Back in the ‘90s, Polaris introduced the Sportsman line and quickly conquered the all-terrain market, now holding the title for best-selling automatic 4×4 ATV of all time. Unfortunately in this day and age, holding the number-one spot isn’t enough. In the immortal words of Tim Taylor, what do people want? More power.
Proof that Polaris hears them loud and clear: the 2019 Sportsman XP 1000 High Lifter Edition.
Um, what’s a “high lifter,” exactly? In Polaris’s own words, it’s built to “dominate the mud,” features “purpose-built mudding power,” packs a “952cc engine built with high and low mud specific transmission with lower gearing” and has “the performance you need and the handling you want for pure mud dominance.”
We get it! You can take this thing through the muck! Er, mud.
More explicitly, the 85 HP you’ll get from the High Lifter’s power train will triple the power offered by many of its competitors, as HiConsumption notes. But the literal interpretation of “all-terrain vehicle” doesn’t stop there.
The High Lifter Edition, while showing upgrades from all angles, gets its name from the roided-out tires: 29.5-inch High Lifter Outlaw 2s, to be exact. Other ingredients include a shielded clutch and engine intake ducting, a 3,500-lb. winch and even an “industry-first centered handlebar-mounted mud bar,” which is supposed to help with stability when leaning heavily to one side. You’ll probably never need it, but when gunning it through a pool of an unknown depth, you may take comfort in its presence.
The grime-clobbering updates will put you a cool $2K over the price of the most recent Sportsman XP 1000: the High Lifter starts at $13,999. But should your local trails look something like The Neverending Story’s Swamp of Sadness, it’ll be worth the extra expense.
Images via Polaris
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