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The flush design keeps the crossbars tight to the roofline, giving your setup a clean, from-the-factory style. Nothing sticks out past the sides, so the rack blends in with a streamlined look. The integrated tower and bar system makes it all feel like one solid piece instead of something bolted on after the fact.
When you’re on the highway, wind noise can get annoying fast. These aero-style aluminum crossbars are shaped to cut through the air more smoothly. The push-down rubber strips in the top channels not only make it easy to attach accessories but also help reduce wind noise and vibration while you drive. It’s a quieter ride without having to mess with extra covers or tape tricks.
Whether it’s a kayak in summer or a cargo box for a cross-country trip, this rack can handle it. The bars work with most bike, watersport, snow, and cargo carriers that mount in top channels or clamp around the bars. That flexibility means you can use what you already have and still add new gear down the road without needing a whole new rack.
Strength matters when you’re hauling your gear. The aluminum construction gives you a solid platform that feels sturdy under load while keeping weight down. With a 165 lbs capacity—always within your vehicle’s roof load limit—you’ve got plenty of muscle for typical outdoor setups and road trip gear.
If you want to lock things up tight, this system is ready for Yakima Same Key System (SKS) lock cores (sold separately). Once added, those locks help deter theft of both the rack itself and any channel-mounted accessories—great for when you leave your setup parked at a trailhead or overnight on the road.
Alternate Instructions
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 going to take a look at the Yakima SkyLine FX Roof Rack with JetStream Crossbars and we're going to see how it fits with our 2025 Jeep Grand Cherokee. Now, when it comes to the Grand Cherokee, it's obviously a great vehicle to load up with friends and family and take a trip. But if you do have a loaded car, everybody with their stuff, you can run out of room pretty quickly. So where are you going to end up putting all of that extra gear Well, a roof rack is going to give you the option of carrying that extra gear up here on your roof. There are all sorts of accessories you can use with this. There are rooftop cargo boxes and cargo baskets, bike racks, kayak carriers, you name it.
If it's something that either won't fit in the vehicle or you don't want in the vehicle, there's probably something that's going to let you carry it up on your roof. So these JetStream crossbars have a 165-pound weight capacity and they are an aerostyle bar. So what an aerostyle bar means, it just has a more aerodynamic shape. It's going to be quieter driving out there on the road than you would be with a square or a round bar. It's also a flush style of roof rack.
And what that means is that our crossbar is going to dead end into our tower without overhanging any. Now on the one hand, this does make for a much cleaner look as far as, you know, just not having anything extra overhanging it. It looks a lot more OEM this way, but you do lose some functionality. For instance, whatever you put up here, you're going to be kind of forced to put it in the middle of the roof. And with a vehicle as tall as the Grand Cherokee, that might be something you want to be careful of.
So for me, as long as it's something that's not too heavy or too difficult to maneuver, there's no real issue with doing this. You just want to remember, you're probably only going to be able to carry one rooftop accessory at a time, and you are going to have to mount it toward the middle of the vehicle. Now, as far as that 165-pound weight capacity, that's true of the bars and the towers, but you always want to double-check your owner's manual for the vehicle's rooftop capacity. If it's lower than 165 pounds, then that's the weight capacity you'll have to adhere to. Now, let's get up on the roof and take a few measurements and see how this fits up there.
So as I mentioned, this is a flush style roof rack, so you're really only going to have the bar space in the middle of your towers to work with. Now, the thing about it too is that these rails up here on the top start wider at the front of the vehicle and they taper and get narrower as you get toward the back of the vehicle, which is why you have two different bar sizes. You have a larger size and a shorter size with the shorter size being toward the back. And because of that, as far as the bar space between the towers, we're really going to be kind of limited to what we can use back here on this back bar. So just to give you an idea of what kind of bar space you have to work with, you've got about 27 1/4, 27 and 3/8 inches of bar space back here to work with, either for your clamp-mounted accessories or your T-slot accessories, which are going to drop into this opening in the middle and be slid over to either side. The other thing that we want to take a look at is our crossbar spread. Now, as you'll see shortly in the installation, these are fixed mounting positions. So we really only have this shorter crossbar spread, which we put up here today, which is going to give you a spread of about 20, 24 and 1/2, 24 and 3/4 inches. This back mounting position gives you about 10 inches more than that, up to about 35 inches. As far as how much height this is going to add to your vehicle, you can expect it to add a height of about 4 1/2 inches to the top of the vehicle. So if you've got concerns like with a garage opening or something like that, you know your vehicle height, just add that 4 1/2 inches and make sure you're going to be able to clear that garage or whatever low hanging area you're worried about. We're going to take a look at the bar space underneath our bars as well, which is going to end up being about 3 1/4 inches. That actually ends up being about the same height, maybe even a little bit taller than the shark fin antenna back here. So I'm not really worried with that antenna interfering with anything that I'm putting on top of these bars. They should end up clearing right over it without any issue. The other thing that we've got to think about though is our sunroof if we have one. Now, this does leave room for our sunroof to clear and open up. However, I never advise anybody driving around with a sunroof open and a roof rack. While these arrow bars are quieter than round or square style bars, they're by no means completely silent. It'd be a lot easier for you to just take them off and put them back on. And that's going to be true of an automatic car wash as well. Now, the cool thing is that Yakima thought about that