When he built a sweet-colored stripped-down car mounted on four large wheels to surf the California beach sand in 1963, Bruce Meyers could hardly imagine that his “buggy” would become the iconic car of the summer.
Meyers, who first named his invention Meyers Manx, died at his home in San Diego earlier this month after building thousands of light fiberglass cars that had enough space in the back just for a surfboard and a beer.
Meyers, a commercial artist, lifeguard and passionate surfer, 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 buggies he initially built just for himself and his friends, after watching surfers race across California sand dunes in cars dismantled in the early 1960s.
“He had a life that no one else lived,” said his wife Winnie Meyers in an interview with the AP. He was still driving his original buggy, called Old Red.
“All I wanted to do was surf in Baja when I built the drug,” he said in an interview in 2001, adding that the first vehicles were built without a chassis, which made them lighter, but it was illegal to drive on public highways. Later models included chassis, and Meyers sold kits that allowed amateurs to build them for about $ 1000.
Sales soared when Meyers and his friends entered the Old Red in a 1,600-kilometer Mexican street race in 1967. Meyers’ buggy won in record time and orders skyrocketed.
A year later, Elvis Presley drove a buggy in the opening scenes of the movie “Live a Little, Love a Little”.
His company built more than 6,000 Meyers Manx dune buggies before registering the project. The Historic Vehicle Association called the dune buggy the most copied in history, with more than 250,000 versions.
Born in Los Angeles, he dropped out of high school, served in the Merchant Navy after the war and attended the Chouinard Art Institute, now California Institute of the Arts.
In 1976, Road and Track magazine called the buggy “a genuine sculpture, a work of art”.
