This lightweight, compact bike rack carries up to 3 bikes without adding bulk. The articulated, rotatable head adjusts to different bike styles, and the rack folds down small when not in use. It also tilts to allow trunk access while loaded.
If you live in the city, it can feel like you're stuck riding the same streets every weekend. You'd love to get out of town and hit some real trails, but carrying a heavy rack up and down the stairs? That isn't happening. Even with room for 3 bikes, the Thule OutPace stays lighter and easier to handle than most full-size platform racks. It also folds up small, so carrying it feels more like toting a suitcase than lugging around a bulky rack. That makes a big difference when you live in a building without an elevator or if you just don't have a straight shot from your door to the car.
That same folding design comes in handy when the ride's over. The trays tuck in and the shank folds up, so the rack can stand upright on its own. It's compact enough to store in an apartment or any tight living space, unlike the big, bulky racks that are always in the way when you're not using them. You can tuck this one into a closet, set it on a shelf in your garage, or just slide it up against the wall where it won't become an instant tripping hazard. You can even stow it in your trunk while you run through a carwash and still have plenty of room left for a grocery run.
The arms pivot to match the angle and position of your bikes' frames, so you don't have to shift things around just to get the clamps lined up. It doesn't matter if you're carrying a step-through, a mountain bike, and a road bike together, your bikes load without a bunch of trial-and-error positioning. The trays are even staggered, so the handlebars don't smash into each other. Your bikes lock down tight, and you can rest assured they'll stay that way until you unload.
Grabbing gear from the trunk doesn't have to mean unloading all your bikes. You can tilt the OutPace away from your vehicle by pulling the release cable and gently lowering it down with the built-in handle. Need snacks? A jacket? No problem. Grab what you need and get back on the road. And when the bikes aren't loaded, the rack folds up against your vehicle. This takes up less space, so you can keep the rack on your vehicle to park in your garage.
Some platform racks make you line up the shank just right, thread in a long bolt, then tighten it down with a wrench. It's not hard, but it can get old fast, especially if you're taking the rack on and off a lot. The OutPace still needs to be lined up, but it uses a locking hand lever to secure the rack in your hitch, so you don't need any tools or hardware. Just crank it down, lock it up, and roll out while everyone else is still digging through their toolbox.
Videos are provided as a guide only. Refer to manufacturer installation instructions and specs for complete information.
Hello, neighbor, this is Curt with etrailer, and today we're gonna be taking a look at the Thule OutPace for three bikes, and we're gonna see how it fits with our 2019 Mazda CX-5. Now, the really unique thing about the OutPace is just how compact you can get it. The three bike version only weighs about 36 pounds, and it folds up to about the size of an extra large suitcase, meaning that you could store it in your garage very easily in a corner, in the back of a closet, or even in the trunk space of your vehicle. You get a 55-pound per bike weight capacity. So it is gonna accommodate some of the lighter-weight e-bikes that are out there. It can accommodate wheel bases up to 49 inches, wheels up to 29 inches in diameter, and tires up to three inches wide.
It is a frame mount. You can mount it to any of the three main tubes on the bike right here, and it's gonna have a pad on it so that it's gonna be gentle against your paint. Each of your wheels has a angled wheel strap, so that's what's going to allow it to stay compact, but still accommodate those wider wheel bases. As you could see, a lot of the tires coming off that back wheel tray. But it's not going anywhere because these straps are trapping it against each other.
So, it's not gonna get any of that extra lateral movement. Now, when it comes to the fit against the CX-5, just for reference, the bike we have on here today is a large-frame with 30-inch wide handlebars, so you can use that to scale against the bikes you have at home. But even on a rougher patch of terrain, we're really not in any danger of this bike coming into contact with the back of the CX-5. But like with any platform hitch bike rack, we are gonna have some securities when it comes to our visibility out of the back. First and foremost, it does keep the bikes pretty high up off the ground, so you are in all likelihood going to see a lot of the bike coming out of your rear window.
