How to Choose a Bike Rack

Video Transcript

"Hi, I'm Will from the Outspokin Bicycle and Sport Shop located in Newbury, New Hampshire. Today I'm going to talk about different bicycle racks for your vehicle. There's a lot of nice bikes out there, a nice bike rack is important thing to have; it can get your bike to and from your riding destination. So we're going to talk a little bit about the top of your car or roof rack systems. Those are great; they are somewhat expensive because there's a lot of materials involve. But once you get your initial crossbars, you can add a lot of other accessories beyond bicycle racks. So you can have a bicycle attachments; you can have a kayak attachment; you can have a lot of other things to secure your bumper off it if you want to. So they're very useful, very handy; you can carry the big boxes on there but they cost a lot of money and also they, might be a little difficult to get to if you have a higher SUV. So the high roof lines in today's vehicles might take away from the benefit of a, of a roof rack system. So we'll talk about receiver fish racks which a lot of the big SUVs and a lot of cars actually come through with tow hitches; the square hitch on the back bumper and you could slide a receiver hitch right into that and it just carries your bikes off the back of the car. Those are very popular 'cause they're very secure; it fold down out of the way when you need to get into the rear trunk or lift gate of your vehicle and they're very easy to load and unload your bicycles onto 'cause they're right at the proper height. So you just lift up, put them on; so that's a very very popular. Medium-priced point, they're a lot less than roof rack system but they're more than what I'm going to talk about next which is a lower cost alternative called a rear strap rack. And those are probably the best selling rack, mostly because you can just put them on when you need them; they're very light, anybody can handle them. Receivers hitch rack are a little heavy. So you just would have straps that would secure them, them on the top; whether you rest it on a trunk or on a rear hatch. You have load straps from the top; you have load straps in the bottom keeping the rack from bouncing and then two side straps keeping it swaying. Those are great too 'cause they're usually right at the right height for easy loading and unloading. When you think about them is when you're done using them, you can take them off quickly with the straps, they usually fold into a fairly compact size and you could store away out of sight, out of mind. So that's a real nice, "Hey I don't use my bike rack too often" solution. The more you use it, the more you might want to step towards a rear receiver hitch or roof rack system. And those are the basic types of bicycle racks that are available."