A very fun
game found
widespread at
amusement parks or
annual harvest fairs. Bumper cars have been around for over
seventy years. The
classic model we have in mind when we
think about these
vehicles originated as the
Lusse Auto-Skooter.
The Auto-Skooter was an outgrowth of the Dodgem, a rear-steering monstrosity invented seven years earlier by Max and Harold Stoehrer of Methuen, Massachusetts.
...
A full-page ad in Billboard called it "the repeater of all repeating rides... the Rolls-Royce of amusement devices. It brings them and it holds them." People liked smacking into one another, and for several years Stoehrer and Pratt sold every one they could make.
- Seth Gussow
excerpt from Automobile Magazine, Nov 1997