2019 Argo Aurora first voyage

Before you even start with me, this damn thing has a handlebar. My colleagues recently made a big deal over this as a determinant of a vehicle’s motorcycle-y-ness. The 2019 Argo Aurora 800SX has a bar, so if I understand my colleagues correctly, this is a motorcycle. Or something.

Look, I’ll get right down to brass tacks. As Common Tread expands its base of contributors with more and more qualified personnel, I too must grow in order to stay on the payroll, so I am now in charge of Extraneous Bullshit and Not Quite Motorcycles, which is the precise reason you are reading about a floaty boat-car.

A bit of background

Normally, I am issued keys and a press kit and have a bevy of handlers and press representatives when we review stuff here. But that’s bikes. Argo, understandably, has never called me to find out if I wanted to test their wares, and that’s fair. However, I am a social butterfly, and one of my good friends is Chris Kline, who works at a dealer, the next best thing to a factory.

Chris is the Chief Bad Decisions Officer at Blackmans Cycle Center in Emmaus, Pennsylvania, which is basically the home for all things off-road. Whether you want two skis, two knobby tires (or four knobbies or even eight paddly tires, in the case of this Argo), they sell it. I am going to get them to loan me a Roxor one of these days.

Chris is a military man, and one of his jobs with the Big Green Machine was teaching combat driving — HMMWVs, MRAPs, and the like. When a man like that asks you if you want to go play with a weird vehicle on his boss’ dime, you don’t think. You say yes.

The test

I showed up at Blackmans with my muck boots in the bed of the truck. Chris was loading up the Argo so we could go stretch its legs. He has an incredibly nice truck and since he knows how to use it (remember all the training?), I was able to pretty much go on mental autopilot and start my meandering review process.

The first item of note is that the Aurora was getting tugged on a 10-foot trailer, and it took up… well, all of it. If you’re dropping one of these things at hunting camp and leaving it there, no big deal. But if you plan on bringing this in for maintenance, a truck and trailer are pretty much necessities. (And given the capability of the Argo, I’d imagine most of you will want a 4x4, as long as I’m spending your money.)

I popped the hood to see what I was working with. We gots a 748 cc Kohler 30-horsepower V-twin that’s liquid-cooled, fuel-injected, and mounted with the crankshaft in an east-west orientation. Cool. Just like a Harley, kinda-sorta. (2020 models now have Vanguard engines, which is the super-nice Briggs & Stratton line, displacing 993 cc and kicking out 40 horses. These are badass engines. They’re very durable, and are made in America. Yeah, I’ll talk about commercial motors all day long. They ain’t sexy, and they ain’t supposed to be.)

So there’s a CVT like a sled, with High and Low gears, and three differentials! There are also two master cylinders because that's how skid steering works; the locked-up wheels skid on the terrain. The second row of wheels on the Aurora is driven by the transmission, and all the other wheels are connected by systems of shafts and chains. Badass. I’d like to take a moment to point out this model is equipped with Argo’s new APS (Argo Progressive Steering) which they are very proud of in sales literature. It offers variable drive-to-skid ratio to make successful steering a little less operator-dependent. (Even to the point of rotating the braked side's wheels backwards, I am told.) We’ll come back to that.

And there’s also huge tires. Eight of them. With paddles.

Other neat shit on this rig: I saw a Warn winch poking out of the brushguard, and when I flicked one of the switches on the dash I didn’t recognize (I’m sort of stupid like that), I realized I was dry-running a bilge pump. Man, I never thought I’d get to write “bilge pump” on Common Tread. Take that, Oliver.

After that I tested out my LaCroix seltzer in the cupholder. Maybe Chris can take Middle-Aged Suburban White Guy to the max, but I was not about to let the title go unchallenged.

Chris stuck the Argo up on the trailer. We strapped it down, then climbed into his beautifully detailed truck, which cuddled me in two-tone leather as the local country station played softly. I stuck my cell phone into his wireless charger. Hey, I’m press, right? I need to be treated accordingly. I was a little curious how this truck was supposed to stay nice after our little romp in the muck, but quickly filed that concern away into the “not my problem” dossier. And given Chris’ background, this was one of the few times where I was not the most experienced person with moving huge equipment, so I was happy to let him do all the worrying about the towing. (That Chevy rode like a cloud even loaded up. He wasn’t worrying at all, and I didn’t blame him.)

We unloaded at the local ski slope, of all places. They’ve got a ton of land they let the Blackmans staff use. We grabbed Bill, the head of maintenance, and packed into the Aurora, with Chris at the wheel helm bars controls. We elected to test in the water first, then test on land later. Oh… yeah. Did I not mention the Aurora is amphibious? Because it is. That’s actually the draw here — you’re looking at a 20 mph top speed in high range on land, and about three mph in the water. (Knots? I don’t know nautical stuff. Jib starboard boom. The Argo is slow, but it can travel anywhere but the air, and we even tried that out, as you'll read in a little bit.) That’s why this rig has the paddle tires… it has to move not just over dirt, but through the water, as well.

It was at this moment some new information came to light. Remember the guy who did all the crazy military driving and blew stuff up and can pull a trailer blindfolded? Turns out homie had never taken an Argo into the water. This was his first time doing this. Now, normally, readers, you should know that on a manufacturer press ride, they treat us like kings. Fancy hotels. Fluffy pillows. Posh dinners with $16 cocktails. And if you bin a bike, the manufacturer reps act like you’re not a complete nitwit, tell you it’s not a big deal, and often give you another pristine machine right off the trailer to get that perfect cover photo.

This was not a manufacturer launch.

