By Jon Crowley
While at Sand Hollow for the SxS Adventure Rally, we had the opportunity to jump in a 4-seat Speed UTV El Jefe for a quick spin. The 4 Seat El Jefe RG Edition has a base price of $49,999. The engine is 1000 CC Turbo 225 HP with 77 inch wide suspension.
Now, please take this as a first impression only as I did not get to drive the vehicle and only had about 15 minutes to do some fast desert sections. Normally, manufacturers will have a media event for new vehicles, but Speed UTV is far from normal and this is their first-ever production vehicle. Although Robby Gordon has been involved with production vehicles from Polaris and Arctic Cat, I don’t think he has ever thought it necessary to have media test his new vehicles at a press introduction. So unbiased reporting of the vehicle will be hard to come by since anybody that would like to do a review will have to depend on an owner to have access.
A few takeaways:
- Lots of legroom in the passenger/front
- Factory-installed comms are nice
- Car looks good from a distance
- Do not like the cheesy stickers covering accessories that were not purchased.
- Suspension in the whoops is impressive for a stock vehicle (70+mph along the fence line).
- Lots of axle and/or differential noise while idling out to riding area.
- Sway control feels good.
- Brakes feel a bit light (Wilwood upgrade available)
- Stock springs appeared to be sagging a bit (Eibach upgrade available and would be nice to have Shock Therapy spring kit as an option).
- Power from a stop is not all that impressive, but decent in the mid-range.
- Three-speed transmission is nice but it’ll take a bit for customers to figure out how to smoothly shift.
- Apparently, shifting from 2-wheel drive to 4-wheel drive needs to be done while the vehicle is moving.
- After we got back from 10-minute ride, an axle boot was leaking grease pretty good, and there appeared to be oil leaking (power steering fluid?) from the engine area and front diff area + possibly coolant leaking.
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Oil Leaking from several locations under Speed UTV
Overall, the Speed UTV feels like it is still a vehicle that needs more testing with a variety of drivers/terrain before prime time. We did not have a chance to do any rock crawling in low-range, but Nick from @chupacabraoffroad did some while out at Sand Hollow – check their Instagram for videos.
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Immediately after our quick rip in the Speed UTV, we jumped behind the wheel of a Yamaha RMAX and hit Double Sammy trail. While these are two completely different machines (sport vs. rec utility) the difference in fit and finish and how solid the RMAX feels is night and day compared to the Speed UTV.
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