and made it really easy to get these on and off. Now, if you just remove your tower covers, unlock this door here that's in your tower. Now, it comes with this plastic lock core. You can open that up with a coin or with a flathead screwdriver. I would actually encourage you to invest in some metal lock cores through Yakima's SKS or same key system. What that's going to allow you to do is to get lock cores for each of your towers. They'll all be keyed alike, but you have the opportunity to get them keyed alike to any other Yakima accessories you have as well. For now, we're just going to use the flathead though. We're going to go ahead and open it up. Drop this door down. That is going to release the tower from the base here. And I'm able to lift this right off and on. And the cool thing is, is during the installation, you preset the width of your towers. So I can take these off and throw them right back up here because the bases aren't going anywhere. In fact, the bases are going to even be protected with these caps. You could just pop this on. And if you want to take a drive with your sunroof open or if you want to take it through an automatic car wash, you're perfectly safe to do so now. Now, you've heard me reference the installation more than once by now. So stick around. I'll show you exactly how we got this roof rack up on our Grand Cherokee today. So the first thing we need to do is get up here and prep our rails. These do have fixed mounting points, so we don't have really any freedom to put our bars really wherever we want. On the front, there is a very specific spot to put these. In the back, we've got a choice between this set and this set here. If you go with this set here, you're going to end up with a crossbar spread of about 25 inches. If you go back here, it'll be about 35 inches. So it's really dependent on what type of accessories you're going to be putting up here because all of these accessories have a minimum and a maximum crossbar spread you can use. You always have the freedom of moving these back and forth if you switch out accessories, but that's just a little more hassle. So if you have a certain accessory in mind, double-check its minimum and maximum crossbar spread before choosing your second bar mounting location. We're going to go ahead and go with the shorter set here. But what you'll want to do is take your trim panel tool and we're just going to pull these plugs out and expose these threaded holes. Now, if you don't have a trim tool, you can do this with a flathead screwdriver. My advice would be, however, that if you do that, I would put a cloth or something underneath here. Just in case that flathead screwdriver slips on you, you don't end up putting a scratch in your roof. And when it comes to the front, you'll have basically different bolt holes that you can use. We use the very front one. There's a tie down up here on your rail that doesn't really allow us to move this any more forward. So there's really only one fixed position you could put your front bar. So once your bases are up and in place, we're going to turn our attention to the crossbar and towers. Now, on the Skyline FX, they're going to be fixed already right out of the box. You're going to have a longer bar and a shorter bar. The longer bar is going to go toward the front of the vehicle. The shorter bar, which we have right here, is going to go toward the rear of the vehicle. These are going to install really exactly the same. So to get this prepped to go up on the roof, the first thing I want to do is unlock it. Now, it's going to come with these plastic lock cores. You can use a flathead screwdriver to open that up, just like that. Once I do that, I'm going to pop this down and out of the way. This is going to control the piston underneath here that opens and closes and basically holds this onto the base that we just installed on the rails. So I'm going to open it all the way up. The other thing I want to check is to make sure that my tower is maneuverable on here. It's already tightened down a little bit. So what we're going to do is we're going to take the tool that was provided from Yakima. And using this bolt right here, I'm going to loosen that up some. Now if this is closed, you could still do it because they put a hole here for you to do it. And I'm just going to go ahead and loosen that up just enough that I can get my tower moving back and forth. Now that we've got it all prepped though, we're going to go ahead and get it up on the roof. So as I get this up here, I want to make sure the wider portion of the bar is facing the front of the vehicle. And with this opened up, this is essentially just going to drop right into our base there just like that. Now I can get this kind of closed up, just like that, and it's going to be latched on to my base. The next thing I want to do, once I get that latched in on both sides, is I want to maneuver my bar, remember we left it a little loose, so that that center opening is as close to the center of the vehicle as I can get it. Once I've got that crossbar centered, I'm going to go back to my Yakima tool. And remember, we can go right through this bolt hole or this hole right here to get to that bolt. And I'm going to tighten this down until I hear a loud pop. (tool pops) Just like that. This is a torquing tool, so that's letting me know that this is locked in as far as it needs to go. Once I've got that done on the passenger side, I'm just going to grab my flathead screwdriver and lock that back up. And then, once I've get that locked into place, I can replace my tower covers. It'll just snap on just like that. And with that, our installation is complete. I'm going to be ready to load this up with whatever accessories I need to and head out on my next adventure. But if after watching this video, you've still got some questions about this particular roof rack or if you've picked it up and you've got some experiences to share, go ahead and leave those in the comments below. We always love to hear from you and our other neighbors. Once again, this is Curt with etrailer. Thanks for stopping by.
Ratings & Reviews
James
8/24/2025
The rack base has worked perfectly. I took my Yakima rack off my Tacoma and transferred it to a Honda Pilot and eTrailer had the correct bracket.
Do you have a question about this Roof Rack?
Info for this part was:
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Andrew N.
10/15/2022
You definitely want to use the gaskets and I dont recommend using the crossbars without them. Here is an install video that might help you out with this part. Let us know if you still some assistance after watching.
Helpful Links
https:www.etrailer.comtv-review-yakima-roof-rack-2017-honda-cr-v-y00425.aspx