Video Transcript for How to Set Up Your Rhino-Rack Vortex Roof Rack Kit - 2024 Hyundai Tucson

Hello, neighbor, this is Curt with etrailer. And today we're gonna take a look at the Rhino-Rack Vortex crossbar system on our 2024 Hyundai Tucson. Now if you've had any experience with the Rhino-Rack Vortex before or if you have any questions about it after watching this video, go ahead and leave those in the comments below. We love to take your questions and your stories and share them with our other neighbors in order to help them make the best decision for themselves. Now, you may come across those situations in your Hyundai Tucson where you're planning a trip and you've got a lot of extra gear or luggage that just simply won't quite work inside the vehicle, whether you have too many passengers going with you, or it's an item that's just too big, or it's an item that you just don't want traveling in the vehicle while with you while you're going down the road. In those instances, a roof rack system really is one of your best cargo options.

I find this to be a better option in most cases than a hitch-mounted cargo basket in the back, simply because you're not really adding that extra footprint of length. It's all up here on the roof and out of the way. Now the Rhino-Rack Vortex system is a pretty nice one. It is gonna give you a 165 pound weight capacity. However, it is always important to double-check the vehicle owner's manual and see what that roof capacity states.

If it's lower than 165, you'll have to go with that lower number. But this is an aero style crossbar, meaning it's got more of an ovular shape, and this is a symmetrical crossbar. Some aero bars that you see out there are gonna be wider in the front and narrower in the back. This is actually symmetrical, so it's just simply an ovular bar. But what that shape is gonna do for you is cut down on wind resistance and road noise just by simply being more aerodynamic.

So how is this roof rack going to fit on your Hyundai Tucson Well, one thing is we've got a really nice crossbar spread set up. We've got about 28 1/4 inches from center track to center track. 26 to 30 is right in that range where most rooftop accessories are gonna fall into. So that would be the crossbar spread that I would aim for. We also specifically set them up so that they would be pretty much on our door seams.

