Imagine that you’ve just dropped $50,000 on your first side-by-side: a Polaris RZR Pro Boost R. You’ve even scraped together enough cash for an RV and a trailer, and you’ve convinced your boss to give you an extra day of PTO over Halloween weekend. You filled your tow rig with $ 9.00-per-gallon diesel, and you’ve made it to the dune-covered off-road slice of heaven that is Glamis, California. It’s gonna be a good weekend.
You’re revved up and ready to go with your helmet on and your dune flag up, but on your first outing to Oldsmobile Hill you manage to lawn dart it into a witch’s eye, (translated: you misjudge your huge jump and land in a deep hole in the sand that is often not visible until it’s too late). The front end slams hard into the sand, shearing off your front control arm and bending the tie rod all to hell. On a normal weekend, you might think that your fun is done, right? Not this weekend, my friend.
Halloween weekend in Glamis is Camp RZR, where a Polaris-sponsored mobile village pops up next to the big dunes complete with vendors, a Ferris wheel, and a garage that will fix your rig for free. Yes, in 2026, you read that right. For free.
In the garage, there are 10 mechanics’ bays, each with specialized tools for electrical work, suspension, driveline, and clutches. Then there are factory-trained Polaris techs ready to do all the wrenching for you. Sounds like heaven, right?
Brandon Glissmeyer is the Director of Engineering for Recreation at Polaris, and he heads up the garage. This is the man who says that not only is the labor free, but the parts are free too.
“So if I come here and destroy my $1,000 Fox Live shock, you’ll just replace it,” I ask, thinking I must have misheard, or that there’s some weird catch like a reverse mortgage or something.
“Yeah,” Glissmeyer says. “If we have them.”
There are at least two full crates of those $1,000 Fox Live Valve shocks sitting nearby, so yes, they do in fact have them.
For those with the know-how, they can remove a broken part themselves, exchange it for a new one, and reinstall it. The line was 100 folks deep at least, most needing a belt, clutch, or both, though there were plenty of flat-brim types wandering around with bent control arms and tie rods.
I’m heartened to see that long line of DIYers. Back in the day, if you wanted to get out deep in the dunes, you had to build a car yourself. You knew every quirk, every weakness, and how to address them when they inevitably broke. With the advent of side-by-sides, you can finance your way to fun, but many folks aren’t familiar with their rigs at all. That’s good for the dealers, but can leave you in a tight spot if you’re in the middle of nowhere.
Glissmeyer says that Polaris tries to educate its consumers as much as possible. If someone has burned up three CVT belts in a weekend, the mechanics will talk to them about proper break-in procedures, dig into the clutch, and show customers what to look for when prepping for a weekend. An ounce of prevention is worth a pound of cure, they say.
Surely there has to be a limit to what Polaris and its army of techs will do over the weekend, right? The mechanics won’t take on any transmission or engine swaps– they try to maximize their time to get the most customers through– but it’s hard to find fault with that mentality. The fact that it’s more of a time issue than a cost issue is pretty amazing on its own.
They don’t turn away jobs that would be very expensive outside of Camp RZR, either. I saw one side-by-side with the whole front end completely torn apart. Shock missing, arms akimbo, axles nowhere to be found.
“That’s a $12,000 job,” says Glissmeyer. “And we just hand it back to them.”
Mechanics are paid for their time at the Camp RZR garage, but the parts bill Polaris just eats over the weekend is what knocks me out.
I spoke with Oliver Ouradnik, a project engineer at Polaris who also coordinates the parts supply for Camp RZR, and told him it looks like he’s got $500,000 worth of OEM parts spread out around him.
“That’s about right,” he says. “That’s what customers would be paying at the dealer.”
My jaw dropped.
All the parts are brought in via two semi trucks, and he and his team spend three days organizing the garage to keep things efficient and get the most UTVs fixed as possible. Pallets of axles, crates of shocks, and small bins full of nuts and bolts line the floor. There are tables piled high with clutches, clutch covers, and control arms. I look over and see a crew member walking across the lot with CVT belts draped all over him, looking like some kind of freaky Michelin man.
While a half-million bucks in parts is nothing to sneeze at, they can’t stock everything. The garage only stocks parts from 2014 and above, and they don’t do any welding or tire repair.
As you might expect, the Polaris folks do have to keep an eye out for fraud. The mission is to keep people riding for the weekend, not do maintenance for those too lazy to do it themselves. If that means a customer walks away angry, so be it, and Glissmeyer tells me that since it functions as a parts swap, it helps keep fraud at bay.
“If you bring me a broken shock and I have a new shock, I will hand you a new shock, and I will throw your old one away.” Nobody is getting a free shock to sell on Marketplace.
While the final numbers for this year’s weekend aren’t in yet, last year the garage at Camp RZR exchanged just under 900 parts and worked on 178 rigs. Polaris expects to meet or exceed those numbers for 2026. That is a crazy amount of parts and labor, just given away for free, with the only requirement being that you own a Polaris newer than 2014.
So, with that in mind, go ahead and send it in your new RZR at Glamis next Halloween. The Polaris garage will have your back.
