Autonomous Golf Carts of the Future?

My friend and co-worker, Joel Sietsema, recently challenged me to rethink the trusty golf cart. Driving the golf cart is easily my favorite part about golfing, so I thought it deserved a bit of attention. Looking at the carts on the market many seemed primarily driven by cost. It must be a competitive business as courses need to get dozens of carts at a time. Yet this seemed to not align with the average golfer who spends a lot of dollars on his or her passion in greens fees, apparel, balls with magic in them, putters blessed by a shaman and super expensive dual cam twin turbo drivers.

Now layer in all of the amazing smart phone based digital tools that help golfers pick their club and refine their stroke based on GPS coordinates on the course and real time weather conditions and you get an image of the golfer as a tech savvy gadget hound who likes to drop some coin.  There has to be room to elevate the cart to a more premium part the experience.

As I played with the idea of a redesign, I thought about how much I stink at golf. I'm always dropping mulligans.  So I added an easy to reach bin for balls on the exterior of the cart. Loading and unloading the bags always seems more troublesome than it should be, so I added a swing down bar system to hold them in place like you would find on a roller coaster. A storage bin up front for all the random stuff that I seem to be holding that gets in my way. Music on the course seems like an essential now and an integrated bluetooth sound system would be a nice plus. The pièce de résistance of course is a cupholder up on the hood of the vehicle... got to get to that beverage. 

Beyond all of these simple physical upgrades I started to think about that tech side of the modern golfer. Some driving ranges are starting to integrate ball distance tracking. I'm not sure if they use RFID or purely use sensors on the range, but imagine if a similar technology could be implemented on a full course. With ball position data the cart could have an auto drive function where the user hops in after the shot, the course relays the position and the cart autonomously drives to the ball's new location.

It would behave essentially like a hunting dog pointing the user to that elusive ball. Could the cart go from simple utility to an essential part of your game? If your swing is like mine and you spend more time walking in the woods than you do on the faraway, this could be your new best friend.