Trojan Battery Brand Guidelines: A 1925 Los Angeles Maker Named for USC and the Golf Cart

A Los Angeles battery firm named for a football team.

Trojan Battery Company was founded in 1925 in the Los Angeles area by George Godber and his brother-in-law Carl Speer. The Los Angeles Times reported in 2010 that Godber had worked on batteries in Navy submarines during the First World War, and that Speer had played on the first football team of the University of Southern California, which is where the name came from: USC’s teams are the Trojans. English Wikipedia says the Trojan name and logo were inspired by the team, and the company itself says its founders were inspired by the early days of USC football.

The firm started with automobile batteries and later moved into batteries for commercial trucks, the Times said. The turn that defined it came in 1952, when Trojan worked with the Autoette Electric Car Company of Long Beach on a golf cart that was at first meant for physically challenged players. Trojan says that work produced the first golf cart battery, and it has built its story around deep-cycle batteries ever since: batteries that, in the Times’s description, give out energy in a steady stream over relatively long periods.

In the 1960s and 1970s the company moved to Santa Fe Springs, in southern California, which is still its headquarters, and widened its range to floor machines, boats and construction and industrial equipment, according to English Wikipedia, which adds that a technology centre opened at Santa Fe Springs in 1992 and a renewable-energy division in 2009. Manufacturing also grew in Georgia: the Times in 2010 listed factories in Santa Fe Springs and at Lithonia, outside Atlanta, and Sandersville, near Macon.

From family firm to Stryten Energy.

For most of its history Trojan was a family business. The Los Angeles Times described it in 2010 as family-owned and operated for 85 years, with George Godber’s grandson then running its renewable-energy business. The paper reported on the company’s push into solar power systems in remote areas, with customers in Bangladesh, India and Pakistan, and in Africa and South America, work that had earned it merit certificates from the US Commerce Department’s Commercial Service.

Ownership then changed three times in just over a decade. The Godber family owned the company until 2013, when the investment firm Charlesbank Capital Partners bought a majority share, Batteries International reported. In November 2018 Trojan announced that it would be sold to C&D Technologies, a Pennsylvania maker of reserve-power batteries for telecommunications, UPS and similar uses, which had itself been bought by the private equity firm KPS Capital Partners in 2017. Trojan’s chief executive said at the time that the two businesses would keep separate brand identities for separate product lines.

The latest change came in 2026. On 1 October 2026 Stryten Energy announced that it had completed its acquisition of C&D Technologies and Trojan Battery Company, Battery-Tech Network reported the next day. The combined business operates under the Stryten Energy name, keeps the C&D Technologies and Trojan Battery product brands, and has 18 manufacturing and component sites in the United States, Mexico and China.

Trojan makes flooded lead-acid, AGM and lithium-ion deep-cycle batteries for golf carts, low-speed vehicles, aerial work platforms, floor machines, boats and solar storage, according to the company and English Wikipedia. Its AES AGM range arrived in 2023, and the OnePack, a single 48-volt lithium battery for golf carts and low-speed vehicles, in 2024. The company says its three plants, in Santa Fe Springs and at Sandersville and Stonecrest in Georgia, are certified to ISO 9001:2015.

Cells, trays and racks.

Industrial batteries are rarely seen by the people who depend on them. They sit under the seat of a forklift truck, in a locked room behind a telephone exchange or in the cabinets that keep a data centre running when the mains fail, so the makers in this guide have to show their products in places most readers will never visit.

Their pictures tend to come from a small set of scenes. There are rows of cells on a factory floor, forklift batteries packed into steel trays, standby racks lined up in data centres and telecom rooms, and cutaway diagrams that open a cell to show its plates, separators and chemistry. Newer lithium makers add architects’ renderings of large cell factories, and the oldest firms reach back to photographs of early lead and nickel works and to the railway, telephone and submarine customers they first supplied.

The trade is also a story of ownership. Many of these names have passed through electrical groups, private equity funds, stock markets and energy companies, and several survive mainly as brands inside larger groups. Regulators have looked at the trade too: in 2017 Germany’s competition authority fined two makers of industrial batteries over a shared lead surcharge, and a French heritage inventory has recorded one maker’s Bordeaux factory buildings as industrial architecture.

This guide sets out what can be checked about each brand — who founded it, who owns it, where it says its batteries are made and which product names it uses — and marks clearly what rests only on the company’s own word. The colours and typefaces shown are our own interpretation, not official brand assets.

A college name and a colour word.

Trojan’s name is its most direct link to its origins. It comes from a football team rather than from anything to do with batteries, and the company still tells that story itself: its short film on its first hundred years, from 1925 to 2025, begins with founders inspired by the early days of USC football.

The company also gives its idea of quality a colour. Its website describes “The Maroon Standard” as the standard to which Trojan products are built, one it says has set the pace since the first electric golf cart was switched on. The maroon in our palette is our own interpretation of that word, not a brand value.

Its other recurring theme is the golf course. Trojan dates its place in deep-cycle batteries to the Autoette golf cart of 1952, and by 2010 the Los Angeles Times was describing it as the top US provider of batteries for electric golf carts. Its newer products keep that link: lithium batteries in standard golf-cart sizes from 2022, English Wikipedia says, and the OnePack from 2024. Under Stryten Energy the Trojan name continues as a product brand.

For a design guide, Trojan Battery shows how a name borrowed from a college team, and a colour word attached to it, can carry a battery brand through four owners. Compare East Penn, a family-owned Pennsylvania battery maker founded in 1946, and Exide, a battery name that goes back to the Electric Storage Battery Company of 1888. For this guide we use a deep maroon, a warm cream and a charcoal with a serif, an unofficial interpretation; no product or logo is reproduced.

Keep Trojan Battery’s identity on hand — save it to a board in the Made Good inspiration library.