Dirt Wheels had a shootout between the Honda Rancher 420 straight axle vs tha Kings Quad 450 IRS.

Not a very good shootout IMO. The KQ is $1,000 more than the Rancher and it's a single axle vs IRS, and ES vs automatic. (The KQ won)

 

Yup, pretty predictable. I like to go through and read the captions under the pictures first. Just from them I could tell that the KQ would win. All the captions were like "the rancher can only do this... or the rancher had trouble keeping up with that..."

At an extra $1,000, the KQ is just more bike than the Rancher. At the same time, the Rancher is probably the best in it's price range. A far better shootout would be the Rancher 420 vs the KQ400. It's already been done with comparing the Rancher to the Eiger. By the same magazine the Eiger won the first time and the Rancher the second, go figure.

Jaybee

 

IRS is all the rage right now, and any machine with IRS is a shoe in against any SRA machine. While I agree that IRS has advantages in some situations, it also has other disadvantages (extra weight for example....50 pounds in this case!). For the average trail rider, the Rancher is the most quad you can get for the money!