In my opinion the snowmobile industry is not far from Formula One racing... Pretty soon there will be an onboard computer to help you sidehill. I am all about technology to a point, but this new tilt-O-track or whatever they are calling it is stupid! Are they targeting guys who ride in the mountains or guys who want to be able to say I can side hill my sled in the parking lot?? Why not work on refining and making sleds lighter. Polaris is the first manufacture to take a real step towards doing this with their new belt drive (and I'm a cat guy). These are the types of changes that make our sport and the manufactures better. I rode a 2013 XM in Revy last year (deep snow conditions) for about 4 hrs. I threw a leg over the machine with the intension of being completely unbiased. The sled is definitely and improvement over the 2012 and a major improvement over the earlier years. Any doo rider that rides the new XM will like it much better if you ride on one ski allot. My impression of the machine was flickable and very light in the front end, when you turn the bars you go from lock to lock as they turn super easy and it takes a little time to adjust for this. Once your sidehilling (easy to initiate) it felt fairly planted and the balance point was good, but the machine had a tendency to want to turn back up hill. Nosing the machine down hill while in a sidehill moving slowly was a challenge, it would resist forcing you to muscle it a little. Once you had it orientated in the right direction it would get grabby as if it wanted to go back up hill and the track was dropping out. Going straight downhill and cranking a turn back up hill was easy and it worked well. Picking through the trees was good and bad. For widely spaced trees it was good, for tighter stuff it wanted to get high in the nose and had a tendency to trench a little when you made quick directional changes. Again I attribute this to the nose of the sled wanting to go uphill to fast. Carving downhill turns was easy and the sled felt responsive. The clutching needs work – when you let off the throttle you get big time nose dive as there is a substantial amount of engine breaking (or at least that's what it feels like). So much so that after 4hrs of riding my shoulders were soar from pushing myself away from the bars under declaration and then pulling hard when accelerating to stop nose dive. Power was good, but flattened out on top. Felt like it was going to start rippen, but would fall off slightly. Weight felt ok – not too heavy, not really light and most of it it feels like its up higher in the saddle. All in all I would say its a great sled, but not a game changer by any means. IMO doo has come up to where the other sleds are in the handling department and is fun to ride. I'm not brand bashing just giving feedback on the way the sled felt to me. If you want to know if this sled is right for you – go ride one!
