How are they in the dirt?

     Here at Carlisle Cycle and Scooter we do a little bit of everything on two wheels. We sell and service scooters, motorcycles, dirt bikes and even the famous Harley Davidson from time to time. Several of the small scooters we sell are styled towards the dirt end of things. We are often asked just how they are in the dirt.
      The Genuine Rough house 50 and the Lance Cabo are two popular models that have some dirt bike styling and a bit of a bad boy image. For this test we had a Kymco Cobracross 50 ( a model very similar to the RH50 with almost the same specs) and a Lance Cabo 150. We will be doing some off road testing in a future post with a RH50. If you want to see how well one of those holds up, we also suggest looking at A Symba in the Wild. The author owns a few small scoots and the RH50 gets a few write ups along with the others.

    For our adventure, we had a hot muggy modern morning and a few hours to kill, so we searched out some real back woods trails.                      
                                             

       Okay, those of you that know us will surely notice the total lack of gear on my son, Cody. Okay, okay, we goofed off in our backyard after breakfast, BUT we do have 7 acres and some good dirt bike trails.

                                                                        

       That looked a bit to easy, so we found a steeper hill to climb.

                                                                            

      It may not look like it in the photo, but wet leaves and some slime made for a tough pull for the 50cc. He needed all the room he could get.
                                                                 

                                                                            

    The Cabo, being a 150cc machine, handled the hill with ease, unfortunately the video for the Cabo came out a bit shaky; so it was time to go find the equalizer, MUD.
                                                            

                                                                                  

      There may have been some mud slinging committed against some poor sod stuck on a 50. The witnesses weren't talking.

                                                                               

                                                                            

       We did finally get the 50 out of the stream (time for a new tire) and took the bikes up by the pond for a break.
                                                                                

     The Cabo, being the ham, decided to pose for a picture out on the dock. It was fun getting it back off without being tempted to make the jump. We do our own stunts ,you know.

       After a fun morning of testing these bikes on steep uphills, mud and even stream crossings. We found that they are not dirtbikes, but they DID take us everywhere we wanted to go. The pace has to be backed down a bit for the size of tires and lack of armour under the engine. However, these guys will take you down just about any fireroad you can imagine, and can certainly keep you from walking to your favorite fishing hole.
     Both testers are experienced dirt bike riders; so we were willing to push it a little bit more than is recommended for these machines.The makers of these bikes stress that they are not for off road use, but if you keep your ego in check and use them for utilitarian transport. They will do quite well.