Overlanding with an $850 RATV
It has a 127 horsepower fuel injected inline four, a four-speed automatic transmission with high and low range, a heated cab, and seats five. At 156” long and 66” wide, it’s 25” longer and 2” wider than the Kawasaki Teryx4. Did I mention it’s street legal? Technically, it doesn’t meet UTV definition and would be more accurate to call it a RATV (pronounced Rat-Vee), for Roadgoing All-Terrain Vehicle.
All for the price of $850.00, roughly $12,500 less than current four seat UTVs.
Allow be to explain, if you will, before suspecting that I’ve lost all my marbles.
There’s a disease some of us are inflicted with that causes one to look farther into the future than considered normal-many of us become hoarders of odd things like flashlights, for when the world goes suddenly dark. For me, it has been contemplating how to continue off-roading with children, even though our first born isn’t yet born.
Rather than having a fleet of ATVs varying in sizes that are quickly outgrown, requiring full-time maintenance and a winning lottery ticket, I decided a UTV would be more practical and safe. But they’re expensive and a proper four-seater would get awfully cumbersome brush mowing the neighborhood where it would spend most of its time-I’d need to keep an ATV. Not to mention our ATVing friends and family-we’ll still want to go on adult outings-now we need to keep both ATVs. So much for thinning out the herd.
Exploring Wisconsin and Upper Michigan with ATVs has opened my eyes to the beauty of roads less traveled; hidden lakes and scenic wonderlands accessible only by dirt roads and a sense of adventure. Getting to most of these places doesn’t require locking differentials and thirteen inches of suspension travel-some of the best “trails” I’ve been on are dirt two-tracks open to licensed vehicles. Though it does require a vehicle that can get scratched and dented without regret, thus the 2001 Chevrolet Tracker pictured above. It needed repairs that could be done affordably at home, but costly over the counter of a local garage, so the owner sold it cheap. Cost plus parts came to $850 and labor provided quality time with Dad.
Welcome to the concept of Overlanding: “...self-reliant overland travel to remote destinations where the journey is the principal goal” according to Wikipedia. Prior to the existence of ATVs, I dreamed of some day off-road excursions depicted in magazines such as Petersen’s 4Wheel & Off-Road. I hadn’t yet discovered that such excursions didn't require six-figure incomes, months of vacation, and travel on foreign continents-they’re only hours away and can be affordable weekend or weeklong adventures done with minimalistic vehicles.
No, we won’t be heading to Moab anytime soon with the Tracker and toddlers in roll bar equipped child seats, but UTVs and RATVs with second row seating are more about quality sight-seeing than catching big air.
"Thanks to the Interstate Highway System, it is now possible to travel across the country from coast to coast without seeing anything. From the Interstate, America is all steel guardrails and plastic signs, and every place looks and feels and sounds and smells like every other place." -- Charles Kuralt, On the Road with Charles Kuralt