New Kubota RTV X1130 Long Bed Utility Vehicle

Neil: Neil from Messicks here today to walk you around Kubota's new RTV-X1130 utility vehicle. There's a surprising amount of stuff on here that I find is pretty innovative, but also some things that you should be aware of, so join me here today,and we'll walk you around this new utility vehicle.
Neil: The RTV-X1130, this is a new variant of Kubota's utility vehicle line that sports a full six-foot, and then some, bed on the rear of it for utility applications. When you've been around the equipment business as much as I am, it takes a lot to excite you after a while. So often when new models come out, there are iterations and remixes of existing products, and that is the case here. This is based upon Kubota's RTV-X1140, the two-seater long model that we've had for some years now.
I was, actually, pretty surprised here when we were walking around this machine and talking through all the new applications of this and looking at some of the new features that are worked into this bed. There's a lot more here to appreciate than simply taking an old model and dropping a big bed on the back. Today, we're going to take some time, we're going to walk around the bed here first and show you all the things that have changed in relation to this and then talk about the machine itself and some of its features and function that we've come to appreciate from the RTV-X1140 over the years.
Kubota has dabbled with the RTV's bed on and off over the years, and there's some aftermarket companies that have even gotten into this game as well. Fundamentally, the RTV is one of the heaviest chassis of any utility vehicle that's out there on the market and, for that reason, this frame has been attractive to aftermarket companies building heavy-duty, off-road, EMS, related vehicles. Thinking about ways to use this bed has not been new. Most of those, though, have been pretty straightforward concepts of just simple flatbeds to drop onto the back of the RTV, and this will do that, but it also does a bunch of other stuff as well.
You'll notice the bed here is what's called Kubota's Pro Convert Bed. This concept is available over on the RTV-X2 now as well, it's not exclusive to this model, but this Pro Convert idea puts latches and pins here onto the sides of the bed that allows you to remove the bed and convert this into a truly flat bed. If you have an application that calls for loading skids in and out of the back of the utility vehicle, this is a great machine for that.
This doesn't stop here, though. If you want to go and take these sides, you can just-- Not just fold them down to get in, but you could also completely remove them by taking the pins off here at the bottom and removing the sides. Now, one thing you've got to watch here that's not called out too well in the marketing literature for these things is that these sides aren't made to be folded down and have the machine operate. They're going to flop around a little bit, they can get dangerously close to the wheels, so you are supposed to not be operating the machine with the sides flopping around and folded down. They should be removed completely for that use. It's very easy.
You're not just having a tailgate that you can come in from the rear with this. You can also come in from the side. Now, you may have noticed when I flip the sides down over here that there's also a 2x4 stake pocket built into this as well. They're actually encouraging you to build these sides up here. If you have a lot of, say, loose, light material, say hay and that kind of stuff, to carry around. You can have a really high-capacity bed back here. Now, I told you before that this is six feet long. It's also a full 58 inches wide, so it's wider than what the traditional utility vehicle beds are.
Then you've got stake pockets to bring the sides up, so you could fit a truly impressive amount of stuff back here. The capacity of this machine is rated at 1,200 pounds. We know from experience over the years that that's a pretty conservative rating for this machine, but at the end of the day, you're talking a real workhorse and a real high capacity for a utility vehicle. Another neat feature here contained in the bed is this winch mount up at the very top of the bed combined with another option of an extended tailgate down here at the bottom.
What that allows you to do is to have a tailgate that's long enough that when the bed is fully tilted back, the tailgate will contact the ground. Then using the winch, you can pull things up the bed, drag them up into the bed, then be able to hydraulically lower the bed down and drive away with a winched load in the back, so pretty cool. They thought of a lot of really neat applications. The options continue.
My unit here does not have these on, but the bed can be equipped with an optional set of bed work lights. You'll notice this pocket down here on the RTV-1140 two-seater model. This is where your feet usually rest. For this model, no, they built storage containers that fit down here into this hole so you can have a weatherproof container with an open-up door for storage here right on the side of the machine.
Now, because the tailgate here sticks back behind the unit, and you can even have that bed extension that goes further still, if you have a load sitting on the back of the machine, that can cause this bed to want to lift up. and in order to catch that case, there's a locking mechanism right here that you can lock to lock the bed down for a rear load that you might have in the back of the RTV.
As you can see, they did a lot more to make this bed interesting and innovative than what I may have guessed. At first glance, when I heard we were getting a long bed version of the RTV, I was a little bored, but to be honest, they've done a lot here that I think opens this machine up to a lot of interesting and unique applications that we haven't had before. Now, we're going to spend a little bit of time here on the RTV itself.
Now, like I said before, this is based upon the RTV 1140, so this is a machine that we have had for 8 to 10 years now, probably. The 1140 is a two-row version of this machine. You can see, in order to build this long bed, they simply removed the second row. The cab structure here is the same as all of the other RTV utility vehicles so all the accessories that we've always used for roofs and windshields and cabs and heaters and lights, you name it, all fits right onto this machine, so it maintains compatibility with all of those accessories.
