Matt Prior: Bring back the beach buggy

It appears to be like like the original dune buggy is due a comeback.

A number of additional facts about foreseeable future versions have commenced to filter out of Meyers Manx, the enterprise launched in California by Bruce Meyers in 1964 and renowned for generating very simple, Volkswagen-based, glassfibre-shelled, open up-top off-roaders.

You could possibly know the Manx buggy finest from the 1968 film The Thomas Crown Affair but it competed in Baja rallies, way too, and spawned dozens of related buggies.

The fundamental principles were the similar: the Volkswagen Beetle’s floorplan and functioning equipment are mostly flat and as a result ripe for sticking a human body on major of them.

Working the display as a little something of a enthusiasm, Meyers was nonetheless functioning Meyers Manx in 2020 when, aged 94, he bought it to a business referred to as Trousdale Ventures. Even then he stayed on as an ambassador right up until his demise a calendar year afterwards.

Trousdale appointed Freeman Thomas as CEO. A native Californian automotive designer, he experienced used time with Volkswagen, Porsche, Daimler-Chrysler and Ford. On his CV is the notion that grew to become the new Volkswagen Beetle, the first Audi TT, a Jeep Willys concept and other amazing matters.

“I grew up on the beaches of Southern California. As I turned an automotive designer, the philosophy of Bruce Meyers turned a huge inspiration,” claimed Thomas at the time. He receives it, in other words and phrases.

You could nevertheless acquire a glassfibre shell and kits from Meyers Manx in 2020. You can not now, and providers cannot are living on T-shirt product sales alone (other than T-shirt providers, certainly), which is wherever a different of Trousdale’s organizations, Coreshell Technologies, arrives in.

Coreshell makes coatings for battery anodes and cathodes, the idea remaining to reduce batteries from corroding from within just to enhance both of those usable capability and the everyday living of the lithium ion cells that underpin present day electric vehicles.

Anyway, you can possibly see exactly where this is going: Coreshell technological innovation in a battery pack beneath a new Meyers Manx dune buggy.