Pedal Cars

Madge Bumstead

Madge Bumstead

Well-known member
Did everyone here grow up with a pedal car?

We had two in our house, and pretty much everyone kid in the neighbourhood had on, too, and just like a car show, we'd all hop in our pedal cars and drive around the block over and over again all day long.

I remember one boy up the street having what was by all accounts a home-made pedal car. It was large, all metal, and resembled a Model-T, how he loved to ride everyone else's pedal cars, and how we all loved to get into his and pedal it!

Such simple times where quite literally nothing was battery powered, yet us kids enjoyed endless fun.
 
Madge Bumstead said:
Did everyone here grow up with a pedal car?

We had two in our house, and pretty much everyone kid in the neighbourhood had on, too, and just like a car show, we'd all hop in our pedal cars and drive around the block over and over again all day long.

I remember one boy up the street having what was by all accounts a home-made pedal car. It was large, all metal, and resembled a Model-T, how he loved to ride everyone else's pedal cars, and how we all loved to get into his and pedal it!

Such simple times where quite literally nothing was battery powered, yet us kids enjoyed endless fun.
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I think the only pedal ride we had was a tricycle or a bike with training wheels, but I had a donkey and neighbors with horses I'd sneak over fence and ride.
Lots of hill's where we lived in north Georgia, not much peddling going on.:)
 
Probably somewhere that there was a lot of water... 😁

I didn't have a pedal car but in shop class at school I took a carcass of an old gas powered go-cart and using parts from a wrecked 1955 Ford Fairlane I made an electric go-cart. It wasn't very efficient. It would take almost all day to charge the battery and it would be dead in about an hour. Thinking back on that now I have to laugh. My shop teacher said electric cars would never happen. And it only took about 40 or 50 years for technology to say "Oh, yeah? How do you like me now?"
 
Axel Slingerland said:
Probably somewhere that there was a lot of water... 😁

I didn't have a pedal car but in shop class at school I took a carcass of an old gas powered go-cart and using parts from a wrecked 1955 Ford Fairlane I made an electric go-cart. It wasn't very efficient. It would take almost all day to charge the battery and it would be dead in about an hour. Thinking back on that now I have to laugh. My shop teacher said electric cars would never happen. And it only took about 40 or 50 years for technology to say "Oh, yeah? How do you like me now?"
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It seems like that is a part of our history we were not taught in school, @Axel Slingerland . I now know that we had electric vehicles almost as early as we had gas powered vehicles, and the early Fords could run on several different types of fuel, in case one type was not available. They actually ran very efficiently on alcohol, and this was one of the reasons that we had prohibition.
Rockefeller had oil and he wanted cars to run on gasoline, which people had to buy, instead of alcohol, which they could make themselves. So, he funded the prohibition movement to stop people from making their own alcohol.
None of this was in my history books at school.
 
I actually wanted a pedal car when I was a kid. There was maybe 1-2 kids in the whole neighborhood that had such a wonderful thing; but my mom would not buy me one, although she did get me a tricycle. She probably thought i would ride it in the street and get hit by a car, which IS a possibility, I have to admit. There was not anyplace else to ride/drive one, that is for sure. I don’t think any of the kids that had one let me even try it.
Eventually, my mom bought me a pony, which was the joy of my life, and much better than any pedal car would have been.
 
Axel Slingerland said:
My shop teacher said electric cars would never happen.
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Electric cars appeared decades before gas-powered cars, in the 1820s and 1830s, decades before practical gasoline cars emerged in the 1880s and 1890s. Electric cars predate gas cars by about 50 years. Early electric cars were experimental, but functional electric cars were available long before internal combustion engine automobiles.
 
I know... And what is more ironic (or perhaps a better word might be Moronic) is that I knew that when I was 10 years old (in 1966) and my Industrial Arts (aka "Shop Class") teacher apparently did not. That was one of the many things I learned from hanging around with my Dad. When I was 10 I thought he was a genius. He always had a correct answer for any question I could dream up.

le-jamais-contente-michelin1-03-1530039899.jpg

1899 Electric Car
 
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I never had a pedal car, per se, but I did have a contraption that was a combination of a push cart and a pedal wagon. I remember it vividly but I don't have a picture of it.

The cool part of it was that there were two small horses (maybe 18" to 24" high) attached to the front that were made of real horsehair with manes and tails and everything. When the cart was pushed from behind (there was a handle where an adult could push it like a stroller) or peddled by me, the horses would move up and down. There were reins that could be held by me.

I don't know where my grandparents got that thing, but as the first grandchild on both sides for a long time, there was a real competition to see who could provide the best things.

I sure hope I showed gratitude. Probably not, though.
 
Axel Slingerland said:
That is all part of why I say that the government only tells us what they want us to hear. Look what happened to Nikola Tesla's work after he died. It was like "Poof" and quite a bit of it just disappeared. He invented some really great stuff, and some of his missing stuff was found...

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I read about Teslas inventions and life, although I forgot most of it along with lots of other things.
 
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