Video Transcript for Mount: Rhino-Rack ROC25 Roof Rack for Naked Roofs on a 2018 Toyota Yaris

Hi, everyone. Aiden here with a trailer.com and today we're gonna be taking a look at the Rhino Rack ROC25 Roof Rack System for Naked Roofs here on our 2018 Toyota Yaris. Now, the Yaris is already a pretty small vehicle. We have the three door version with us today which is even smaller so you're gonna be cramped for cargo space and one of the best ways to improve that cargo space is to add something to the roof whether it be a box, a basket, or maybe you're just looking for a better way to haul your bikes, to haul skis and snowboards, whatever it may be having something on the roof is a great way to expand that functionality of your vehicle. Now, I like the ROC25 system here. I think it's really nice and clean looking.

You get a good fit for your vehicle. There aren't any overhang in the cross bars but I don't think that's a big deal in this case. Most of the time, what you would need that overhang for is something like a load assist kayak carrier but with how low the car is I don't think that's ever really going to be a concern. And this gives you more than enough space to add accessories to the top of your roof. And the whole kit is designed for a nice custom fit on your Yaris.

You can see these rubber pads wrapped around and contoured to all the different shapes on the roof here and the clamps seat really nicely in here holding the whole roof rack nice and tight to the car. I mean, I'm shaking the whole car back and forth with this and the bar isn't moving. Now the way this roof rack attaches you are limited to these fixed mounting points. There really isn't much room to play around with here to begin with, but you've got specific places that each crossbar needs to be. So your crossbar spread is gonna be pretty fixed.

Right here at the bars, we're working with a little under twenty one and a half inches, so just keep that in mind with any sort of accessories you start to add on. A lot of accessories will have a recommended range of the crossbar spread that you need, so just make sure everything's compatible before you pick that out. As for height added to the vehicle, we're only gonna be adding about three inches. Everything's pretty low profile so that's nice to see, and then you do have about an inch and a half of space between the roof and the bottom of the bar. Just be mindful with any sort of clamp-around accessories that inch and a half at the center here is what kind of clearance you're working with.

