They dont have power, when i see them at glamis they shouldnt even belong there, and they cant make it up the hill. I know they are for rock climbing and stuff, but i mean come on, why would you want to go ride a quad on rocks instead of going 85 miles an hour on a dry lake bed or race somebody up the hill to see who is the king of the hill? I mean come on.

 

ride a prairie 700 i know it won't have the power that your raptor has but its pretty good for a utility

 

Someday you'll find some mud - then you'll understand. [img]i/expressions/face-icon-small-smile.gif[/img]

Jaybee

 

Why would I want to drive up a sand hill where there is nothing to see but sand?? Why would I want to do 85mph on quad ?? I can go places your sport quad would only dream of going and I can still do 65 on hard packed. I would much rather drive in the woods and through the mud than in a sand box. I mean come on !!

 

Now, I'm not going to get involved in one of those "My quad is better than your quad" thingies, but WE got "utes" because we want to get out and explore. We want to use them to go camping and go places we couldn't go with our pick-up. I like having the option to haul all kinds of cool stuff with me. And frankly, when we're whizzing along at 30-35, that's damned fast enough for me! These things get squirly! I think the suspension in sport quads is more car-like than utility quads, and that means you can go faster, safer. I don't really care about speed. I want to be able to climb up vertical walls, I want to be able to ride to England over the ocean, and I want to be able to carry the kitchen sink with me.

I hope everyone bought the machine that does what THEY want to do.

 

Cut him some slack. He is from California, and this is SPORT BIKE COUNTRY! The image out here is that utes are for hunters, and fat senior citizens. While you can go searching and find some tehcnical stuff to ride, for the most part a ute is a pretty lame ride out in the open desert. Even the best utes, handle poorly compared to the sport machines.

I have both, because I want to go everywhere! But, my motto is "never ride a utility anywhere you can ride a sport bike". My utes, are just "go anywhere" sport bikes. When the rocks get to big, or the water crossings get to deep, or there is snow, then I will switch to riding a ute.

On a recent desert trail ride, we on sport machines where having a great time, wheelieing off if the whoops or doubling through them. But everybody on a ute, including the rider on the Prarrie 700 (the magazines perennial pick as the best handling ute) was complaining about how miserable they were!

A lot of ute owners have never even ridden a sport bike, and will never know what they are missing!

 

You're right, Recon. We've never ridden a sport bike. A couple other guys at work have them but we're not 'buds' enough to hang out. Just from reading the mags (and wathcing the ATV shows on TV), I can tell the sport bikes ride better. I've been a 4x4'er forever and I just don't see myself changing. We ride mostly in the desert and mountains of Nevada and to be honest, we're in 2WD at least 90% of the time. And when I think it's time for 4WD, that's when I have trouble getting my wife to follow.[img]i/expressions/face-icon-small-sad.gif[/img] But nevertheless, we have so much fun we can hardly stand it.

Strangely enough, when we attended the ATV Safety School (because how can you turn down $100 for a half a day of riding?), it was obvious to us that this school is geared toward sport bikes and the way you are 'supposed' to ride them. How to slide around corners, high speed cornering, etc. The two things we were REALLY interested in were cancelled because of technical difficulties. One was how to turn around after going up a hill and you can't make it for some reason, and the other was jumping logs (or whatever). But, between us we got $200 so all was not lost.

Oh, and we were the only two on 'utes'. The other 4-5 were on sport bikes. And of course, they all just couldn't see owning one of these things. I don't share their view of their bikes. I just like 'utes'.

 

I agree sport bikes are a better ride in the sand and on cerain trails. I am not downing them I just felt like being a smart a$$. A guy has to do that once in awhile you know. I will say where I live and what I do with a 4 wheeler a sport bike would never work for me.

 

I guess if I lived out west and the basic riding was sand riding I would have a sport bike also,
Most of the places I ride (not all) the image of sport bikes are snot nosed kids tearing up the woods, not too much sand here. I guess its just a simple thing of people assuming things(ie image). Yeah my bike could not zip up a sand hill like a raptor, but that raptor cannot crawl through the mud like my ute, a sport bike could smoke my ute in a race , but my ute will pull that sport bike out of the woods in the snow. It all depends on what you want to ride and where. So 7540875048 it would not really be right to say ute's don't belong in the sand , ute's can go anywhere, do sport bikes belong in the woods?

 

As an aside here, I have my Yahoo front page gather any news regarding ATV's. Everyday when I check the news related to ATV's, it's always, and I mean ALWAYS about someone being killed on an ATV. There isn't a state in the union, I don't think, that's not trying to do something about the "scourge" of ATV's. Whether it's environmentalists saying ATV's are ruining wildlife habitat or 'creating' new roads; or the mounting death toll and how these 'things' are killing our kids (and not all the deaths are kids either), we're under massive attack. A lot of this is in states that don't have a lot of open ground left, and people ride where they can (which is not necessarily the same as where they're 'allowed'). Complaints from bikers, hikers, horse people, you name it, are on the rise. "We're" ruining everything, they say. Loud, fast, rude, we're fast becomming "persona non-grata" and I'm not sure we can stop the rising tide. Even here in Nevada where the average out-of-state person thinks there is nothing, the attacks are rising. There's an article today in the "Elko Daily Free Press" about the Nevada Wildlife Commission's attempt to regulate ATV's and the use thereof. Nothing attracts more attention quicker than "loud and fast".

When I was a kid (in the 60's), "loud and fast" was how you described our cars. Today there aren't any cars worthy of "loud and fast" (ha) so younger gentlemen (like that term?) seem to have turned to ATV's. "Loud and fast" is going to sink our hobby/sport if we aren't careful. And we're not...