Most Popular Roof Bike Racks for 1981 Mercedes-Benz E-Class

So close! This rack is great, with a few caveats... First, it's almost too small for an XL (21" frame, 29" tires) mountain bike. I had to completely remove the adjustable wheel holder thingy on the rear arm (brace? lever? support?) to be able to properly fit my bike. Not a deal breaker, but not really working as intended, I think. Second, the front mounting bracket is... middling. It doesn't have a lever like the rear, and so tightness is purely dependent on how hard you can twist the little knob. Also, there's only one in the front, unlike the double setup in the rear. The brackets, themselves, aren't designed particularly well. I'm not sure what crossbars they were using as a baseline, but the angles just don't make sense. (at least to me...what do I know) What I do know, is that they don't grip the factory Outback crossbars very well, and I found myself constantly adjusting and tightening them to where I wouldn't get any sliding left to right on the crossbar. (I did finally get it to where I was satisfied, but it took some doing, and I imagine it would be like that every time if you wanted to take the rack off occasionally.) TL,DR: Does the rack do what I need it to do? Yes. Is the fitment a bit frustrating? Kinda. Are there other similar options out there? Not many, and none that I could find at this price point. Would I recommend, or buy again? Yes and Yes.

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The bike rack worked well until the ratcheting teeth on the track became worn. Now I can't tighten the tire hold levers. I contacted customer service in March, and they said they would contact me when the replacement part came in. It's now November, and I'm still without a working bike rack. Definitely inhibited my mountain biking this summer, which was a huge bummer.

This bike carrier has a clean design and it assembled and attached to the roof rack easily. A locking front cover prevents it from being detached from the roof rack and the tray has a cut out in the front for a disc brake if my next bike has one. Once everything is snug, the bike feels solid and there's no slop.

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I'm not too sure how to rate this but I'm not happy with it. Everything that happened is no fault of etrailer. I've made many purchases from etrailer, they're a great distributor. The bike rack appears to be great. The problem seems to be that they changed the design. To start, UPS damaged the box in shipping and then tried to tape the package they sent me. After walking through the parts in the box with an etrailer rep on the phone, it seemed that no parts were missing. So I proceeded to connect everything up based on the instructions. As I put it together I noticed the mounting bracket in the rear doesn't have anything to remove the slop. The rear is literally resting on a slider, which means that it would rattle when driving around. Just for kicks I took it for a drive with my bike on top. It rattled like crazy! So I looked at the installation videos on etrailer and then youtube. Every one of them showed an extra rear mounting bracket with knobs to tighten. These were not listed in the install manual so I suspect Rhino thought they could cut cost by eliminating them. I contacted etrailer to see if they had any. They didn't. So I returned it. Sadly, I still had to pay a $25 restocking fee. I'm not sure why etrailer charged me. It's not like I bought the wrong thing and didn't want it. It's actually a really nice bike carrier. Just a flaw in the design that etrailer should catch when they test it out in their videos. If anything, I've helped them out with this. Hopefully etrailer will test out what I sent them, then reach out to Rhino about this new design flaw. Again, I like etrailer as a service but I wish they had caught this before selling to me (and others). I strongly suggest that you don't buy this until the bracket issue gets resolved. Also, take a look at the last pic of the Inno XA391 on the etrailer site. They resolve the rear bracket rattle by putting in a thumb screw.