Hop in, don a helmet, buckle your seatbelt and go! The fun and easy-to-drive nature of side-by-sides has made them hugely popular over the past few years.
There we were, barreling down the course at a pace that blended the surrounding scenery into a beige and green blur. In my mind, I'm World Rally Championship driver Colin McRae and my British codriver calmly states the turns ahead, "Right turn in point two followed by a hairpin left," he says over his headset. I pin it and our Subaru WRX drifts through the curve beautifully. Countersteering into the turn, I effortlessly skate past the apex and into another straightaway-with speedometer and tachometer climbing in unison. "Well done, old boy," he says as we rocket through the Australian outback on our way to another rally victory.
Of course, that's just my imagination. In reality, I'm just a magazine editor and we're plonking down fire roads in Primm, Nevada, not Australia. My "codriver" (ATV Rider photographer Drew Ruiz) isn't praising me, he's yelling at me not to damage his expensive camera equipment that's bouncing around in the back. And we're not in a hopped-up Subaru WRX ... we're testing the all-new Polaris RZR 800.
Later that day, my imagination takes me to a packed stadium filled with fans thirsting for mechanical carnage. I stomp the accelerator and the supercharged, methanol-fueled monster truck I'm piloting crashes into a pile of old car bodies and shoots skyward. The foundations of the stadium rumble with a combination of engine noise and screaming fans as my truck comes crashing down on top of the car pile.
Again, that's just my ego at work. I'm still in the scorching Nevada desert, but this time I'm rock crawling aboard a Yamaha Rhino 660 Special Edition. The hooting I hear isn't from 60,000 fans, but from members of our riding group as they rally to see how far off-camber I can get the Rhino before she'll tip over.
Clearly, side-by-sides (SxS), utility terrain vehicles (UTVs) or whatever you want to call them are fun. Don't mistake them for a re-hashed version of a Kawasaki Mule-we're talking bigger tires, longer suspension travel, more creature comforts and much more performance than the Mule could ever offer. The side-by-side revolution is here, and it's high time ATV Rider got involved. Yamaha's Rhino 660 is the current king of the hill, but can Polaris' Ranger RZR 800 knock it from the top spot?
First off, we'll spare you the obvious clichs, such as "razor sharp," "the razor's edge," "razor thin" and more. With that out of the way, let's talk about the ground-breaking Polaris Ranger RZR 800 (or RZR, for short). Polaris has developed a large fan base with its Ranger 700 side-by-side, but that model is rather large and utility-oriented. To counterattack against Yamaha's ultrapopular Rhino, Polaris could have used the Yamaha as a benchmark and tried to copy it. Instead, Polaris looked past the Rhino in many areas to set benchmarks of its own.
The result is a SxS that's lighter, faster and more powerful than the Yamaha. Polaris claims the RZR makes 30 percent more horsepower than a Rhino and a whopping 52 percent more than an Arctic Cat Prowler (which we couldn't receive in time for testing). Weight is one area where Polaris usually suffers, but the Minnesota gang developed a svelte machine that claims a dry weight of 945 pounds. The Rhino's claimed dry weight is 1049 pounds. These are big machines that require a trailer or at least a full-size pickup with a 6.5-foot bed to haul.