You do have a bit more on the edges here, so if you do have something with hand knobs that you have to tighten, maybe just position that towards the outer edge of the bars. Now on all of the legs you do have locking cores. So the roof rack is going to be secured to your roof. No one's gonna be able to mess with it or get to the hardware that's actually holding it on. From here we can also see we've got the rubber stripping here to reduce wind noise, and it's gonna make everything nice and aerodynamic. This will also expose the t-rack, so if you do have accessories that can slide into the t-track, you can take out the weather stripping, slide in your accessories and trim up the weather strip to fit around those accessories. That's not my favorite system of doing it. Some other roof racks like Inno have a nice weather strip that you just push down and slide in and it just conforms around the accessory. So this works, but depending on how many accessories you have, and if you're taking them on and off pretty frequently this might be a bit of a pain. Now on your Yaris, this is gonna have a 132 pound weight capacity, so just keep that in mind when you are loading it up you don't wanna overload the roof rack or your roof. And overall the install is pretty easy. The hardest thing really is just getting the measurements out to find the correct position for the roof rack and making sure that all of these rubber pads go to the correct sides, but just follow the instructions, follow our video, and it should be just fine. So to start off for installation we're gonna install the weather stripping on the top of our crossbar here. We've already got one installed and they're pretty easy to do. I like to just get one side started in and then I can pinch it a little bit and it starts to get in the track there. I have little spots like this that pop up. Just kind of go back through like that, get everything well seated and once you get it going, goes pretty quick and you just kind of work your way down like this sort of pinching that weather strip and you can feel it whenever it locks in to place correctly. Now on the end here, you will notice that we have just a little bit left that needs to be covered and what we have to do is actually take one piece, put it in here and actually cut off the excess. This is our piece from the first crossbar, so I'm just gonna take this one and cut it again rather than cutting another full new one. And then we can have all the extra weather stripping for if we ever need to replace any or add new accessory and we want to change how these are cut or we can just leave 'em all in like this. This one's being a little bit stubborn right there in that one spot so I might come back to that in a second but basically what you want to do is just trim off the overhang. A pair of side cutters like this is really nice cause you can get right up to the edge. You get a nice clean cut, right like this, just get that little bit on the end. There we go. So you got a nice clean edge there and we can go ahead and install the legs. So for the legs, we're just going to slide them in on each side. Make sure you have that Rhino Rack logo face up and make sure that the leg is kind of curving down like this. But once we have it in, we can actually peel up the weather stripping here. We can see with that in place, our holes there line up and we can actually put this little set screw in place and run that down with a phillips head screwdriver to secure the leg to the bar. At this point, with both of our legs attached we can move on to the fit kit. So we've got our rubber pads here and then we've got these plastic ones that will actually attach to the legs. So it's important to note with these rubber pads we can flip them upside down and they've got a letter and number code on them plus an arrow. Consult your instructions depending on whether you have the 3 or 5 five door Yaris, but on ours today, we've got these M368s for the rear crossbar. They're both gonna be the same on either side, they're symmetrical, so we got it set up like that. Arrows face out. And then same thing with these plastic pieces on top arrows face out, and those will set on top of the rubber pad and you can kind of feel them nest into place, nice and secure. And then those notches in the plastic piece will align with these circular portions in the leg. And we can go ahead and hear that snap in and we'll do that on both sides. With everything assembled, we can take it up to the vehicle. Now we already have our front crossbar on you wanna do that first. Consulting your instruction manual to figure out the distance from the center of the door jam here all the way to the center of that front crossbar. Once you have that firmly in place where it's supposed to be, you can measure out where this second one is supposed to be, the rear one by setting it up in place and measuring from center to center. So again, that measurement is gonna be slightly different whether you have the 3 or the 5 door version of the Yaris here. So you wanna consult your instructions to make sure you've got the correct distance between the two bars. So once I've got it set on this side, I'll repeat that on the driver's side to make sure everything's running parallel and then we can begin to clamp it down. So with everything in place, we can come to this bolt right here in our foot, in our legs sorry. We're gonna unthread it and this part pivots so it might be a little bit weird to get it unthreaded and to thread it back in with all the moving pieces, but once we've got it we can pass that bolt through our clamp. Now all these clamps are gonna be the same for all of the four legs so you don't have to worry about differentiating them. And then we wanna thread that back into the little pivoting threaded holes there. This part can be a bit tricky, just lining it up and getting it to catch right with all the moving pieces. But once you get it started, you can kind of feel it and then we can go and tighten them down. And once we have it, you can see that clamp will just kind of rest down like that. You can see where it will end up holding onto and so we'll take our included tool and start to tighten this down. Now you don't wanna just go all the way on one side right away. We're going to at least just get this clamp touching the door jam right there and then I'm gonna go over to the other side and do the same thing. You wanna work your way back and forth so everything gets done relatively evenly because if we go to just fully tighten one side it's gonna pull the roof rack all the way over there. So we wanna make sure everything stays centered and nicely seated. And as we're tightening things down, you'll notice that on the tool there this little curve portion will straighten out and flex, that's how we know it's properly torqued down. So once that pushes flat, you can kind of see right there it won't turn anymore. I have to push it flat before it'll turn. That's good there. So once it's done on both sides everything's nice and secure, we're good to go. And the final piece of our puzzle is just the little end cover here. That'll just slide on covering all of that hardware that we just tightened up, lock it in place so no one can mess with this when you're not around. And overall, I think this roof rack is gonna do a really good job of expanding the functionality of your Yaris. You don't have many hitch options so if you wanna carry a bike or some extra cargo a roof is probably the better way to do it. You can get more up here and with the car being so low to the ground, it's easily reachable. You're not gonna have to really be reaching to get a bike up there or anything like that and I think it's gonna make a really nice addition to your vehicle. And that'll do it for our look at the Rhino Rack ROC25 Roof Rack System for Naked Roofs here on our 2018 Toyota Yaris..