Bruce Meyers, who used his skills as a boatbuilder to invent the first fiberglass dune wagon, which fueled the craze for off-roading in the late 1960s, and thrived until copiers flooded the market, was on February 19 in his house in Valley Center dead. , California. He was 94.
The cause was myelodysplastic syndrome, a blood cancer, says his wife, Winnifred (Baxter) Meyers.
The invention of mr. Meyers got a big promotional boost after he and a friend took the Meyers Manx (named after the cat with a tail stump) to a time record of nearly 1,000 kilometers from the rough roads of the Baja California Peninsula in 1967. The victory proved the viability of the vehicle and made an older beach boy the darling of field dedicators.
“Go back to the lifestyle I was living when I came across this thing,” he said in a 2017 interview with Motorward, a car website. “It’s not about higher education or education, but just having fun.”
Mr. Meyers was a surfer in Southern California with an art education that looked at four-wheel-drive Jeeps struggling for traction on sand dunes in the late 1950s and early 60s.
But he sees better expressions of off-road freedom in custom Volkswagen Beetles, which were more efficient at navigating dunes because their engine weight was behind. At the time, enthusiasts were adjusting the Beetles by cutting off the corpse to make it even lighter and adding wide bands.
Something about the vehicles Mr. Meyers recalls his childhood.
“All those characters – Donald Duck, Mickey Mouse – all drove tiny little cars with big fat tires,” he told The National, a newspaper in Abu Dhabi, in 2012. “Perhaps my instinct when I made the dune wagon was guided by my memories.”
For 18 months, he worked in his small garage in Newport Beach to create the Meyers Manx. He removed the body of a Beetle, shortened the floor section, and then bolted to a one-piece fiberglass cap (with mudguards, sides, and a front cutting area) that was malleable and lightweight, but sturdy.
He completed the Beetle-turned-Manx in 1964, which made it light and fast, with a shorter turning radius and greater traction than the dune buggies that preceded his. He calls his creation Old Red for his painting.
He started selling kits with which others could convert their beetles. But sales rose until 1967 when he and a friend, an engineer, Ted Mangels, drove the Meyers Manx to Tijuana in just 34 hours and 45 minutes from La Paz, Mexico. It broke the previous record, which was. held by two motorcyclists, about five hours.
A cover story in Road & Track, describing the wild Baja adventure, has started orders for the kits. But the question ultimately raised the ability of Mr. Meyers’ company to manufacture the kits was overwhelming – he insisted he was not a businessman – and opponents knocked out his design.
Mr. Meyers has shown more than 5,000 sets, but it is estimated that at least 20 times as many pacifiers are produced by Meyers Manxes. He lost a legal battle against a copy manufacturer to uphold his patent on a ‘sand vehicle’. In 1971 he closed down BF Meyers & Company.
“It took ten years before I could hear the words ‘dune buggy’ and not get angry,” he told Car and Driver in 2006.
And almost three decades before he returned to the business.
Bruce Franklin Meyers was born on March 12, 1926 in Los Angeles. His father, John, helped set up car dealerships for Henry Ford. His mother, Peggy, was a plug for the song.
Mr. Meyers left high school to join the Merchant Navy and volunteered for the Navy during World War II. He was on board the aircraft carrier Bunker Hill when it was attacked by two Japanese kamikaze aircraft near Okinawa on May 11, 1945. He remembers jumping into the water when the burning carrier began to sink; he gave a sailor his life jacket and helped a pilot until hours later they were rescued by a destroyer.
346 sailors and pilots died in the massacre, 264 were wounded and 43 were missing.
“I came back with a skeleton crew for almost a month and got the dead men out of the ship,” he said. Meyers told The National.
After the war, he returned to the trading sea and spent time in Tahiti. After that, he attended art schools in San Francisco and Los Angeles for six years, specializing in portraits.
He worked for several years at Jensen Marine on fiberglass sailboats – experience that helped him build his revolutionary dune wagon.
In the nearly thirty years since he closed his business, Mr. Meyers had various jobs, including with a boat manufacturer.
Then, in the late nineties, he fully returned to the dune-car world. With Winnie Meyers, his sixth wife, he started the Manx Club and thereafter produced a limited Meyers Manx kit identical to the original. He also developed several other kits, such as the Manx 2 + 2 and the Manx SR.
The couple sold the company to Trousdale Ventures, an investment firm, in November.
“He was 94,” Winnie Meyers said by telephone, “and I had to quit.”
In addition to his wife, Mr. Meyers Survived by a Daughter, Julie Meyers; five grandchildren; and a brother, Richard. Another daughter, Georgia Meyers, and a son, Tim, have passed away in recent years.
In 2014, the Meyers Manx was the second major car, motorcycle, or truck (after the 1964 Shelby Cobra Daytona Coupe CSX2287) to be included in the National Historic Vehicle Register, an eight-year-old project examining the historical and cultural significance of American vehicles. has been set out. The register is a collaboration between the Historic Vehicle Association, an ownership group and the Department of Home Affairs.
In a wink to the ingenuity of mr. Meyers and its operations in the register, the register said that the Meyers Manx ‘is the inspiration for more than 250,000 similar cars manufactured by other companies and that it is therefore the most repeated car in history.’