5 Reasons Why The Polaris RZR Pro R Boost Is the Ultimate Side Quest Machine (Yes, Again)

Five reasons Polaris’ turbocharged, 275-horsepower desert toy is the best way to get off the macadam and send it.

“The faster you go, the better these things are going to handle for you,” a lead engineer from Polaris told me on a Wednesday morning in Sand Hollow, Utah. I sat idle in a 2027 Polaris RZR Pro R Boost, already squinting from the sun.

I knew what he meant. Last year, I drove Ford’s preposterous $350,000 Mustang GTD through the California mountains and desert, and learned that high-performance machines open up the more you push them. As I wrote then, “The faster you go, the more graceful and planted it feels.”

Still, way out here off the pavement, I stared up at a sand dune and wondered what I’d gotten myself into.

Sand dunes that pepper the terra of the American West are extraterrestrial, and the ones at Sand Hollow in particular feel like you’re on Mars. About 200 million years ago, back when dinosaurs roamed around here, this whole corner of the Southwest was a sea of sand bigger than today’s Sahara. Over time it got buried and hardened into the red Navajo Sandstone you see everywhere out here, and now that rock is slowly eroding back into sand. So the dunes I was about to drive on are, in a very real sense, made of ancient dunes. Picture the Baja 1000 or Mint 400 racers launching over them in massive, rigged-out buggies. The closest I’d ever come to driving on a sand dune was doing donuts in the snow as a teenager in my Ford Escort, which, it turns out, is not the same thing.

I’ve been really into this whole side quest thing lately. By “lately,” I mean since at least 2023, when I declared the Polaris Slingshot “the ultimate side quest machine.” Turns out, to no surprise, that Polaris is really, really good at builing side quest machines. My wife calls me the side quest king, and at this point I’ve leaned into that identity pretty hard. Consider this mission a title defense, now with 275 horsepower.

Can you blame me? I’m in midlife, I live on the West Coast, and I’m trying to max out my enjoyment of all of it by having adventures and having fun. So when I got the chance to spend a day ripping around Sand Hollow, Utah, just west of Zion National Park near Hurricane, in the new Polaris RZR Pro R Boost, I jumped at the ultimate out-of-office midweek adventure.

One of the things I’m always marveled by is what engineers are capable of when it comes to getting us off the macadam and concrete and out into the wild. We are living in a golden age of ways to explore the world around us, especially when it comes to off-road vehicles.

Side-by-sides in particular have evolved in incredible ways. When Polaris rolled out the original Ranger RZR 800 for 2008, it made about 52 horsepower and cost around $10,000. By 2022, the RZR Pro R was making 225 horsepower, Can-Am answered with the 240-horsepower Maverick R a couple of years later, and the whole industry has been locked in a full-blown horsepower war ever since. The new Pro R Boost makes more than five times the power of that original RZR. It’s genuinely one of the damn coolest side-by-sides I’ve ever ridden in.

This isn’t my first rodeo in a RZR, either. Back in 2017, I white-knuckled a Polaris RZR XP Turbo Dynamix through Nevada’s high desert southwest of Las Vegas, pushing 40 mph until I felt pins-and-needles in the palms of my hands. That machine made 168 horsepower, and at the time I called it one of the most advanced off-road vehicles ever engineered. The engineers, it turns out, kept engineering. In 2021, I did a 60-mile guided loop in Polaris RZRs through Johnson Valley, one of the largest OHV areas in the country, past rock slabs, boulders, dry lake beds, and sandy washes. The Pro R Boost makes 107 more horsepower than that 2017 rig.

Sand Hollow is the perfect place to put that to the test. It’s a state park with a manmade lake that borders a whole lot of federal BLM land, and the wonderful thing about BLM land is that you’re allowed to use UTVs as much as you want. On a hot 100-plus degree day, with red dunes and slickrock in every direction, I got some hands on the wheel and some time in the cockpit, as they say, to experience the joy of the trail.

If you think about life like a video game, not all side quests are created equal. Here are five reasons the RZR Pro R Boost is the ultimate side quest machine.

1. It has so much giddyup

This thing is freaking turbocharged. Polaris dropped a turbocharged 2.0-liter four-cylinder into a little side-by-side and got 275 horsepower and 223 lb-ft of torque out of it, which is 50 more horsepower than the regular Pro R. Polaris even has a slide in its presentation that says “TORQUE = FUN.” Think about it like a quarter horse busting out of the starting gate. In race mode, it even bumps the idle up to 1,450 rpm to keep the turbo spooled and ready to launch.

We got to test it side by side with other best-in-class machines from Can-Am and Kawasaki, sophisticated, state-of-the-art rigs in their own right, and the Polaris hit jackrabbit speeds way faster. Officially, it clocks 0-60 in 4.20 seconds, and here’s a link to an official video from the Polaris YouTube to back that up.

These things are modern horses for us weekend warrior cowboys who want to experience the backcountry in the coolest way possible.

2. It changes personality at the flip of a switch

The suspension delivers a smooth, buttery ride across all the different modes, even through apocalyptic terrain that feels one step removed from a Mad Max movie. On rocky trails, you don’t really know what’s going to be ahead of you, so you put it in rock mode, and the suspension just does its thing. There’s Rock Mode, Race Mode, and Comfort Mode, all of which are pretty self-explanatory for your driving conditions. With a flip of a switch, it changes how the suspension optimizes itself, and it does it perfectly.

