North Texas cul-de-sacs: custom golf carts.
“Every cart we get, we tear it all the way down to the frame, then build it back up with all-new suspension, new body, new seats, new plastics, everything,” says Robert Wallach of Excessive Carts. After two decades working in vehicle maintenance in the Air Force and a couple years with a competing golf cart company, Wallach opened his own Prosper workshop in January. Already he’s had to add more space and hire two employees. In June, he was working on customizing 12 Club Cars at once. In other words, business is revving up. Most of Wallach’s clients live in the suburbs north of Dallas—Frisco, Plano, McKinney, Prosper.
Ben Rogers of 105.3 The Fan’s Ben and Skin Show tweeted a picture of his own Excessive Cart build in May. The orange and black cart has a 6-inch lift, illuminated marine speakers, a built-in cooler, LED lighting, plus a light bar on the front brush guard. All of this, Rogers says, costs somewhere “north of $5,000 and south of $10,000.”
These tricked-out carts are used more for leisure and socializing—taking kids to the pool, buzzing over to the neighbor’s for dinner—than for the actual sport of golf. “I hate golf,” Rogers says. “If golf were here right now, I’d punch it in the face. You will never find a golf club on my golf cart.”
When he and his wife were planning their new home in Celina’s Light Farms, they were so enthusiastic about joining the neighborhood’s significant cart population that they added to their blueprints a small garage solely for their cart.
Rogers admits there’s some competition among cart owners (“I say no, but absolutely there is.”) and recently took his cart back to Wallach for upgrades. The boss of his neighborhood: Daniel Durbin, a sales manager at Crest Cadillac, who paid about $12,000 for Wallach to custom-build a 6-seater stretch cart.
“I’m sure, as a guy, there is some competition,” Durbin says. “I mean mine’s decked out with every option on it. But I’m just in the car business, and I want the coolest cart, period.”
