I know Smart Shox has been available for over a year from Ski-Doo and to be completely transparent we had a limited build Gen4 Renegade with Smart Shox over a year ago. However, there’s a small wrinkle to this story.
The Smart Shox equipped Renny did not have the Smart Shox compatible ECU “chip”. Why? The same reason about a bi-jillion cars and trucks are running around missing “chips” which run all manner of accessories: Supply chain and Vendor problems!
So… we rode a Renny X-RS all last season that was defaulted to a “get home” setting on its adjustable KYB dampers. Let me tell you about the “get home” default compression damping setting. It feels like the shocks are filled with cement instead of oil!
This, of course, is not anything like the ride quality we experienced at Snow Shoot. Knowing Ski-Doo’s Smart Shox are revolutionary in their ability to semi-actively adjust to terrain you are riding over, we did not pass any opinions on the PR model Renegade we rode last winter.
This is why I can’t wait to ride the new Gen5 Renegade X-RS with Smart Shox (with a chip installed!) What we experienced in Yellowstone was nothing short of remarkable when riding deep and fast into moguled, choppy and rolling trail surfaces.
To make this all ring true you must realize Ski-Doo’s current rMotion 137-inch skid provides the best ride in the biz without Smart Shox. One would think to discern an improvement over the current rMotion set up would require a huge improvement in overall ride quality. Correct?
Here’s the beef. Smart Shox do tangibly improve on the rMotion’s amazing compliance. It’s the kind of improvement that has you getting off the sled, standing back and saying: “This can’t be right, can it?”.
At the end of the day – to use an overworked expression – I need to get on a Smart Shox equipped Ski-doo and let it swallow some high quality, gnarly trail surfaces. Like I said at the beginning of this commentary. I can’t wait!
