Your intrepid reporter spends a day on the latest Polaris Rangers. He tried but couldn't get stuck.

From tooling around the farm on early model three-wheelers and four-wheelers to navigating Iowa mud at Farm Progress shows, I have some experience with ATVs and their utility cousins.

I'm no going-to-western-Montana-for-two-weeks expert on what these machines need to do in the sportsman's world, but I know utility when I see it.

And I saw it in the Ranger.

For the agriculturalist, these machines offer a triad of important qualities: Ruggedness/mobility. That is, they go where you want them to. During our ride just north of Orlando on the MT ranch, we pushed the 4x4 and 6x6 Rangers through mud bogs and water holes. The 6x6 uses on-demand, true six-wheel drive, engaging the front wheels when the rear wheels lose traction.

We hopped some small logs and watched as a professional driver hopped some significantly larger ones.

We looked for places to get stuck. We couldn't find many. The difference between a mud hole in Florida and one in MFA's trade territory, however, is in the mud itself. There, it was a thin layer with sand underneath--something for the tires to grab. I'd like to try a 6x6 Ranger in any one of the varieties of mud that we call "Gumbo."

Tow/haul payload
With 1,000-lbs. haul payload capacity and 1,500-lbs. tow capacity, the Ranger has the power to complete plenty of chores and tasks on the farm or ranch. These models use a 30-horsepower Polaris 4-valve/4-stroke engine. We saw how the 4x4 and 6x6 could handle heavy tow-loads with the questionable traction of Florida sand. And here's a reminder: These things will haul more than they're supposed to. The listed limits have to do with ride stability and braking capacity--basically, your safety.

Utility
The marketing team at Polaris understands what sells utility vehicles on the farm. They said as much by admitting that available accessories will boost sales. And that's the case. The more spreaders, sprayers, discs, wire rollers, harrows, snow plows and brush mowers that are available, the more farmers will be likely to invest in the sizable cost of the machine.

The design and engineer team, the marketing folks and p.r. apparatus of a company can always drum up excitement when they're showing off new vehicles. That's what a launch event is all about. But at certain events, you can see more confidence than hype. My impression was that the Polaris team has put out a product that will be one of the premium models in utility vehicle market segment. It's a salvo into the market that suggests the bar for power, speed and payload has been raised.