Now, a couple things that you should know about Kubota's utility vehicle series. This is a little different than a lot of other companies' utility vehicles are. I usually explain it where most other companies, where they took their utility vehicles, they started with, say, four-wheelers, right, and then built that up into a utility vehicle. Kubota, though, went the other direction. This is a tractor company that took the technology that they knew in tractors and developed that into a utility vehicle, so the perspective that varying companies have come from when constructing utility vehicles is very different.
You'll find this machine has a lot of tractor technology in it. It's Kubota's 24.8-horsepower diesel engine. This is the biggest diesel engine that you can get into a machine before you start to get into, say, DEF and particulate filters and that kind of stuff. There aren't additional external emissions requirements on this class of diesel engine. It produces 51-foot pound of torque, so that's something we're not always used to. If you've run around in high-performance, gas-powered, high-revving machines before, you'll know that they run out of torque pretty quickly when you ask them to start to work.
That's very different in a diesel-powered machine like this. You have ample torque to be able to haul around heavy loads and pull around heavy things. That engine is bolted onto a hydrostatic transmission. This is a tractor's transmission with no belts, no CVT inside of it, no clutches. It's hydrostatic just like a tractor is. Up on the dash, you'll have a high and low and then a pedal on the floor. As you press that pedal down, the machine will come up to speed and when you take your foot off the pedal, the machine is going to stop.
This sometimes is a little surprising to people who are used to coasting when they take their foot off the gas. This machine does not do that. It stops when you remove your foot from the pedal. There's a really heavy chassis underneath of this machine with an independent suspension the whole way around it. This one's going to come through with a little bit heavier springs on that suspension, so I suspect it probably doesn't ride quite as well off-road as what the more passenger-oriented models might, but it's sharing all of that same technology.
Kubota's tractor philosophy that we've had in the RTV utility vehicles for years now comes over into the 1130. If you've not run a Kubota utility vehicle before, this is the second-generation platform that they've used to build their series of machines. This would have come out in about the 2010/2011 timeframe, so we're a good 10 years now into this system, and it's held up very well for us.
You have a simple display over here with your speedometer and a couple of operational lights for the machine. I mentioned it's hydrostatic, so up here on the dash, you have a low, high, neutral, reverse to be able to change those ranges. The principal complaint that you'll hear about RTVs is this lever. Because this is hydrostatic, if the machine is sitting on a grade somehow and is wanting to roll, you can end up with a little bit of pressure on this lever, and it sometimes can be a little bit hard to shift.
In the later generations here, when you step down on the brake pedal, it releases the pressure from the transmission and makes this easier to get into gear, so it has improved a little bit, but you will hear some grumbling sometimes about the operation of that lever. The machine does have power steering on it. This is hydraulic power steering. It's not an electric assist like is often found in other machines, it's truly hydraulic. Continuing that theme of hydraulic is also the dump for the bed. This is not an electric screw to lift the bed up and down.
Again, mostly tractor technology in this machine, so when you lift this up and down, it's using a hydraulic cylinder in order to dump that bed. That means when you take that 1,200-pound load in the back of there and go to lift it up, you're not listening to a slow little whiny screw as it tries to lift the thing up. When you pull on this, that hydraulic cylinder will very quickly dump your load out the back. You have a diff lock down here on the bottom if you'd like to lock up the rear. There is limited slip differentials in this machine from the get-go, but you can get a posi lock here using the diff lock. Your four-wheel drive is shifted right down here between the driver and the passenger.
If you flip these seats up, there's storage compartments for a couple little things down here underneath the seat, and like I said, a nearly unending list of accessories from the prior utility vehicle series that will give you several options for roofs, windshields, cabs, lights, you name it, they can all be added onto your operator's area. While I can spout off all the benefits of this machine and the cool features and all the neat stuff that we can do with it, there's two things that we should talk about that, if you're considering buying one, you should probably be aware of.
The first is its wheelbase. It is a long-frame machine. Compared to the extra RTVs, your back wheels are sitting back about 18 inches further than the rest of the RTV series does and that definitely increases the turning radius of the machine. If you're going to be using it for, say, work-oriented tasks in and around a barn, you're not going to make the tightest turns on this machine because of its longer wheelbase. While the capacity is certainly nice, it does hurt its maneuverability to a degree because of its length.
The other thing you should know too is that this is based upon the second generation RTV platform. It shares the commonality with the existing RTV-1120, RTV-1140, and RTV, now, 1130. The model numbers all make sense and fall nicely into line, but this same year there's also an RTV-X2 coming out that has some additional product improvements, some changes that are happening in the transmission and the driving dynamics of the machine, and those changes in the RTV-X2 are not in this model. This is the existing platform.
They couldn't go through in one year and update all of the machines at one time. In the next model year or two, I wouldn't be surprised to see some of those changes and improvements now show up in this model and see this be redesigned at that point. The product cycles for these things tend to run about every three to five years or so that Kubota gives things a refresh, so it probably will happen pretty quickly on this machine that will get some new improvements to it that we've seen in those other models.
This is available here to you today, and we can see, probably, what the future looks like kf you check out the videos that I'm also going to be posting on the new RTV-X2 series here very shortly. You should have a good idea, if you pick one of these up today, you might be missing in a model that might come out two to three years from now. Shopping for a piece of equipment, then we can help. If you've got parts or service needs for a machine you've already got give us a call at Messicks. We're available at 800-222-3373 or online at messicks.com.