Audio comfort level
Two things I like about the Polaris 700
Sportsman are related to
the engine.
The first is an engine brake.
As you let off the gas some sort of braking gizmo in the engine
brings the ATV to a full stop. I barely need to use the regular brakes
anymore, but what I like most is the increased safety. Sometimes Lucy
wants to stop in front of me for a quick smell check where she pauses
and puts her nose in the air. The engine brake decreases stopping
distance by a considerable amount.
Engine noise is the next
thing I like compared to the 400
Polaris. I guess I prefer
a more deep, throaty engine to the 2 cycle whine that sounds too much
like a chainsaw for my audio comfort level.
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About us: Anna Hess and Mark Hamilton spent over a decade living self-sufficiently in the mountains of Virginia before moving north to start over from scratch in the foothills of Ohio. They've experimented with permaculture, no-till gardening, trailersteading, home-based microbusinesses and much more, writing about their adventures in both blogs and books.
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While I don't know enough about the sportsman to say that there isn't a special gizmo in the engine, I somewhat doubt it.
The thing is that 4-stroke by their nature have much more engine braking than a two stroke.
A four stroke in general has more moving parts (balancing shaft, valvetrain) than a two stroke. And in contrast to a 2-stroke it only has one power stroke in two revolutions of the crankshaft, instead of a power stroke in every revolution.
This is the reason why a 2-stroke will generally produce more power than a 4-stroke engine of the same capacity.
Modern 4-stroke engines (with EFI) will cut the fuel flow to the engine completely when you're engine braking. Two strokes that use pre-mix cannot do that because this would also starve the engine of oil.