Why We Don't Run Rear-Facing Third-Row Seating
Six-passenger "4+2" golf carts and LSVs are common on the rental market — a standard four-seat cart with a rear-facing bench bolted onto the back for two more riders. It's an easy way for an operator to add capacity to an existing chassis. It's also a seating position with real, documented injury risk that doesn't get explained to the people sitting in it.
What the research actually shows
Passenger ejection is the dominant mechanism of injury in golf cart crashes: a 2023 review of adult golf cart injuries in Traffic Injury Prevention found 82% of patients had been ejected, and a 2024 series of golf cart–related neurosurgical injuries put ejection as the primary mechanism in 84% of cases. Rear-facing bench seats are specifically implicated. A peer-reviewed study in Accident Analysis & Prevention examining rear-facing golf cart passenger ejection found that current passive restraints are not adequate to prevent ejection of rear-facing passengers during rapid forward or lateral acceleration — the exact motion a hard stop or a sharp turn produces. The same research found that the hip restraint on a typical rear-facing bench sits around 5 inches above the seat, while an effective restraint for that seating position needs to be roughly 13 inches to actually contain a passenger through a sharp turn.
The practical version of that finding: a rear-facing passenger has nothing to brace against, no forward view of what's coming, and a restraint bar that sits too low to do its job in exactly the scenario — a sudden stop or swerve — where it matters most. Ejection injuries from this seating position include traumatic brain injury (even at low speed), skull and facial fractures, and spinal injury. Children are disproportionately represented in golf cart ejection injuries generally, which matters directly for a rear-facing row that's often marketed as "extra seats for the kids."
Why this matters for a rental decision, specifically
A cart owner who bought a 4+2 configuration made a capacity decision. A renter climbing into the back-facing row of a rental cart usually has no idea the seating position carries meaningfully different risk than the forward-facing seats in front of it — it looks like more room for the group, not a different safety profile.
Where JellyCarts stands on this
JellyCarts runs forward-facing, belted seating for every passenger, every seat. Not because six-passenger capacity isn't tempting from a revenue standpoint — it's a real, ongoing conversation in this industry, including internally — but because the research on rear-facing bench seats is specific enough, and the injury pattern serious enough, that we're not willing to put a family's kids in that seating position to add two more spots to a cart. If that changes industry-wide restraint design in the future, we'll revisit it. Until then, every seat on a JellyCart faces forward.
What to ask before you rent a 6-passenger cart anywhere
If a rental fleet — ours or anyone else's — offers a 4+2 configuration, it's a fair question to ask directly: is the rear row forward-facing or rear-facing, and what restraint does it actually have. You're entitled to know what seating position your kids are riding in before you climb in, not after.
Sources
Schau K, Masory O. “Ejection of a rear facing, golf cart passenger.” Accident Analysis & Prevention 2013;59:574–579. doi:10.1016/j.aap.2013.07.025 — the source of the 5-inch and 13-inch restraint figures.
Gibson K, Stevens TJ, Krause MA. “Adult golf cart injuries: A rising hazard off the course.” Traffic Injury Prevention 2023;24:352–355. doi:10.1080/15389588.2023.2188986
Torres-Urquia A, De Jesus O. “Golf cart-related neurosurgical injuries.” Surgical Neurology International 2024;15:222. doi:10.25259/sni_185_2024