We're also gonna get some partial blockage on our tail lights as well as our license plate, and importantly for you, the driver, our rear view backup camera. So it's important to understand just what kind of footprint this is leaving behind the vehicle. So if we go from the middle of our bumper to the furthest point on the bike rack, we are going to be sitting right at about 35 1/4 inches. So you gotta keep that in mind. You've almost got a footprint of almost three feet extra coming off of your bumper that you're gonna need to account for whenever you're backing into a tighter space or trying to parallel park.
The other thing I had mentioned is the ground clearance. That's something on this rack that I am really happy with the. Ground clearance on this is gonna be just under 26 inches, and that should be more than enough to tackle any steep inclines or driveways that you might come across, but it is something you always wanna keep in mind. Now, I had mentioned earlier that you can accommodate up to 55-pound bikes on this rack, but there is no kind of load or lift assist to it. And with the ground clearance that it has, you wanna make sure that however much your bike weighs, you're comfortable with getting it up to a height of about 21 inches to get it on the nearest tray and about 24, 24 1/2 inches when it comes to the tray furthest from the car. And one of the most common questions that we get when it comes to hitch bike racks is, will you have access to your lift gate with bikes loaded on the rack And the answer is yes, you do. We do have a really aggressive tilt-away feature on this rack. And rather than being operated through a latch or a trigger or anything like that, like you see on a lot of bike racks, it's actually all done through this cord that runs through the middle right here. If I'm gonna brace the bike, pull up on this cord, we'll see that that red indicator, that means that this is loose and we can lower the bike away. We've got a handle here to help us out with that, too. And once we get it all the way down and come around, we got a ton of extra space back here behind our lift gate, and it is gonna allow us to get in and outta here pretty easily. So now if I'm on my way home from the trailer or something like that, I can get access to my cargo space if I need to do any shopping, anything like that, all with the convenience of not having to unload the bike from the carrier. And when it's time to hit the road, again, you don't have to engage that cord. All you need to do is lift back up against it. (cord clicks) It'll lock into place. You'll notice that that red indicator goes missing, and we're upright and ready to hit the road again. Now when it comes to getting the bikes on and off the rack, we'll start when we're taking a bike off. We're gonna start with the wheel straps. All I need to do is depress this gray trigger and it is going to loosen this up. Now, when you're loading a bike, these are actually ratcheting, so you could pull it up to get the bike tighter. But when we're taking it off, we just need to depress that button, take the strap out, and clear it out the other side. We're gonna do the same thing with our front wheel here. (button clicks) (strap whirs) And finally, we're going to get up here to our arm. Now, the arm has the same type of ratcheting mechanism here. It does have a lock on it that is going to be able to keep your bike secured onto the rack when you're leaving it alone. So we're just gonna do that, feed it through. You can see there's a good rubber pad on here that's gonna protect your frame, and you just need to be able to lift it all the way down, which is why it's important to understand, depending on how comfortable you are lifting your bike up and down, that ground clearance that we talked about earlier. Now, one of the things I really like about the OutPace as well is how you can stow away all of your straps. So when you don't have a bike on it, they actually have these slots here that you could put your straps through kind of at an angle like this and keep 'em kind of stowed outta the way and not dragging anywhere. We're gonna do the same thing over here. And we also have a stowaway spot on our arm here that we could put our strap down right there. Now what I need to do is just go ahead and fold this down just like that. And when you don't have any bikes on the rack, if you're not gonna take it out and store it away anywhere and you're gonna leave it on the vehicle, we do actually have two different ways that we can do this as far as folding it up into a stowaway position. We're gonna go ahead and engage our strap. We're gonna lift up against the back of the vehicle (cord clicks) and put it up just like that. Now, when it comes to doing it this way and leaving the wheel cups out and deployed like this, we're gonna have some partial blockage to our taillights. But what it does is it frees up this central cavity right here and gives other people visibility to your license plate and your rear view camera. But if that kind of thing doesn't bother you, and your concern is gonna be more about whether or not other people can see if you're braking or turning, these will actually fold in just like this and it's gonna let you operate that same cord and put it up against the back of the vehicle like this. Now this way, you are gonna have your license plate blocked, you are gonna have your rear view camera blocked, but for the safety of you and other drivers on the road, our taillights are gonna be completely exposed. All right, that was a look at the Thule OutPace for three bikes on our 2019 Mazda CX-5. I'm Curt with etrailer. Thanks for stopping by.
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