Are sidecars relevant in 2025? Sidecars were first bolted to motorcycles as a low-cost alternative for hauling the family around. Then when cars were reduced to little plastic appliances, running an outfit wasn’t something done to save a quid. These days it’d have to be a scooter to be more economical than a car.
Nobody I know would be seen dead on a bloody scooter. Except you of course, Basher. You go get the coffees any way you want, mate…
Sidecars are about fun. They’re about skills most riders or drivers never knew existed. The basic plot’s lovely and stable sitting still but once underway, everything – accelerating, braking, right or lefthand turns – requires a coordinated approach that comes from practice and confidence.
Riding an outfit is different, and for a lot of folks that’s more than enough. They can also be incredibly capable off-road if they’re built to purpose, with plenty of clearance and potential for the passenger to chuck his weight around.
So, in the right hands, the right outfit is the ultimate adventure machine!
Forty years ago my brother Nicko and I built a sidecar from a pranged Honda 250 to use as a prospecting rig. It was narrow and nimble and had enough carrying capacity for a roll of ladders and a generator. It was also impossible to get stuck – we could lift it out of big holes and shove it through the mud – and so nimble it got us places in the rushes quicker than any four-wheel-drive. We also had ladies queuing for rides around the bore baths when the pub shut.
Good memories, trust me! With those in mind, Nicko and I borrowed a Ural Gear Up from Matt and Clare at Ural Australia in Uralla (that’s a lot of Ur per sentence!) for a prospecting trip around New England a while back. Why? Because this is as good as an all-purpose outfit gets. The engine’s a 750cc air-cooled boxer making 41 horsepower and a torque curve flatter than a track out of Alice Springs. Hit the electric starter – there’s a kick starter for emergencies too, YES! – and the familiar putter putter of half a Volkswagen reminds you straight away that these things will go all day, every day. No fuzzy digital crap here; simple fuel injection is as tech as it gets.
There’s so many grab rails on the Ural Gear Up Adventure, even your granny could hop in without adjusting her corset. That makes it dead easy to clamber all over the rig if you’re stuck mid-stream trying to sling a rope to a winch or something.
Mind you, once you put power through to the sidecar wheel, stopping means hanging her up on a log or something. No wonder the Germans had so much luck with two-wheel-drive outfits in the desert battles of World War II. You can use two-wheel drive and reverse together, so you can get out of trouble almost as quickly as you slide into it.
Ten years ago I ran into an older couple touring Australia on a Ural outfit when they copped a flat tyre somewhere out of Darwin. They told me they’d left home in Tasmania, boarded the barge and turned left on the mainland. They were carrying camping gear – you can carry a tonne of stuff on an outfit – and had happily chuffed across the Nullarbor and up the west coast at the sort of pace that allows plenty of time for sucking up the scenery. They rode over plenty of it too, trekking off the bitumen whenever they felt like looking up a creek or camping on a hilltop. And everywhere they went people wanted to talk about the sidecar.
If they were doing it today they’d have a Gear Up and their photos wouldn’t look much different. Bottom line? Urals are the pinnacle of sidecar design and engineering and offer a totally unique method of getting around that’s loaded with adventure.
Feeling a bit jaded with this modern world and too molly coddled by ABS and traction control?
Try the ultimate cure for boredom, the Ural Gear Up. It proves sidecars aren’t merely relevant, they’re flying higher than ever in a world of their own.
