You don’t realize just how much noise an ATV makes until you kill the engine in the backcountry. A serine silence envelops you, the wind rippling across a ridgeline, moving branches and bushes, swaying the tall grass. The creek you’d been riding adjacent to you suddenly comes to life with sound. The silence is deafening after you’ve been running out the 1000cc four-stroke engine sitting beneath your seat.
On a ranch or farm, a typical ATV can often be heard across the property. A low growl as you ride from fence post to fence post, or haul things from one side of the farm to the other. It can be disruptive to livestock or the horses you keep in the corral. When using an ATV for hunting, the noise it makes can alert game to your presence long before you arrive. And while most hunters will use an ATV to access hard-to-reach locations, hiking the rest of the way in, there’s still a need to keep things quiet as much as you can.
As it turns out, quiet is precisely what Can-Am’s new E-ATV is. So much so that during our test ride at Turpin Meadow Ranch outside of Jackson Hole, Wyoming, I was worried I might spook a grizzly bear wandering in one of the meadows we’d crossed during the course of the day. But quiet is also one of the major selling points Can-Am is pushing with its all-new ATV, which is powered by its Rotax E-Power Unit using an 8.9 kWh battery. The company saw the need for a low-maintenance utility machine, and filled the void using their 1000R Outlander G3L platform as a starting point.
