If you look for Polaris to push the limits by unleashing something bigger, faster, and stronger than anything else out there, you might miss a pretty sweet piece of technology hiding in their humblest machine. They rolled out some awesome features in early 2019, but some of the coolest are exclusive to the youth Polaris Ranger 150. Nevertheless, it’s something that kids and parents will absolutely love.
The Polaris Ranger 150 itself is nothing terribly special—just a little 150cc Ranger limited to two-wheel drive and 8″ of clearance designed for kids aged ten and older. Don’t go asking us when we’re making portals for it—it’s not gonna happen. But what this UTV has that no other UTV in the world has is the Youth Ride Command.
Youth Ride Command doesn’t look like much. It’s not the 7″ backlit touchscreen on current RZR models—it looks more like a souped-up car CD player. But the youth version can do a lot when paired with your smartphone. It’s equipped with geofencing, variable speed limiting, passcode protection, and helmet safety features.
Let’s take a look at how these features work.
Let’s say you own a piece of property that butts up against a busy road. You want to let your kid ride around all they want, but you don’t want them to drive on the road at all.
With geofencing, you can use your smartphone to draw boundaries for your youth Polaris Ranger. You just pull up the map on your Ride Command app and put the boundaries wherever you like. If the Ranger crosses one of these boundaries, it won’t stop the machine, but it will limit its speed to whatever you want down to under ten miles per hour, according to Polaris. That’s not too bad and certainly discourages a kid from riding where you don’t want them to.
Like we mentioned, you have the ability to set whatever speed limit you want from 10 MPH up to the vehicle’s maximum speed with Youth Ride Command. You can also set separate speed limits for inside and outside a geofenced area. The whole idea is to let your child grow into the machine. As they get older, more confident, and more experienced, you can up the speed limit to match.
It’s a nifty feature, and the Passcode Protected Safe Start rounds out the safety suite nicely.
We mentioned this feature in the previous section: with Youth Ride Command, you have the ability to set whatever speed limit you want from 10 mph up to no limit. You can also set separate speed limits for inside and outside a geofenced area. The whole idea is to let your child grow into the machine. As they get older, more confident, and more experienced, you can up the speed limit to match.
It’s a nifty feature, and the Passcode Protected Safe Start rounds out the safety suite nicely.
On the Ranger 150, you can program a 4-digit passcode that must be entered before you can start the engine. This Passcode Protected Safe Start keeps your kids from riding when you don’t want them to—they can’t just take off without you knowing it.
Passcode Protected Safe Start has some convenient features as well. You can enter it either on the Ride Command display itself or on your smartphone. You can also set it to not require a passcode if the engine is shut off for a short period. That way, you don’t have to plug the code in again just because you stopped for a bathroom break.
Helmet Aware Technology is Polaris’ newest innovation in the youth Polaris Ranger category. It’s only available on 2022 and newer vehicles and ensures that your kids never leave the garage without a helmet.
2022 models come with attachable Bluetooth beacons that you can stick to the included helmets (or any other helmet). When the vehicle is out of range of the helmets, it will switch over to the parent’s pre-set safety settings. Basically, it won’t be able to go over the speed you set without a helmet on board.
Sure, they could stick the helmet on the seat beside them, but it’s a step in the right direction.
Altogether, all this innovative tech gives you some pretty compelling parental controls over when and how your kids ride.
But why should this technology be limited to the youth Polaris Ranger 150?
Why not give yourself absolute control of who, how, and where your RZR Turbo gets ridden? How often do you hear stories about someone letting their buddy ride and they end up wrecking hard? What if you could just turn the speed down a little bit when that friend gets behind the wheel? You know the one.
Ride parks could make use of a version of this technology. Parks often have issues with people sneaking onto their property after hours. This is a big problem for two reasons. First, when people steal trail access, they’re stealing money from the owners. Second, an accident after hours won’t necessarily be covered by insurance. It’s a huge risk for park owners. But what if parks could geofence their boundaries so that UTVs couldn’t sneak in after hours? It might save them a wad of cash.
These features could help with security as well. If you could lock your UTV with a passcode, you might see a decrease in thefts. It won’t stop the more professional thieves that would just load it on a trailer, but it would stop a casual RZR robber.
If Polaris expanded the feature set just a little, you could put a geofence around your garage and receive a notification anytime your RZR left it. Out on the trail, you could link two UTVs together and get alerted if the vehicle following you fell too far behind. The technology is interesting and there are countless applications for it.
I’m sure the folks at Polaris are hard at work coming up with new concepts for Ride Command, and as a proof of concept, the youth Polaris Ranger 150 is pretty solid.
Ride Command already does a lot, from GPS navigation to vehicle-to-vehicle communication to marking your deer stand on the map. What are the limits of Ride Command technology if it can already control ride area, speed, and ignition? We’ll just have to wait and see.
