Bruce Meyers, inventor of the dune buggy, died at 94

When he built a stripped-down, candy-colored car mounted on four big wheels to ride the sands of California beaches in 1963, Bruce Meyers hardly imagined his “dune buggy” would become the iconic car of the summer.

Meyers, who first dubbed his invention the Meyers Manx, died at his San Diego home earlier this month after building thousands of lightweight fiberglass cars that only had enough room to spare. back for a surfboard and a beer.

Meyers, an avid commercial artist, lifeguard and surfer, has also designed boats and surfboards. He built a trading post in Tahiti and survived a Japanese attack on his Navy aircraft carrier during World War II, in which 400 of his fellow sailors were killed.

But Meyers, who was 94 when he died, was best known for the dune buggies he first built just for himself and his friends, after seeing surfers running through the sand dunes of California in cars stripped down in the early 1960s.

“He had a life that no one else has ever lived,” his wife Winnie Meyers said in an interview with the AP. He still drove his original buggy, named Old Red.

“All I wanted to do was go surfing in Baja when I built the dang thing,” he said in an interview in 2001, adding that the first vehicles were built without a chassis, which made them lighter, but it was forbidden to drive on public roads. Later models included chassis and Meyers sold kits that allowed hobbyists to build them for around $ 1,000.

Sales exploded when Meyers and his friends competed with Old Red in a 1,000 mile Mexican road race in 1967. Meyers’ dune buggy won in record time and orders exploded.

A year later, Elvis Presley drove a dune buggy in the opening scenes of the movie “Live a Little, Love a Little”.

His company built more than 6,000 Meyers Manx buggies before making it the brand. The Historic Vehicle Association has called the dune buggy the most copied in history, with over 250,000 versions.

Born in Los Angeles, he was a high school dropout, who served in the Merchant Marines after the war and attended the Chouinard Art Institute, now the California Institute of the Arts.

In 1976, Road and Track Magazine called the dune buggy “a real sculpture, a work of art”.