Review: 2023 Polaris RZR200

Helicopter (or drone) parenting can only go so far

Closed course, 12-year-old driver!

This review should have appeared on the Hagerty website but I was, ahem, separated from the company before I could put it up. Enjoy — jb

Surely the Polaris RZR200 is the most disturbing manifestation of blue-collar prosperity one could possibly imagine. It’s a gasoline-powered two-seat vehicle costing at least $6,799, aimed exclusively at children. If my Mahindra Roxor is wink-wink not-street-legal, this is just flat out not street legal. You wouldn’t want it to be street legal, because it can’t break 30mph with a tailwind and it’s positively tiny. I cannot imagine a single productive thing one could do with it on a farm or elsewhere; hell, it’s too cold-blooded to be easily used for the quarter-mile trip to our mailbox and back, unless we wanted to let a vehicle warm up for five minutes every time we checked the mail.

The sole purpose of the RZR200 is: for kids to have fun. And that’s how you know it’s a white-trash proposition, because the so-called elites don’t spend money on letting their kids have fun. $6,799 won’t cover a season of development youth soccer in Massachusetts, much less a season of coached tennis, but those activities are not meant to be fun. They are meant to prepare children for a life of meritocratic competition. By contrast, this little Polaris is just pure, stupid, ignorant fun. Imagine that!

So you already know if it’s for you or not, and if you want one.

Nevertheless, the ethics of this industry dictate that we actually test the thing, rather than rewrite the press release like Brett Berk or some mommyblogger in-between mimosas, so I handed it over to my son, John, who was twelve years old for the winter and spring we had the RZR200 in our possession. He’s raced in three different outdoor karting classes and has a higher winning percentage than any autojourno in existence, self included, and he is a better-than-competent downhill MTB rider, but he had zero previous existence with side-by-sides.

I suspect that will be the case for most prospective mini-Polaris pilots; the company makes a 50cc side-by-side and there are other electric vehicles of that same pre-teen size on the market but all of those are essentially toys. The RZR200 is not a toy. It has long-travel four-wheel independent suspension, a 180cc fuel-injected single, and a full suite of electronic features.

It was delivered in the winter and John amused himself by doing endless donuts in our cul-de-sac. As far as I can tell, the RZR200 is winter-and-weather-proof. You can fill it with snow, you can get it wet, there’s no real consequence for doing so. If the temperature is below about forty degrees, you may need a jump box to get it started; the battery is just barely adequate to the task of getting it running in the summer, and in the winter it will crank three times and die. Unfortunately, most of it is located beneath the driver’s seat, which has a relatively short range of adjustment. You’ll have to get creative to get the cables in there.

While it’s possible for me to cram myself into the driver’s seat and operate the two-pedal, CVT-equipped RZR200, I don’t enjoy it and neither does the Polaris; a quick move between storage units where I drove it two miles in 50-degree weather had the operating temperature near the limits for the whole time, courtesy of my considerable bulk and constant running at max RPM. Truth be told, the Polaris likes to get hot and will do so during prolonged idling as well. While that’s nominally not part of a side-by-side’s existence, there are times at your local trail where you might have to sit and wait for the UTVs ahead of you to clear an obstacle, and in that case the RZR will get hot, especially if there’s mud on the engine and chassis to insulate it a bit. Be aware.

As delivered to you, the Polaris won’t exceed about 15mph. You’ll need to download the RideCommand app for your phone and “unlock” it to full speed, which is between 25mph and 30mph depending on conditions. RideCommand will allow you to do a million different things with the RZR200 but most parents will be interested in “geofencing” and speed restriction. You can program the RZR to basically shut down when it reaches the limits of your property or designated area. I can’t say I’d be a fan of letting a child just wander through the woods without supervision while driving a 735-pound miniature car, but let’s face it: they’re probably at more risk in a California public school. You can also program it to require the presence of special Bluetooth-enabled Polaris helmets. In our testing, it ran just fine with the helmets in the little bed area behind the seats, so don’t think you can use technology to ensure your kids behave. Go be a parent for once, why dontcha.

Fit and finish is better than that of the average Cadillac CT4, but worse than that of a Honda UTV. The doors are hardshell half-height affairs that, in conjunction with a seatbelt, are more than enough to keep your child from ejecting. John and I had a long talk about what to do if the RZR200 rolled. “Don’t pull an Andrew Collins,” I noted, referring to the fellow who rolled a manufacturer-provided UTV at his bachelor party and chopped off a finger in the process.

I needn’t have worried. John proved able to levitate the RZR200 on two wheels whenever he wanted, then bring it down without incident. While it’s certainly possible that I might be stupid enough to crash a UTV in autojourno-approved fashion, that’s not true of the boy. We made this stupid low-production-value video for Instagram a while back.

A word of warning, mixed with typical bullshit parental pride: John is able to catch a slide in a short-wheelbase kart at 60mph or above, every time, no excuses. If you can’t, or you aren’t certain your kid can, then it’s worth treating the RZR200 with absolute respect in turns. The wheelbase is just 48 inches. It likes to roll and you can do it on loose dirt as easily as you can on asphalt. For that reason alone, I didn’t let my son drive it unsupervised and I wouldn’t recommend you do so, RideCommand or not. See previous comments.

The RZR200 can effortlessly climb a foot-tall log, go through two feet of water, and climb anything it can get traction for. The brakes are strong enough for a 12-year-old boy to lock them up at most speeds, and despite having the weight distribution of a Sixties 911 it does plow straight ahead when you do it, rather than loop. I’m not sure it could be spun in any circumstance short of glare ice. Steering effort is minimal and quite child-appropriate. “Less than an indoor electric kart,” says the boy.

Acceleration is modest, as you’d expect; the RZR200 is only 250 pounds less than my Radical PR6 with perhaps a fifteenth of the horsepower. It takes about an eighth of a mile to get up to that modest top speed. If you are looking at this as a tag-along behind your UTV, and your UTV is one of the modern turbocharged monsters, be aware that you could inadvertently leave a child behind.

John was unable to break the RZR200 or even damage it; tossed rocks and roots don’t bother the tough, thick plastics much. In certain circumstances, such as twenty minutes of donuts on snow, you can smell the differential overheating, but unless you’re going to run Windrock after a rainstorm I can’t imagine you’ll be spinning the tires enough to encounter the issue.

Almost any trailer you can imagine will haul an RZR200. With the right ramps it would also fit in the bed of my F250 — or my Canyon, for that matter. There’s really not that much to criticize about the little Polaris, which despite being a brand-new product shows every sign of being well-thought-out. It’s expensive, but you can see where the money went.

That being said, it failed to charm my son. “It’s not fast, like a kart, and it’s not exercise, like a mountain bike, and… Can you race them? ‘Cause if you could then it might be worth having, but I’d rather race a kart, or a bike. It takes so long to accelerate, and… I don’t know. We don’t need to keep it, or buy one, or anything like that.” Not our kind, dear — but I should point something out anyway. In March I, ah, paid the police to close the roads on our old neighborhood so the boy could take a few laps of the place. He came back to me after thirty minutes of seeing friends and co-existing peacefully with the various SUVs on the roads, then said,

“These two girls over on the other side of the neighborhood came out the first time I went around, and every time I went around again they were waving and yelling at me. They wouldn’t go back in the house, or stop yelling. What’s their problem?”

“Two years from now, you’ll figure it out,” I told him. Nota bene: the RZR200 is very much a toy for the prosperous blue-collar boy, but it has what it takes to catch the eye of the uptown, or suburban, girl.