Club Car’s colorful history dates to 1958 and a Dallas, Texas-based company named Landreath Machine, which produced some of the nation’s first golf cars. In 1962, an Augusta businessman named Bill Stevens purchased the four-year-old Texas company and moved it to Augusta, where he began operations with a handful of employees. The company’s first new model was a golf car dubbed the “Caroche,” the word for an elegant French carriage. But the name didn’t exactly roll off the tongue. Some people took to calling it the "car roach" or the “cockroach,” and the company wisely dropped the name.