Club Car: Shaping Tomorrow’s Mobility – Where Will It Take Us?

Club Car boasts a 60+ year history of industry-leading innovation and design, initially focused on golf cars and then expanding to commercial utility vehicles and personal-use transportation. “Over time, we also began to see the opportunity for these small-wheeled vehicles, and specifically a variation of the fleet golf car, to be used in neighbourhoods for consumer vehicles. People use them for driving around the neighbourhood. It's a fun, fast, easy way to get around your neighbourhood, whether you're going to the neighbourhood pool or to potentially a neighbourhood country club”.

The CRU is described as a “Neighbourhood Electric Vehicle”, designed for consumers seeking a more “fun & sustainable option” for travelling short trips. ” It is an open vehicle. When you sit in it, it’s got a very innovative seating setup. The front seats can allow you to face forward or when you're stopped and you want to hang out with the rest of the people you're driving with, they can be flipped around and face forward so that everybody can be sitting and talking around a table that we have in the vehicle. The back of the vehicle is configured in what we call a lounge system. It's very much like a pontoon boat. You would, uh, see a pontoon boat where you could sit around in a semi-circular fashion. A lot of times, people will hang out in the vehicle, have lunch, and just socialize. The Club Car CRU was spelled C R U. People ask us a lot. What does that mean? Is it an acronym? No, It's just a cool name for a vehicle that's different”.

“From an innovation perspective, Club Car is always looking to be more efficient and to get the best possible product out to our customers. We do offer both gas and diesel vehicles, but the large majority of what we manufacture, and it's been this way for decades, is electric vehicles. We're approximately 70 percent electric and we have been, as I mentioned, for decades. Efficiency is very important to us and very important to our customers. We're constantly trying to make sure that the vehicle costs you less to maintain.

Club Car is a proud industry leader in electrification and sustainability and is at the forefront of environmentally responsible Zero Emission Vehicle technologies. With the question of what type of vehicle is next for Club Car, the answer is that the future is here! “The future is now. The Club Car Urban is just getting released. It is designed for last mile delivery. It's designed to replace large combustion engine vehicles with an electric vehicle for use in high density urban population areas. From a Club Car perspective, the future is now. We are specifically targeting on, on re replacing combustion engines on short duration trips with our small wheel electric vehicles”.

Club Car is investing in the growth that comes from customers interest in new and enhanced products, such as the CRU. But with that comes the need for innovative ways to address that growing demand quickly and efficiently. And this is where PTC's Creo Simulation Live plays a hand. Creo Simulation Live is an integration of some new technology developed by our partners at Ansys that allows design engineers to gain insights into the performance of their designs as they develop their design. If you're thinking about implementing simulation into your design process, you're looking for exactly what Club Car says in this great case study. They're getting the market faster with higher quality products.

This groundbreaking technology performs structural, thermal, and modal analysis and fluid flow simulation on 3D CAD designs in seconds. No more back and forth, no separate environments. Created especially for design engineers, the analysis updates dynamically in real time as you edit, create new features, or change properties.

Thanks to Brian for his perception, Dan Dykstra for giving us a ride around in the CRU and Tristan for letting us take a sneak behind the curtains of Club Car.

Please rate, review, and subscribe to our bi-weekly Third Angle episodes wherever you listen to your podcasts and follow PTC on LinkedIn and X for future episodes.

This is an 18Sixty production for PTC. Executive producer is Jacqui Cook. Sound design and editing by Rema Mukena and Clarissa Maycock. Location recording by Tristan McNeil. And music by Rowan Bishop.