I'm a farm equipment dealer. I don't sell Polaris, but I felt compelled to make a video on this. I recently bought this thing, did quite a bit of work researching it, looking on YouTube, trying to find videos, and was hugely disappointed by what I found out there. There doesn't appear to be anybody making good quality videos for this kind of equipment. I have filled out a Polaris dealer application several times now, it's four pages long. Polaris, if you're watching this, I'd love to sell your stuff. I'd love to be out here talking about it on YouTube. Take a look, maybe consider my application a little bit. Going to show you around this machine, educate you on it a little bit. I can't sell one to you, this isn't my product. There's a lot of really cool stuff on this that's been cool for me as a parent, cool for my kids running it out around here my backyard a little bit. So we're going to show you around the Polaris RZR 200 EFI. I picked up a Polaris, little bit of a story, give you some back explanation on why I added this to my list of motorized things in my garage.
Growing up, I always spent time riding three-wheelers, four-wheelers out between farms, down on the road between my parents' house and my uncle's house, up at a cabin that we go to periodically up north of State College. Always have had a lot of opportunities to be out running this kind of stuff around. It's been part of my growing up. For my kids, when they were younger, we lived in a development for a number of years before we were able to move out here into some space where we have some spots to run around now. And when we lived in a development, we always had the little kids' battery-powered Power Wheels. I love to tinker in the garage. It's the way that I go and let off some stress, right? It's by having some projects and working in the garage a little bit. And we went through two different battery-powered Power Wheels that I took from 24 volt little things that drive around the backyard. But I went and stripped all the electronics out of the inside, put in motorized scooter controllers, 36 volt batteries and made these things tear around the backyard. They were a lot of fun. The kids loved them until the kids got to be about 50 pounds or so and they started tearing out the transmission, wrecking the motors and I was just constantly putting parts into this thing.
It was at that point, I sold it. The kids were super disappointed in order to see their toy go away, and I vowed to the kids, at some point I'd get them a proper motorized vehicle to drive around. Now, there's a lot of different ways you could do this. We could go out and we could find an old fourwheeler somewhere or the three-wheelers that I grew up on, but being a safety-conscious parent, I wanted something with a roll cage that I could put my kids down inside of and still had enough power for them to have fun with.So it was the safety factor that really sold me on getting something like this, something the kids can sit down inside of, put a seat belt on, have a roll cage around them. But this really goes a couple steps further than that. There's a sensor on the seat belt. Obviously, if you don't have the seat belt locked in, the machine's only going to drive five miles an hour. So the kids have to have that.
There's also a little Bluetooth chip that you can attach to the back of their helmet, that if they're not in the machine with their helmet on, you can set it up that it's not going to drive or that it would drive very slowly. It also has some simplistic GPS on it. You can take out your cellphone, set up some geofences, and when the machine is inside of the respective geofences, limit the speed that it can drive. So, wide open, this can go about 30 miles an hour. My kids have no business going that fast, so we can slow the whole thing down. They can go five miles an hour when they're around the house and let them go a little bit more quickly when they're out in a farm field or something and have some space to kind of wind it up a little bit. It does take a little bit of time for that GPS to lock on. If you cycle the key on and off, it needs to be out in some open space before it gets enough satellites in order to start driving at those appropriate speeds. Sometimes that causes some problems for the kids who are quick to turn the ignition off. They got to start it back on again and drive out to some open space to get a GPS lock before they can start driving more quickly.
So I have two kids. They are small and tall. The age range for this does puzzle me a little bit. If you look inside the door, they kind of have this marked out for ages 10 and up. Two helmets come along with the machine, and those two helmets are sized for children who are clearly much smaller than 10. In fact, they don't even come anywhere close to fitting small over here. So that's a little odd in and of itself. Inside the machine, it's small enough that you could slide the seat the whole way front and a small child can easily drive it. But when you get to the age of tall over here, who's 13 at this point, so only three years over the minimum age that's supposed to be driving this thing, becomes pretty small for you. An adult can fit in here, but it is a little clown car-ish for somebody as large as a 13-year-old teenager to be able to fit into.
The other thing that really impresses me about the parent features on this is the drivability of it. Even though you have a limiter in here that's limiting the speed of the engine at times, it's not necessarily limiting the amount of RPMs that the engine can spin. So even if you have the thing set to 10 miles an hour, a fairly slow speed for it, you can still rev the engine the entire way up. You can get that grunt feeling of the thing being exciting to drive and spin the tires. But once it hits its top speed, it very gracefully smooths right back out. You slow the thing down again, it's stomp on the gas. You could spin those tires again and get it up and going. They have done a masterful job preserving those driving dynamics of the exciting part of driving these things around without killing the experience of having that speed limit or not behaving properly.
For as much as I like this, I have a couple of frustrations with it. You can see how dirty this thing is. My backyard's a swamp right now. It's springtime and the kids love nothing more than to crash through all the water puddles. It is extremely difficult to get this thing clean, particularly in the driver's area. There's very few washouts on the inside of here that I could take my pressure washer and wash the dirt out of the thing and down onto the ground. It seems to pack up behind the seats. I've got probably, I don't know, a good three quarters of an inch of mud in the back end of the machine here in some of those places. Same thing goes for the undercarriage, the skid plate that's on the bottom collects a lot of dirt. As often as I get back here and try to clean the thing up a little bit, it's challenging to do that.
The other thing that I've had to do now several times is to change the tension on the chain. The chain that drives it has stretched quite a lot, even in the 15 hours or so that we've put on the unit here at this point. Three times now I've had to go back there and tighten that thing up. It's an easy procedure to do, but it does require to get the wrenches out every once in a while, and the kids don't know to keep a lookout for that. I can hear when it's too loose, but they don't necessarily pick up on it. So that has been an unexpected maintenance item for me.
Another minor annoyance that I had were some of the accessories that I picked up. I got the front grill guard, the side rock rails, and the rear guard thinking, "The kids are going to drive this thing, they are going to bump into stuff." I think when these accessory kits were designed, they were designed as much for aesthetics as they were for actually protecting the machine.If you look at the grill guard here, you've got a huge exposed area right in here that you know a good six inch tree is going to find, which is going to crack all these plastics and the headlight and everything through here. If you were really making a grill guard to protect a kid from running into something, you certainly would've continued this around the side here a little bit further. So I would've appreciated that perspective a little bit, right? You buy these things to protect the machine. I think they probably could've done a little bit better job of designing some of those parts. So that's my rundown on the Polaris RZR 200. I really like it, it's very cool. I think the thing has been a fantastic experience for my kids out here. They're having a blast so that I can hardly get them off of it.
Thank you to my friends at C.H. Waltz that hooked me up with this. These things are in extreme demand right now. They're very hard to come by. I ordered this several months ago through a dealership who I know a lot of people at personally and was really lucky to be able to get it from them. Thanks for hooking me up, guys. So this is not a product that my dealership sells, as much as I would like to. But if you're looking for videos on tractors, if we can help you with any of the machinery that you've got, check us out at Messick's, that's what this channel is really about. But today, the internet needs a video on this thing, because it is cool.
