Article reprinted with permission of Automobile Magazine, November 1997.
As written by Seth Gussow.

This patent sketch from 1928 shows an early Lusse effort at the Auto-Skooter. The 1953 version (top) featured more car-like styling.

This year marks the seventieth anniversary of the classic American bumper car, the Lusse Auto-Skooter. To generations of sweaty ten-year-olds, the Auto-Skooter represented powered mobility in its simplest and most satisfying form. Here at last was a safe and sanctioned way to pay back pesky parents and playmates by ramming them repeatedly. And Auto-Skooters could take it. A 1940's ad proclaimed: "They [are] built to exacting LUSSE standards, which means built-in quality and stamina to spare."

But Lusse did not invent the bumper car, nor did it dominate the industry's early years. 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 1921 test by Scientific American called the Dodgem cars "highly unmanageable," explaining that "the steering is only relative." Nonetheless, the Stoehrers were on to something. 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.

This success attracted the attention of cousins Joseph C. and Robert J. (known as Ray) Lusse, who ran the Lusse Brothers machine shop in Philadelphia supplying roller coaster parts to Philadelphia Toboggan. Ray Lusse understood that not only did people want to bang into one another, they wanted to choose who it was they collided with. Even Dodgem admitted that with their cars, "until you have learned how, you go somewhere, but you don't go where you intend going."

By 1922, the Lusses filed the first of eleven patents they were to apply for in the next nine years in the process of perfecting the bumper car. Eventually they realized that no combination of friction clutches and steering brakes was going to solve the fundamental problem. Given the youth and inexperience of many of the operators, the car had to be able to be backed out of a crash by simply continuing to turn the steering wheel. In essence the car had to go from forward to reverse without going through neutral. As Ray Lusse wrote: "Such operation is of considerable importance in the event that the car is in contact with another car, a bumper rail, or other obstruction preventing a forward or side movement."

The solution they arrived at in 1928 was brilliant. The motor, instead of being positioned under the seat as it had been since the Dodgem, was mounted vertically in the front of the car. Power was transmitted through two couplings to a ring-and-pinion assembly that had a small wheel and tire keyed to each end of the output shaft, like the BMW Isetta. The whole final drive was mounted on bearings and could be aimed in any direction by turning the steering wheel. Pivoting the final drive in this manner introduced significant torque steer, but it was probably no worse than a turbocharged Dodge Omni from the mid-80's. The small spring strip designed to prevent wheels from going much beyond 90 degrees often got bent or lost, leading many preteens to discover that an Auto-Skooter could go backward as fast as it went forward.

By the 1930's Lusse had settled into a long period of prosperity that was only briefly interrupted by World War II. Postwar cars began to include some minor changes including headlights, fiberglass bodies, air-filled bumpers instead of rubber and, finally, safety harnesses. They retained 110-volt AC power long after the rest of the industry settled on 90-volt DC. Dodgem went out of business in the early 1970's, and the competition began to shift overseas, particularly to Italy. The three Italian brands, Soli, Barbieri, and Berratzon, used variations of the Lusse front-drive system. Most of them moved the motor to a position inside a somewhat larger front wheel. This eliminated both the torque effects and the 360-degree steering of the Lusse design.

In 1989 Ray Lusse, Jr., got in trouble with the IRS, but he lasted until 1994 when, in the words of an associate, "he spent all his money and died." Rights to the Auto-Skooter design were sold to Designs International in Dallas, and the remaining parts inventory was sold piecemeal by the Lusses' last landload in Montgomeryville, Pennsylvania. Majestic Manufacturing of New Waterford, Ohio, still makes both trailer-mounted and permanent rides, but the cars now all come from Italy.