That puts us in a position where as we're standing up in the second row of our seats, like I am now, I am right in the middle of the crossbars, which means I should be right in the middle of whatever cargo I have loaded up here. That just makes it really, really easy to manage without having to take a ladder or a step stool with you. We do have it set up in a way that we do have a little bit of room to move forward or back. There are not fixed mounting points on this rail, so that leaves us a lot of freedom and where these could be placed. But just keep in mind, if we move them too far back, we're gonna start getting maybe some interference with that little antenna there. Underneath our crossbars, they sit pretty tall at about 3 1/4 inches, as far as the gap between the top of your roof and the bottom of your bar. As far as adding, it's going to give you 4 1/2 inches more rooftop up top. Probably not enough to concern yourself with a garage or anything like that, but always something that you should bear in mind. But at that clearance underneath here, that should give us some good clearance on the antenna in the back. It just might depend on what accessories you're using up here, whether or not that would actually be in the way. The front bar, if you have a sunroof, could definitely end up being an issue. So just bear in mind, wherever you have this placed, it's got a good chance of interfering with your sunroof. And also double-check underneath the bar as far as, you know, how much, if you can, open your sunroof or not without it hitting the bottom of your bar. Now these crossbars are gonna give you 49 inches of usable space in order to mount your accessories. It also has an overhang, meaning it comes a bit past the towers. You can absolutely use that space for both clamp-on and T-track-mounted accessories. Now the clamp on is pretty self-explanatory, but with the T-track which you've got are these removable rubber strips. You can unlock the end cap of your towers and slide the items over and lock them into place. The one thing about Rhino-Rack that I'm not the biggest fan of, however, is that you do have to trim this weather stripping in order to get those channel-mounted accessories, like we have route here. So as you could see, if I remove that accessory, now I've got a big gap up here. You should absolutely save whatever pieces of this you cut out. So you could fill those gaps in later. But if you fail to, that is gonna create an awful lot of noise as you're going down the road. Not only that, you got a good chance of getting a lot of debris and goot in here that could interfere with you using the T-track at all. And I had mentioned the overhang on these crossbars, and one of the biggest concerns that people have with an overhanging crossbar system is, what about hitting my head Do I have head clearance getting in and out of the vehicle Well, yeah, you definitely do on these. Basically, with the door open, these may become 1/4 inch, 1/2 inch tops past the door threshold. So I'm not really concerned at all about getting in and out of my car and hitting my head on this. If you we inchesre to get a set of crossbars that maybe came was longer than 49 inches and stuck out a bit further than that, this vehicle definitely has that kind of height that would be concerning, if that was the case. But with the 49 inch bars, I'm not really all that worried. So there's a little bit about the Rhino-Rack Vortex crossbar system. Now stick around and we'll show you exactly how we got these up here. Now your crossbar system is made up of three main components. You have the crossbar itself, you're gonna have your towers, or is there sometimes called legs, and you're gonna have your fit kit, or is there sometimes called feet. Now out of these three components, the one that's vehicle-specific is going to be your fit kit. It is going to be assembled as such so that these clamps are gonna fit right around the very specific factory rails of your vehicle. So the first thing we're gonna need to do is get these towers assembled. So we're gonna grab our leg here, with the cover removed. The first thing they ask us to do is remove this blue tab and just kind of get it outta the way. We're gonna take our provided Rhino-Rack torquing tool, and it asks us to loosen this up about 10 rotations. Whoops. That is gonna give us room behind here to insert our clips and be able to lock them into place. (table thudding) When you've got that loosed enough, we're gonna take this part of it, not the part with the big hole in the middle, but this part of it right here, and this is going to be in the inside of our tower here or on the inside of our rail. We're gonna simply slip that in here in between these two blue tabs, get that down, and then we'll push it back into place like this, and it'll lock in just as so. Next, we'll take our rubber footpad. Now, it is important to pay attention to these. They are contoured in a way to go specifically up on your rails. So what we've got here is the front left, and that is gonna go right on here. There is an arrow indicating on it which way it needs to be facing as well. So make sure you pay attention to where that arrow is, and that would be the front of your vehicle. There are two tabs in the middle of the rubber pad. It's a lot easier I found to push those into place first and then set the rest of it. Once we've got those on nice and secure, we're gonna take the last piece of our clamp here. That is gonna go into place as such. We're just gonna push down on it gently. Then, we're gonna take this tab that we had twisted around before, bring it around, and back over our bolt. And what that's going to do is hold everything together while we get it placed on our bars. Now that our towers are assembled, we're gonna take this little blue key that came with us from Rhino-Rack. This is their kind of specialty key. This is going to actually open up these locks that are at the end caps of our crossbars. So we're gonna remove one end, just like that. We're gonna go ahead and take our assembled tower. We're also gonna look to make sure that we've got that front arrow pointed in the right direction for us. And then we're gonna use these T-slot attachments to slide right into here. (metal clacking) Once we have it on there, we'll replace our end cap so it doesn't slip off on us, and we'll just repeat that process over on the other side. Now as far as bar placement goes, once you have everything up here, there are no fixed mounting points. So you've got a bit of freedom as far as how far forward, how far back you wanna move it. Couple of things to pay attention to. One is how much of a spread do you want with your crossbar And number two is how far do you get before really the taper of these rails just becomes really too much, it's pointing down somewhat, you can't really get to it. I would also think about access. If possible, I like setting up crossbars, just like this. So from the middle of my second row door, if I'm stepping up into that with the door open to get up here, I wanna be in between the two bars, just to help, you know, everything up there be more accessible. But it's also important to make sure that your crossbars are perfectly perpendicular. We don't want the driver's side tower to be closer to the front than the passenger side, et cetera. So there's a couple of ways we can measure this out. We can go from say the front of our rail here to the center of our tower, and make sure that matches up on both sides. Or, if we've already got one of the bars installed, we can go from the center of that tower to the center of here. And if that matches on both the driver and the passenger side, we know we've got perpendicular crossbars. Now that we've got our crossbars nice and perpendicular, the next thing that we're gonna want to do is double-check our overhang. We wanna make sure that's even on both sides as well. So I'm just gonna take, you know, as good of a measurement as I can to the end of our crossbar, make sure it matches up on the other side. And once I have an overhang that's equal on both the passenger and driver's side, we know we can tighten everything down. So we're gonna check on that now. So now that we've got everything set up, our measurements, our overhang, everything is even, it's time to tighten everything down securely and in place. And to do that, we're gonna take the torque tool that Rhino-Rack provided us. We're gonna go ahead and get that little plug out of our way. and we're gonna tighten everything down through this bolt. This is gonna simultaneously clamp on to our factory rails while also tightening our crossbar into place so it doesn't shift back on forth on us either. Now I did find that it makes installation a lot easier if you could take one hand and kind of press down on these clamps. There we inchesre a few times we tried that. And without doing that, it is possible to tighten it up to where it doesn't grab this lip here that's on your rail. So it's a good idea to kind of hold that down and in place while you tighten everything up. And this is a torquing tool, as I mentioned, which means once it's tight enough to Rhino-Rack's specs, it's gonna give a really nice audible pop. That's gonna let us know that we've got everything tightened down nice and secure. Double-check that. (torquing tool popping) And there it goes. Now we've got everything solid, we'll replace our plug right there. Do the same thing on the other side, and just make sure nothing's gonna be slipping around on us. Now that we add everything tight and secure up here, the last step we've got is to replace our tower covers, and those are gonna go on very simply by snapping on and then using the provided key in order to lock them on. Now, this same key, which works on the tower covers and the ends of our crossbars is replaceable with a metal lock and key if you choose to. Rhino-Rack has those available right here on etrailer.com. For now, we're just gonna use the plastic key. We're just gonna put that right into place, lock it on, and now we're ready to load up our roof rack and hit the road. So there's a look at the Rhino-Rack Vortex crossbars on our 2024 Hyundai Tucson. I'm Curt with etrailer. Thanks for stopping by.