Pakistani Sxs -

But in a country where the Toyota Corolla is king and the Suzuki Mehran was once the people’s chariot, why are rugged, imported (and often smuggled or reassembled) SXS vehicles suddenly everywhere? For the uninitiated, an SXS looks like a go-kart on steroids. It has a side-by-side seating layout (hence the name), a heavy-duty roll cage, high ground clearance, and four-wheel drive. In the West, they are recreational toys for ranchers and dune riders. In Pakistan, they are becoming tools of survival and commerce.

For now, the SXS culture in Pakistan remains a raw, loud, and dusty affair. It is a fusion of American adrenaline, Chinese pragmatism, and Pashtun ingenuity. And on any given Friday, if you drive five kilometers past the last paved road, you will hear them: the happy scream of an engine and the louder scream of a man holding on for dear life.

“Chinese parts are everywhere,” notes Yasir from a Saddar auto market. “You can fix a broken axle on a CFMOTO in a village workshop with a hammer and a welding rod. A Polaris? You wait three months for a belt from the US.” The SXS boom has a shadow economy. Due to high customs duties on fully built units, many high-end SXS vehicles enter Pakistan not via the Karachi port, but through the porous Torkham and Chaman borders with Afghanistan. These vehicles are often purchased in Dubai, driven to Kabul (where duties are negligible), and then smuggled south. pakistani sxs

CHITRAL, Pakistan – The narrow, switchback-laden trails of the Hindu Kush were once the exclusive domain of mules, jeeps, and the occasional hardy trekker. Today, the silence is broken by a different kind of beast: the growl of a 1,000cc twin-cylinder engine, the whine of a continuously variable transmission (CVT), and the crunch of all-terrain tires biting into loose shale.

Furthermore, the legality is murky. The Excise and Taxation department generally considers SXS vehicles as “sporting machinery,” not road-legal vehicles. You cannot put a license plate on one. Yet, every evening in upscale neighborhoods, owners drive them to local chai shops, daring the traffic police to catch a vehicle that can jump a curb and disappear up a dirt track. Whispers in the auto industry suggest that a major Pakistani tractor manufacturer is in talks with a Chinese SXS brand to begin CKD (Completely Knocked Down) assembly in Faisalabad. If successful, the price of a brand-new, warrantied SXS could drop below PKR 1 million ($3,500). But in a country where the Toyota Corolla

That would be a game-changer. At that price, the SXS stops being a toy for the rich or a smuggler’s prize. It becomes a rural household’s second car—one that can carry a family of six, a goat, and a water pump up a mountain that no sedan will ever see.

“Farmers in Swat are using them to bring apples down from high orchards where a tractor cannot turn,” says Bilal Khan, an off-road mechanic in Islamabad who specializes in CFMOTO and Polaris models. “The old way was donkeys—slow, needing rest. The SXS makes five trips in one day.” In the West, they are recreational toys for

Polaris RZRs and Can-Am Mavericks. These are the Ferraris of the dirt. A 2024 Polaris RZR Pro XP can cost upwards of PKR 8-12 million ($28,000–$43,000) after customs and shipping. These belong to the elite—the real estate developers, the retired generals, and the YouTubers.

Mechanics call this the “Kabul Cut”—a rough welding job on the roll cage to fit the vehicle inside a covered truck. While the practice is illegal, it has saturated the grey market, making otherwise unaffordable machines accessible to mid-tier buyers. Not everyone is thrilled. Environmentalists in the northern valleys have begun protesting the use of SXS on fragile alpine meadows (margallas).

The Side-by-Side (SXS)—known colloquially as a “buggy” or simply “the four-seater”—has roared into Pakistan’s off-road scene. From the fertile tobacco fields of Khyber Pakhtunkhwa to the dunes of Tharparkar and the wealthy farmhouses of Punjab, these roll-caged machines are redefining adventure, agriculture, and access.

“These machines tear up the moss. It takes fifty years to grow back,” complains a local guide in Naltar Valley, who asked not to be named. “Tourists rent them for 15,000 rupees an hour, drive in circles, and leave behind oil drips and empty energy drink cans.”