This Aurora was a dealer unit. Blackmans was on the hook for whatever damage we inflicted. And we had a third of a ton of over-the-hill male packed into this boatcar thinger, and none of us had ever taken it into the water. (Incidentally, the Aurora has a 930-pound load limit on land, but that drops to 780 on the water. The three of us were perilously close to that limit. Sorry, boys.) Chris asked me if I wanted to pilot it, and I politely demurred with, “Fuck that, Chris. If this thing goes to the bottom, I ain’t buying it. You neglected to tell me this was your first aqua run, there, GI Joe.”

So, a manufacturer launch it was not. The other thing it was not was a boat launch. We nosed up to the edge of the water, and Chris drove in. That sounds low-key. It was not. The “hood” was practically covered in water. I am certain we all saw this thing going right to Davy Jones’ locker in our minds’ eyes. And then, the front left dipped into the water. Hard. I realized Chris was still giving the Argo gas, and our balance was way off. I slid all the way to the right rear, and we leveled off a bit, but not enough. I scooched my ass out out out, just like I was descending a hill on my dirt bike, and we leveled off. I rearranged a bit, and all three of us sighed and gently unclenched our rectums.

We were dry. I mean, no water came in. None. I had left my muck boots in the truck and just had my old work boots on. Dry as a bone. Chris was wearing crosstrainers and ankle socks, and he was dry, too. Is this stupid? Sure, we were underprepared, but it’s hardly like we were in the backcountry.

We zipped around the pond very, very slowly, and then brought it back in. Bill jumped into his little Kubota RTV and headed off to do some real work. I then realized I had to do my job, too. Happily, I love operating weird machinery, so I familiarized myself with the controls, which were astoundingly simple. The e-brake is on the left side of the machine; that was unexpected.

Other than a winch and bilge pump (items I am familiar with, but never see in the course of my employment), the other big weird thing to wrap my head around was the throttle: It’s a lever. Like a brake. So the left lever is the brakes for the whole rig, and the right lever is the go-button. Talk about a mind-bender.

Now, remember how we were water testing first? Right. So that meant I had six feet of terra firma to figure out how to roll this rig down the road (trail?) and then it was into the drink. I had to drive into a body of water. I knew this, of course. Intellectually, I knew I had to roll this civilian, unarmed, unarmored tank into the lake, but that didn’t really take over my brain until I was dipping that nose into the water, sliding down, reminding me of my Jeepin’ days where you have to just trust it’s gonna work. (But for realsies, you can actually add tracks to an Argo.)

The heavy engine in the front doesn’t help matters, as it wants to sploosh right in until the more buoyant rear of the Aurora follows. And when you’re chicken to drown your buddy’s $25,999 toy that he doesn’t even own, that slide down into the water is interminable. But I plowed ahead. Suddenly, I was in, and it was doing...stuff.

Allow me to clarify: The Argo as a watercraft is a little awful. Steering is vague and ponderous, at best. The best way I can describe it as like drifting a car on ice at three miles an hour. But let’s also remember a few things. First, it ain’t a boat, though if you had a pond nearby you could absolutely drive one of these suckers right in to go pull largemouth bass out. Second, it has paddle tires. They’re a remarkably inefficient way to translate Kohler-power into water locomotion, but the thing does get where it is going, and the transition in and out is seamless — point and shoot.

I brought it up on land, and then started gettin’ after it. Now we come back to the APS I mentioned earlier. Dual-stage steering my ass. This thing handles exactly like a skid steer. Stop, drag, and pivot. (Collaborate and listen? Wait, no, that’s something else.) It’s jarring at best, but this is what happens when you lock up eight wheels on four axles in two tracks: You slide the tires (or chirp ‘em, if you’ve got enough power and you’re on the pavement. Young Lem employed mini-spools and Lincoln lockers in his younger days.) If you can run a Bobcat, the Aurora will feel very familiar. I think I'd prefer skid-steer controls, myself. I can run twin sticks and being able to simply toss some of those differentials would keep the cost down. However, this has a lower barrier to entry and feels more "car-like," so a test ride becomes more likely to move some units, so I understand.

I did some slide-y turns and then stopped because I was tearing up the vegetation very quickly. The Aurora is reasonably quick on land for what it is, especially up in high gear over fairly smooth terrain. Chris and I took it up a little three-foot berm that my dirt bike would swallow with ease. We ascended. Then the front of the Argo, heavily front-loaded with a Kohler and two boys fed on American beef, slammed back down to Earth, beckoned by gravity. And with zero suspension — none — we both clicked our teeth. After that, we gritted them as we tried to act as though it wasn’t that bad. (It was.)

And with test mileage that would be more accurately described if measured in feet, my Argo Adventure came to an end. This is easily the shortest review (by distance) I’ve ever done.

You might think I’m unimpressed by the Argo, and that would be dead wrong. I want to pontificate briefly on the fact that with six feet of training, I was able to figure out how to make this thing go well enough to dunk it in the water, take it back out, and then zip around on land. That’s a low barrier to entry, which makes it perfect for non-powersports people, exactly who this is aimed at.

Here’s the thing. Everyone who knew I was going to try this thing asked if we had fun. I had fun hanging out with a buddy, but the experience of piloting this machine is not fun. It’s fun in the way my riding lawn mower is fun — it does a commendable job and I enjoy needing a certain amount of skill to operate it, but it’s a tool to perform a task. The ride itself is not exhilarating. You take an Argo to a place that is breathtaking to do incredible stuff — backpacking, hunting, birdwatching, whatever. It’s a part of that story (and a catalyst to making an idea a reality), but it is, at its core, unbelievably utilitarian.

It’s also, to my knowledge, without peer: I drove into a lake, drove (Sailed? Paddled? Shipped?) around in it, then drove back out. I mean, on that one criterion alone, the Argo Aurora wins and slays all comers, and on that criterion, which may or may not be a technicality, there is no competition.

That was an easy review.