Then there’s race mode, which is what you want on sand. I got to rip around on sand dunes for the very first time, and these things handle so incredibly on sand. You feel like you’re cutting through butter, sliding around a little bit, and it’s a freaking blast.

At one point we were heading down this crazy steep sandy hill, and I felt like I was going down a roller coaster. I put it into low gear, moved it from rock mode to race mode for better handling in the sand, and down we went. Whoa, this hill is steep, but here we are, and we are sending it. This is the ultimate send machine, and boy, do I love a send machine.

3. It’s built for the hot, faraway places side quests happen

These little vehicles exist to get you way, way, way out there in the desert on a hot 100-plus degree day, and the Pro R Boost is engineered for exactly that. Polaris says it keeps its full power up to 115 degrees or 10,000 feet of elevation, so the heat doesn’t sap the fun out of it. A rear radiator and vented seats keep the cabin from cooking you, and the two-seater’s fuel tank grew to 14.7 gallons from 12, which means more range before you have to turn back.

That matters because the market for these things here in the American West is huge. We have all this incredible BLM land that we can explore, and that’s an amazing thing about this country. God bless America. You can just go out there and have a great time with your friends.

4. It’s quieter, which makes the silence of being wayyyy out there even better

Riding one of these is intense. You strap in, and you really need to lock in and concentrate. Your eyes are on the trail, and your brain waves are firing to pick your line amidst the rocks and quick turns. You untether yourself from your phone and your emails, and you start to feel a oneness with the trail. Oneness with the trail is very different from taking your grocery getter down to the Kroger for carrots and dip or a frozen pizza.

That’s why off-roading rules in modern life, and it’s probably a big part of why it’s exploded in popularity: it’s escapism in its purest form. As I wrote back in 2023, time’s fleeting and headspace is sacred.

Last year, I wrote about whether the cure to male loneliness is actually just buying a Sea-Doo, and the big lesson still holds: you just have to be into things to get out of your head. As we get older, our hobbies serve as the connective tissue that ties us to others. We are creatures that need golf buddies, ski buddies, fishing buddies, and surf buddies (and now, apparently, dune buddies); otherwise, we’re just gorillas that stare blankly at screens and feel the existential dread of spreadsheets. Off-roading is absolutely one of those things. There’s a whole community of off-roaders out there, and there’s always something to occupy your brain space.

For something with 275 horsepower, the Pro R Boost is also surprisingly refined. Because the turbo makes so much power at lower RPM, Polaris says it’s 27% quieter at a 40 mph cruise than the regular Pro R.

The quiet is part of the magic. Every time I’ve ever gone off-roading, there’s been nothing quite like getting to a beautiful sand dune in Sand Hollow, or up on the mesa plateau after a long climb, turning it off, and feeling the beautiful silence of the moment. As one of my favorite writers, Edward Abbey, wrote in Desert Solitaire, “the desert says nothing. Completely passive, acted upon but never acting, the desert lies there like the bare skeleton of Being, spare, sparse, austere, utterly worthless, inviting not love but contemplation.”

Throttle down in the middle of nowhere, have a couple laughs with your buddies, and absorb the quiet and serenity of a true wilderness. That zen of being miles away from anything is something I really, really love.

Maybe you’re reading this at your desk, dreaming about being out in these wide open spaces yourself. That’s the beauty of these sophisticated machines: they make all of it so accessible.

5. It turns grown men back into kids

The whole point of the backcountry is kicking up dirt, getting dirty, exploring, and getting muddy. Every bump is a chuckle or a “woo!” and every slide around a sandy turn is a momentary gasp for breath. At one point I drove through a mud puddle, it splashed all over me, and I was laughing like crazy, because this is off-roading. This is what it’s all about, man, and it’s why these things have a whole race circuit down in Baja.

It comes loaded for the party, too: a Rockford Fosgate sound system and a 10.4-inch touchscreen with split-screen trail maps and a digital camera, plus available add-ons like a rear subwoofer with its own bass control knob and RIGID light bars for night runs. That’s everything you need to hoot and holler with your buddies. It’s the ultimate bachelor party activity away from a casino, or whatever your usual group bacchanalia looks like.

So how much do these desert toys cost?

On the plane ride back to LAX the next day, I guessed these things went for somewhere between $50,000 and $60,000. I wasn’t far off.

The RZR Pro R Boost Ultimate starts at $49,999, and the Ultra starts at $52,999.

These are desert toys, peak desert toys, and I really, really, really want to get one, which is probably a questionable financial decision on a Southern California-based blog writer’s salary. My buddy Greg already informed me I’m not allowed to buy a jet ski until I have a house or sell BroBible, and I have to assume the same rule applies here.

But… to quote myself from that Sea-Doo piece, “Maybe it’s the closest thing to a happiness potion you can buy without needing a prescription.”

If you want a good side quest, the desert is a perfect place to find one, and this is the machine to take you there, so go find joy in the detours. Sure, Edward Abbey probably wouldn’t be too happy about it, but hey, Edward Abbey isn’t around anymore, and it’s incredibly fun to get out there like this.

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Big thanks to Polaris for inviting me to come out and kick the tires on the Polaris RZR Pro R Boost. Their hospitality was gracious, and all thoughts and opinions here are my own.