First Look: Saris SUPERBones 3-Bike Trunk Rack
One thing you should know: I care about bike racks. It’s a beautiful thing to not have to wrestle your bike into your trunk, or take wheels or seatposts off to get a bike, or multiple bikes, to fit in your car. A good bike rack can really enhance your quality of life as a cyclist.
Personally, I’ve always preferred hitch-mounted tray racks like my Thule T2. The attachment to the car is rock-solid, you can lock the bikes, and it won’t damage your bike frame or your car. You also avoid the risk of driving your bikes into the roof of a garage.
RELATED: The Best Bike Racks for Cars
But a hitch (or roof) rack isn’t for everyone. It may not bother you to have your rack contact your bike frame. You may prefer to be able to remove your rack easily so you don’t have to have it on all the time, particularly if you live where parking can be a squeeze, or if you don’t drive your bikes around that often. And a lot of times, trunk racks can be more economical once you account for the costs of installing a hitch or roof runners to your car.
But I still prefer hitch-mounted tray racks. And because of that, it’s hard for a trunk rack to impress me. But the new Saris SUPERBones does.
The seventh iteration of the popular Saris Bones trunk rack, the SUPERBones addresses many of the shortcomings that plague most trunk racks.
Most trunk rack owners are all too familiar with the clumsy process of sliding the several metal clips at the ends of the straps under the surface of your trunk, then obsessively tightening, pulling, and retightening those straps—then, constantly checking on your bikes in the rearview mirror while you’re driving. The SUPERBones alleviates the need for this paranoid-OCD behavior with a smart new strap management system.
They work like this: Open a lever to release the straps; attach them to your car, then push a button that tensions the straps about 95 percent of the way. Next, use the lever to ratchet the straps to their final tension. There’s no guesswork about whether the rack is on tightly enough, and there are no loose ends to tie up or leave flapping around on the back.
A nice aesthetic touch: On sedan-type cars, the straps nestle neatly into the rack’s arms so they’re almost invisible—at first glance from the side, the SUPERBones appears to be attached via suction cups on the feet. (The rack works with a large range of car models, including SUV-type cars; in that case, the straps don’t lay flush against the arms.)
RELATED: How to Choose Your Bike Rack Type
There are a plenty of other well-thought-out details. The feet of the SUPERBones—the parts that make contact with your vehicle—pivot side to side to better fit modern, rounded trunks, like on hatchback cars. The straps are reinforced with four steel cords, which Saris says increases their strength by seven times over the standard nylon webbing on the Bones. (It also makes it harder for bike thieves to cut through them, the company claims.) The SUPERBones features integrated locking: A light cable lock pulls out to secure bikes to the rack, and the levers that release the straps lock so that you can’t release the strap tension to remove the rack from the car. Finally, small telescoping legs hold the bikes’ downtubes to keep them from swaying, rubbing, and otherwise damaging one another on the road—but the same legs rotate out of the way to make it easy to slide bikes onto the frame.
The SUPERBones is made of injection-molded plastic that Saris says helps to keep weight down but strength up. And as with all Saris racks, it comes with a lifetime warranty. For now, only a three-bike configuration is available. The rack is $399 and available now at retailers.
You Might Also Like