Latest news with #SxS
The Drive
2 days ago
- Automotive
- The Drive
Why I Still Like the Idea of a Portable Dashboard GPS
The latest car news, reviews, and features. About 20 years ago, smartphones were not yet ubiquitous, and in-dash nav was an uncommon option. Some of us were printing directions from and reading them off like rally notes to make our way through unfamiliar cities. This created a brief boom for iPhone-sized portable GPS units, which ended as smartphones made their way into everyone's pockets. However, there's still a place for dedicated GPS units today, as long as they're good enough to survive—off-road. Today, Garmin announced the Tread 2—an updated version of the brand's portable off-road GPS tablet, which, yes, is still a thing that exists. Portable GPS may be obsolete in the context of college or family road trips, but with enough features and foul-weather resistance, this type of device can be a great adventure enabler. Tread 2 will ship in a few different configurations; there's a smaller Powersports one and several huge Baja racing models. The newly announced versions are the Overland and SxS models, with suction cups for truck-cab mounting or a clamp for roll-cage mounting, respectively. It's quite a bit bigger than the original Tread, with an 8.0-inch screen instead of 5.5, and stronger. Tread 2 features an IP67 protection rating (water and dustproof), whereas the old one had an IPX7 rating (waterproof only). It's a lot more advanced than the playing card-sized Garmins and TomToms rich kids were getting as graduation gifts circa 2004. You can sync it with the Tread app to notate and download routes, help you route-plan based on weather and vehicle specs, work as a short-range communicator between vehicles, and even track your dogs if they're wearing Garmin collars. But it's also a pretty big investment—Garmin's listing the Tread 2 Overland and SxS models at $999.99. Tread 2 Overland in action. Garmin I'd need to spend some time with this thing to tell you whether or not it's worth it, but conceptually speaking, I still really like the idea of a dedicated and durable GPS for off-road adventure purposes. The first reason is convenience. When I'm out wheeling, I like to use my phone primarily for taking pictures of my dog and scenic vistas. If it's occupied with mapping duty, grabbing it and switching apps is annoying. Or, if I'm really treating myself, I like to stick my phone in a Pelican case, seal it up, and not think about my notifications at all until I'm off the trail. Then there's the durability factor. My iPhone has survived many drops and falls with the OEM wireless charging case, but if it spends a whole Baja trip on the dashboard of my truck, it's going to get sandblasted with dust and cooked in the sun. There's a reason few, if any, Baja racers use iPads for mapping purposes—normal tablets and smartphones tend to overheat on a multi-day trip in rough elements. And forget strapping my phone to my Polaris Ranger's roll bar, the thing would get soaked in mud immediately. Finally, there's the issue of reception. You can download offline maps, especially if you're using a good cartography app like onX Off-Road, but there's still the possibility you'll forget, you'll go somewhere you didn't download, or you're like me and your phone simply can't fit the data because it's chockablock with dog pics. Dedicated GPS units definitely have a more limited use case than they did at the turn of the millennium. It'd be nuts to buy one of these just to drive on roads that Google has already mapped. But for serious backcountry use, the value proposition of something like the Tread 2 is still pretty strong. Got a tip? Send us a note at tips@
Yahoo
09-02-2025
- Automotive
- Yahoo
You Won't Believe What Just Won King of the Hammers!
They say racing improves the breed. Well then, get ready for a whole new breed. For the first time in the 18-year history of the event, a SxS has won King of the Hammers. Kyle Chaney's Can-Am not only won the massive, day-long suffer- and dirt-fest out in the Mojave Desert's Johnson Valley, he beat the next-closest guy by a full half hour, and the guy after that, off-road and NASCAR racing great Robby Gordon, by over two hours. The race wasn't without its unique challenges. Navigation was a problem, for instance. Just knowing where you are in all the dust and trackless desert was Chaney's biggest challenge. 'The course was crazy, we didn't even know where we were going as there was just nothing there. We had to pick where we were going. There is definitely a lot of luck involved in this, but we picked some good lines. Terry (Madden) was an awesome navigator, and the car stayed together. We just took care of the car all day. Guys were passing us and I just let them go because we had to keep the car together.' Previous KoH winner JP Gomez, of the Gomez racing family that has won KoH before, finished second this year. 'Oh man, this is part of racing right,' said Gomez at the finish. 'You go fast, you get flats. You go slow, you get passed by Josh Blyler.' But Blyer wasn't on the podium. That went to a famous name. Robby Gordon rolled into Hammertown two hours and 22 minutes behind Chaney, Gordon was a last-minute entry in the race and drove one of the Gomez family's pre-runners. 'Thank you to all of you fans who come out and support us,' Gordon said to the crowd. 'Mike Jams (ceo of Hammerkings Productions, the company that runs the King of the Hammers), thank you, and Dave Cole (co-founder of the race), thank you for having this crazy dream and building King of the Hammers. It is insane. Everybody comes out here and has a great time.' King of the Hammers is surely the hardest single-day beat-down in racing. It started 18 years ago by a group of friends who used to drive their 4x4s up and down the crazed, boulder-strewn madness carved into the hills around Johnson Valley, Calif., a dystopian hellscape in a land that appreciates dystopian hellscapes. The runs went up seemingly impossible canyons with boulders the size of washing machines and Volkswagons, some the size of single-car garages. These pre-running pioneers from two decades ago named each canyon trail: Jackhammer, Sledgehammer, Clawhammer… They were all Hammers. Then one of the wheelers made the audacious claim that he could run all of the Hammers in a single day. 'No way,' the bros said. 'Way,' he replied. Or words to that effect. Thus, The King of the Hammers was born. Now, close to 100,000 spectators gather each year in a temporary fiberglass paradise of motorhomes and fifth-wheels called Hammertown, eating dust and cheering on the maniacs who come to race. KoH now stretches over two weeks, motorcycle races first, followed by four-wheeled competitions. The biggest and most prestigious of them all is The King of the Hammers. Until now, it had always been won by purpose-built, vaguely Jeep-looking contraptions with four-wheel drive and tremendous jounce and rebound that could not only crawl over big boulders but bomb flat out across the hardened desert in between the Hammers. Your rig has to be able to do both to win. And this year, to everyone's surprise, it was a Can-Am UTV that won it.
