Judith Davidoff
Jablonski: “I can’t afford a Tesla so I drive a cooler.”
As Adam Jablonski and a few friends stroll through Vilas Park, they take turns tooling around on a custom go-kart — a creation Jablonski fashioned out of a standard Coleman 48-quart cooler. Today, sadly, the cooler is devoid of ice and beer, but Jablonski can wall off the motor when he wants to bring along some brewskis.
“Eventually this will be glued in,” he says, pointing to the styrofoam divider in the interior of the go-kart that he has officially named Cooler Cart.
Jablonski, an engineer, pined for a go-kart while growing up in the suburbs of Milwaukee, but could never get one. “There was not enough space [to ride one] and not enough money [to build one],” he says on this sunny, September afternoon. “I couldn’t afford to buy one either.”
He’d get his fix when his dad would bring him to the Wisconsin Dells to drive go-karts. Now, he says, “I’m fulfilling my childhood dreams.”
Jablonski opted to build his go-kart with an electric motor in part so that the motor would fit neatly inside the cooler. Here are the specs: a 6 kilowatt brushless motor; speed controller rated for 300 amps; 48 volt, 750 watt-hour lithium-polymer battery pack.
“I can’t afford a Tesla so I drive a cooler. It’s very quiet — a little hum.”
Jablonski explains how it all works: “The speed controller acts as the brain of the whole system. My throttle button is linked to the controller which controls how much current is allowed into the motor which, as the name implies, controls the speed of the motor. The 300-amp rating means it can allow up to 300 amps from the battery into the motor. It also monitors motor speed, battery voltage, and motor temperature which I can then read on my phone using a Bluetooth connection.”
A brushless motor is a high-efficiency motor that is compact but can produce a lot of power, he adds. It’s most often used in electric drones and electric airplanes but “the one I have is just much, much larger.”
What if something goes wrong? The go-kart has “safety features in it which will cut power to the motor when I apply the brake and let me know if the motor is getting too hot,” says Jablonski, who built his go-kart at The Bodgery, a makerspace on the east side of Madison.
To mount the cooler on the steel frame, Jablonski drilled some holes partway through the cooler, then used drywall toggle bolts.
The go-kart has a range of three to four miles if, says Jablonski, “you are nice to it.” It can reach speeds of 35 mph. Even so, Jablonski doesn’t try to compete with cars on the street.
“I even try to stay off the paths,” says Jablonski, who usually packs the go-kart in the back of his Subaru for excursions. “I mostly ride in parking lots.” Grass is great too.” He recently brought it to a rural wedding where it was a big hit with guests.
Jablonski graduated from the Milwaukee School of Engineering in 2014 with a degree in architectural engineering. He moved to Seattle for two years to work for an HVAC contractor, returning to Wisconsin in 2016 with his girlfriend, who was starting a doctoral program at UW-Madison. He now works as an energy engineer at Tetra Tech.
He was inspired to build his Cooler Cart when, living downtown, he would observe tailgating parties for UW football games. “I saw people sitting on coolers and others pushing scooters around and dragging things all over the place,” he recalls. He says he is not the first to design a go-kart out of a cooler, but the electric version is a modern iteration. “They are quieter and not nearly as obnoxious as gas.”
1956: Arthur Ingels, veteran hot-rodder and a race car builder at Kurtis Craft, built the first go-kart with a surplus West Bend 2-cycle engine on a tubular chassis.
1957: Three Californians, Bill Rowles, Duffy Livingstone and Roy Desbrow, form the Go-Kart Manufacturing Company.
Go-Kart Manufacturing builds first go-kart track facility in Azusa, California.
1961: Classic book, The Complete Book of Karting, is published.
2002: Faye “Ladybug” Pierson, who first rode a go-kart in 1957 and co-founded K&P Manufacturing, comes out of retirement to compete in the first Karting Olympics in West Quincy, Missouri.
