-Messick's, a helping hand with your land.
[misic]
-Neil from Messick's here.
We are out today with my son, Garrett, on an RTV 400.
We spend a lot of time talking about tractors and equipment
and that kind of stuff on our videos. We spend a lot of time talking about tractors and equipment
and that kind of stuff on our videos.
Unfortunately, we don't get the opportunity
to live with all of this equipment.
This is one that we actually do have.
Our extended family has all had a hunting cabin together
for the better part of about 30 years.
Up at our cabin, we decided to have an RTV 400.
We have it up here to run around the trails,
to go out and collect deer, for the kids
to putt-putt around outside.
It's been a great machine for us.
Uses a little 13 horsepower Subaru EFI engine.
It's really easy to start, really easy to get around,
but not so much power that we have to worry about the kids
going too fast up hills and that kind of thing.
We're going to do a little bit of running around
in this machine here this morning and show you
some of the different features and some of the ways
that we've come to appreciate it.
[engine noise]
This is a CVT machine, which is different than Kubuta's
other RTV utility vehicles.
Most of the other RTVs are all hydrostatic machines,
they drive like tractors.
This has a CVT and it drives more like
a four-wheeler or virtually every other utility vehicle on the market.
Kubota did make some changes to this CVT
to make it behave a little bit more like the hydrostatic transmissions
on the other RTVs and they call that CVT Plus.
Essentially, what that does is that that CVT Plus will hold back
a little bit when you go downhill so that machine doesn't freewheel.
When I'm out here with Garrett, we're going
down these hills over here, I don't have to worry about
taking my foot off the gas, I'm actually driving here,
and having the thing run down downhill really quickly.
The hydrostatics are better.
If you've got a 1000 pound load in the back of a hydrostatic,
and you stop the machine going downhill,
it will stop and not roll away on you.
This will a little bit.
It's not as bad as a traditional CVT would be.
It has some hold back to it but not as much
as the other hydrostatic models do in the RTV 500, 900,
and 1100, and 1140.
It's hard to gauge the pitch of a hill here on video
but we're going down something fairly steep here.
Right now, I don't have my foot on the gas at all,
the machine is just in low range.
You could hear the CVT winding up and giving
a little bit of a resistance as we drive down this hill.
The machine just doesn't take off and run,
which is one of the best-selling features
with the hydrostatic models.
This, with the CVT Plus, comes close to that.
[engine noise]
The one thing that I would say that I'm not wild about,
you can hear there's a lot of engine noise.
That's partly because we have a roof and a wind shield
on the machine here.
Nice day like this, you'd almost rather be out here
and breathe a little bit.
The wind shied that's on here is two pieces.
The bottom panel, actually, would come off.
There’s some simple latches in the front
that you can take out the bottom panel
to get a little bit of air up underneath the wind screen.
On a nice cold day, in the wintertime,
it's nice to have the air off of you but in the summertime
I'd probably would prefer to take those off.
We haven't done that yet.
[engine noise]
The turning radius of this isn't bad.
We came here to a nearly 180 degree turn
to come back on ourselves and Garrett's actually quite used
to pumping the wheel around the turns but it is pretty easy.
We can grab it and crank it all way round.
You doing okay?
-Yes.
-Garrett, can you explain how the controls here on the RTV work?
-Yes. We have shifter, low, high, neutral, and reverse.
Here's your two wheel drive and four wheel drive.
Horn, lights.
-Can you tell me when you need to shift gears on here,
is it hard to shift it or easy to shift?
-No, not at all.
-Pretty easy to shift?
-Yes, easy.
-Don’t have too much trouble there? -No.
-Okay.
When-- Only have one complaint.
If I look at the back of the machine here,
you see this is a single axle across the rear,
there's no independent suspension on this series.
The X series, the next step up, does have independent suspension.
You can tell those machines do ride a little bit better than this one
but given the price point of this machine,
there is only so much that they can do.
Otherwise, you just start to get too expensive.
When you go across some rough ground, you can tell the back end
tends to bounce around more than a machine
with independent suspension would.
Underneath the seat down here is my battery and my air cleaner.
If I need to get to those for service,
you simply flip up the seat in order to get to those.
In order to dump the bed, say, if we had
a little firewood here in the back, we have two latches here
that hold the bed in place.
Once we've released those two latches,
we just grab the handle, which Garrett
will demonstrate, and lift.
The power of an eight year old can dump the bed.
You can see that this thing here is hinged,
not quite center, it's towards the back a little bit
so that it doesn't just flop forward.
If you have a load in it, you don't have to tip
the full weight of the load.
The thing goes back fairly easily.
Back here, under the engine compartment,
you can see ours is good and dirty.
There's a, like I said, Subaru engine under there
and this would be the CVT, right there
inside that plastic enclosure.
One of the headaches that you can get with CVTs
is that they get wet, the belts can slip,
and you can see this one is put inside of a plastic enclosure
to keep it dry.
That is an option on some competitive vehicles
but on the Kubuto, its standard equipment.
-If you could use an RTV, give my dad a call at--
-800-222-3373, or online at www.messicks.com
[music]
-Jack. -What?
-Do you like driving the RTV? -Yes.
-Is it fun? -Yes.
-What do you like more, the RTV or the four-wheeler?
-Four-wheeler.
-Yes. -No.
-Not RTV?
-Yes. I like RTV.
-You like RTV too?
-Yes. -Do you?
-Yes.
-Are you a good driver?
-Yes. - No.
-Do you go fast or slow?
-Fast.
-Fast. -Slow.
Very slow. -[laughs] Really fast?
-Really fast. -Really fast.
-[?]
-I’m not going to edit those out.
-[laughs] All right. You don’t need to.
-[laughs]