Kuat Huk Tailgate Bike Pad for Full-Size Trucks - 6 Bikes - 61" Wide

Video Transcript for Kuat Truck Bed Bike Racks Review - 2011 Ford F-150

Hi, everyone, Aidan here at etrailer. Today, we're gonna be taking a look at the Kuat Huk Tailgate Pad for Full-Size Trucks and seeing how this fits on our 2011 Ford F-150. Now, a tailgate pad is a great way to carry, on this one, up to six bikes with you in your truck. It's great, because it utilizes the space in your truck bed while still keeping the bikes organized, because sure, you can throw six bikes in the back of your F-150, but they're gonna be banging around together, all in a big pile, potentially damaging each other, and they're not very secure. And this is going to hold them upright, side by side with one another, and the only thing that's gonna end up overlapping is the tires over your forks, which some people might not be super fond of, in those cases, maybe I'd recommend a hitch-mounted rack that keeps your bikes more separated, but for this, it's a great effective way to get a lot of bikes with you quickly and relatively inexpensively. This is definitely a more premium tailgate pad, just know that there's a reason for that.

The construction here is rock solid, and the fit is wonderful, because they make a couple different variations of the Huk. This one is for full-size trucks, so the width is going to be perfect for your F-150, and this one is the straight tailgate version. There's a version of this where the top is curved to match the newer style tailgates of many trucks where it bows out in the middle, this one just runs straight though and gives a really good fit on the '11 F-150. Here, there's going to be a flap that we can roll up, so if we only have a few bikes loaded up or we don't have any bikes loaded up at all, we can open this up, and if we had a backup camera, we'd be able to use it, but in this case, it's just to utilize the handle for our tailgate. To do that first though, I'll unload our bikes, which is really simple to do, it's just one strap that holds it in.

It's going to feed through some loops on the back, wrap around the frame of your bike, cinch down, close this lever, and that keeps it locked in. They've worked really well for all of our testing today. And once that's done, you can just lift the bike up and away. I'll set this to the side real quick, and we can open up that tailgate and see how it works. But it's a very simple system, and one of the things that I like a lot about this tailgate pad, because we don't have to sacrifice any function of our truck bed.

We've even got a board back here that actually bound itself up against the back tire of our bike. That'll obviously depend on the bike you have, the wheel base of it and how it fits in the truck bed, but it did help with stability overall, even though it's not necessary. And back here are all the loops that are sewn onto the tailgate pad where you can pick and choose where you want these bike straps to be mounted up. So you can customize the spacing between your bikes, so if some need more space than others, they can have it, you're not set at fixed intervals. And the nice thing about these straps being a little bit longer is if your bike we're to fall somewhere in between two straps, you can just run it through both and cinch around your frame that way, so they're perfectly long enough to do that, getting you a good strong hold on the bike, no matter where you set it up.

Then as I close this up, we can kinda talk about the material here. The outer construction's gonna be this TPU material, which is really weather resistant and easy to clean. All of these dust bits just wipe off by hand really easily, and if we took a wet rag to it, it'd be looking good as new. Plus, the material is recyclable and biodegradable, which is pretty cool too. And underneath on this flap, we can see all of this soft felt, really soft to the touch, and it's gonna be protecting your paint. That's located all underneath the tailgate pad, not just that flap there, so we can trust that everything's gonna be protected on the truck side and on the bike side. The four straps that hold the tailgate pad to the truck are gonna do a great job at keeping things cinched down tight, no shifting side to side, and because there's four of these straps rather than the typical three you might see, it's gonna pull a lot more evenly, giving you a much cleaner look on the back of your truck, especially if you choose to leave it on between rides. But overall, if you're looking for a way to carry up to six bikes on your F-150 and you wanna do it in a way where the tailgate pad looks nice while still being very functional with its padding and giving you a lot of features, then the Kuat Huk, I think, is gonna be a great fit. Thanks for watching.