Troubleshooting an electric UTV cart, anyone?

saje
Wed, 26 Mar 2025 13:37:53 +0000
In My Humble Opinion

Hoping one of you wise folk can help ~

I have an old electric American Sportworks Chuck Wagon, it’s an “offroad”-ish utility cart that I use for farm chores. I love it, but it’s getting tired and doing weird things.

I know the batteries are nearing their end (we’ve replaced them once already) and it’s got a reasonably new charger. And I don’t think my issues are battery related anyway.

My main issue now is it’s periodically losing or dropping power, but then it comes back and works fine. It definitely doesn’t like sub- 40 deg weather, but that may be a combination of elderly batteries and whatever else is going on. Today it was surging - very slow to start, then surging with normal power, then dropping back again. I can keep it going with feathering the accelerator, mostly.

A month or so ago something in the accelerator let go so that instead of having some resistance to the pedal it’s now really easy to press down. It still pops back when released but I noticed this morning that it’s getting slower to come back.

I also wonder if it might be something to do with the drive belt slipping, because it kind of fells like something it either slipping and then grabbing, or a contact somewhere is loose and getting intermittent connection.

Once or twice when it’s quit on me entirely I’ve gotten out and rocked it by hand, side to side or back and forth, and that temporarily fixes whatever it is.

Does this ring bells for anyone? This area has a few golf cart and motorsport places but they seem to only deal with common name brand service (EZ Go, Polaris, Club Car etc)

I don’t have the cash for a new (or even good used) one right now, and if I can fix it myself -or get my husband to- I’d be very happy!

5 posts - 3 participants