Weird vehicles of Avalon, California
Avalon, the major town on Catalina Island, has unique local regulations which make it very difficult for private citizens to own cars on the island. Full size cars require a strictly-proven commercial purpose. As a result, the vehicle culture of the island is completely unique.
Avalon is crushed into a very narrow valley. The built area is extremely dense, with very little land left over for parking lots, garages, full-width streets, etc. I was able to find their vehicle codes online here. The lack of space for cars is the first thing they address.
So people there use golf carts, kei trucks, mopeds, scooters, ebikes, and other microcars and two-wheeled vehicles instead. While a full size bus and many full size cars operated by the Santa Catalina Island Company are routinely visible in the street, the vast majority of road traffic consists of pedestrians, golf carts, bikes, and other vehicles which are capable of less than 20 MPH.
I'm no Car Expert - in fact, this is one of the topics which I've sought to eliminate from my peacefulness mind zone, to the point where I cannot accurately recognize the make and model of many vehicles at all. But I loved being in a town where most of the cars were shorter than me.
So here's some of the golf carts and microcars we saw! I've tried to identify all of them, but it was honestly pretty hard. Some of them were clearly international imports. And many were old enough that they were missing their make and model badges. If I've screwed up... forgive me!
Cute Shit
Yamaha Sun Classic
I haven't been able to find a website that catalogues golf carts generally, but this is apparently a Yamaha Sun Classic, manufactured in the late 80s and early 90s. This golf cart might be as old as I am.
I put it first because it was my favorite golf cart out of any on the island. Its so fucking space age! It looks like a lemon wedge! This is something I expect the Jetsons to drive. Great stuff.
Suzuki Samurai
I saw at least 3 of these in Avalon, but this one was the cleanest and freshest of the bunch. These are called the Suzuki Jimny outside the US, and they're fucking adorable.
They've been in production since the 1970s. I have no idea which year model this is.
Isuzu Elf / NQR model garbage compactor truck
This garbage truck was parked across from the building containing the sherriff's office, the courthouse, and the library. Around the corner was the city bus's parking spot. It seems like this particular intersection was home to a lot of vehicles which filled an important municipal role on the island.
It's an Isuzu Elf. Not a kei truck, but certainly much smaller than most garbage trucks on the mainland. Here's a picture with my husband next to it for scale:
Anyway, if you want to buy one, here's where you submit an inquiry to get a new one delivered to you in 20 days. Nice.
GEM EM 1400 LSV
Global Electric Motorcars makes "Neighborhood Electric Vehicles" and golf-carty type things. This is an electric utility vehicle meant as a heavy-duty load carrier. It looks pretty damn similar to a certain heavy-duty Yamaha golf cart a lot of other people were using around the city. That Yamaha cart can carry only 300 pounds... this one can carry 1400 pounds of cargo!!
I saw a couple electric golf carts, plus this thing, and plenty of ebikes... but there are not a lot of larger electric vehicles in the city. Apparently the power grid can't handle too many of them.
Piaggio Porter??
I am pretty sure this is a Piaggio Porter. Most of the badges had fallen off, but it says "Porter" on the side and it looks pretty close to one of the Piaggio Porter facelifts I saw on Wikipedia. It also says "Fleet" on it, so maybe it was once a fleet vehicle?? I don't know. Do they usually print "fleet" on fleet vehicles??? It's cute as hell. Here's my husband posing with it:
Regular Ass Golf Carts
Even some of the most regular golf carts on Catalina were highly customized or modified. I saw golf carts that looked as if they'd had special offroad tires fitted, golf carts with weird seat configurations or cargo racks, and even golf carts with unique livery. There were several different golf cars with the livery of specific restaurants or companies visible. (Unfortunately, I did not get good pictures of them!)
EZ-GO
Most of the people on the island seem to be using EZ-GO carts. They're one of the major golf cart brands in the US. They have a bunch of highly similar models available... a lot of people on Catalina were using the 4 and 6-seater models.
Yamaha - regular carts
There were a ton of regular old Yamaha golf carts on the island as well. 2, 4, and 6-seater models were easy to find all over the place. I included this one here because I like how it's got a child seat!
Yamaha - UMAX
We kept telling each other, "Look! There's the roided-out golf cart!"
There were several of these weird like, high-impact golf carts in the city. This one is the passenger model, the Rally, but you can buy one with a tiny little truck bed. Those are funny because they look exactly like the electric NEV from GEM above, but they can only carry 300 pounds of cargo. They're clearly intended for facilities work--the page advertising the model with a cargo bed on the Yamaha website demonstrates one being used to haul chairs to a wedding venue. Seems like a good choice for people on the island who need to haul shit around, but not 1400 lbs of shit?
Cars I haven't been able to identify
Some of them just escaped me. Here's the ones I couldn't figure out:
Changan who-knows-what
This tiny van is fucking adorable. I have spent the last few days trying to figure out WHICH Changan microcar this is, and I have no fucking idea. "Changan f350" is a doomed search term, thanks to Ford SEO, so I have no idea if that is was it was called in China, or if this is a re-badged model with a different local name. Besides, most of the cars Changan is getting English-language press for these days are full-sized passenger vehicles. I just haven't been able to match this to any of the Changan microvan models I'm finding online.
This is definitely the cutest car I saw on the island. So, so profoundly adorable. And it looks practical as hell! This one was set up with a row of passenger seats in the back, but the spacing between the front and back seats was long enough that the central area of the van looked very convenient for cargo storage.
This random tuktuk
We found one tuktuk on the island! It's an unassuming, grey, fully-enclosed vehicle. We caught our picture of it at night, and my phone was struggling with the low light. No idea what make or model it might be. It seems to have had some body repairs done? Extremely cute!