If you’ve driven an ATV before, or you already own one and you’re considering purchasing a side by side, one thing is going to become very quickly apparent: side by sides are generally larger than your traditional ATV is going to be. If you think about your ATV like a small car, it would make sense to think of your SxS as something like a larger truck or trailer.
And if you’ve driven on the freeway before, you may have seen signs that give warnings to larger trucks before they get to overpasses of a certain height. How large your vehicle is can make a big difference to you, both on the highway and off-road in certain situations.
There are lots of benefits to using a larger vehicle than an ATV. Side by sides are traditionally used for utility-based purposes and not primarily transportation and fun, although they are still certainly good for both of those things. People who purchase side by sides are usually people who want to transport heavy equipment, pull things using an engine with more horsepower, or other purposes that a smaller vehicle would not be able to accomplish.
For this article we’re going to quickly go over some general info on side by side dimensions and sizes, and why knowing these things are so important.
Do Your Homework
If you have a garage that’s a certain size, and you aren’t sure that you can fit a vehicle as large as a side by side inside, you definitely want to check out the dimensions on your ride before you go ahead and pick one up. Not all SxS’s are built to the same size, so it makes a lot of sense for you to do some research on the particular model you have in mind to see if you can accommodate it within your garage or other equivalent space.
Furthermore, many trails and roads where you live may be narrower, and navigating them with a side by side that’s too large to fit through doesn’t make a whole lot of sense.
Side By Side Dimensions
Width
Most side by sides are going to end up being roughly 50 to 65 inches wide. Keep in mind that this is a general approximation, so make sure to check what the dimensions of the specific model you have in mind are before you settle on which model you want.
Height
But it’s not just the width that’s important. Like the example posed earlier, sometimes you’ll need clearance under a bridge or an overpass of some kind, or maybe you’ll just need to fit inside of a barn or other outdoor structure with your vehicle. On average, most SxS vehicles are going to be around 65 to 75 inches tall. But like we mentioned earlier, these are general approximations, so make sure to check your size ahead of time.
Weight
Lastly we should cover the approximate weight of the vehicles. Oftentimes weight doesn’t matter too much, but it can be important to know if you have to navigate some tricky terrain. Generally SxS vehicles end up being around 1,300 to about 1,900 pounds in weight, and this will of course go up if you are transporting something as well.
That’s going to about do it for this article. It’s not a particularly glamorous part of buying a side by side, thinking about its size and weight, but it’s a very important and critical step to make sure that you can properly accommodate your vehicle.
If you found this article on side by side dimensions helpful and want to see more of our side by side blog posts, click here.
