Kuat Huk Tailgate Bike Pad for Compact and Mid-Size Trucks - 5 Bikes - 51" Wide

Video Transcript for Kuat Truck Bed Bike Racks Review - 2022 Ford Maverick KU69ZR

Hi everyone, Aiden here at etrailer. Today we're gonna be taking a look at the Kuat HUK tailgate pad for compact trucks and seeing how it fits on the back of our 2022 Ford Maverick. That's gonna be a great way to carry your bikes with you in your truck bed rather than something like a hitch mounted bike rack. The Kuat HUK is capable of carrying up to five bikes in the bed of the Maverick, which is great. It comes with all the bike straps to make that work. And as long as your bikes physically fit inside that smaller bed of the Maverick, you'll be all good.

We had plenty of luck getting our bikes all loaded in, all of a very similar size to this. There's a bit of front tire overlap, but that's to be expected with really any tailgate pad and it was a very comfortable fit. The way these bike straps work, while I've got this one just out, is they'll feed over the frame and you've got this lever that will bite down after you cinch that strap down and keep it from pulling loose. So these actually do a really good job at pulling down on the bike and wedging it into the tailgate pad a little bit further, resulting in a really smooth and tight fit. There's a ton of padding all around the top and front and back of the tailgate pad too so that helps just kind of conform around the forks and the frame of the bike, getting a better fit on it, but also keeping your tailgate and your bike protected.

Now this would be a great option, I think, as an alternative to a hitch mounted bike rack just because, one, you can carry more bikes with it. Most hitch mounted racks max out at four bikes and this one can carry up to five. But in addition to that, it's going to take up a lot less room. You've got your truck bed open and most of the bike is in the truck bed. Very little sticks out past the bumper here, whereas with a hitch mounted rack, especially a four bike rack, would be sticking out quite a bit from the back of the Maverick.

So having that like this keeps it a lot easier to drive around with and park with. Some of the things I really like about it and how it fits on the Ford Maverick is this cut out at the very bottom. It lines up perfectly with the backup camera. So if you don't have it fully loaded, or if you just have it on there in between rides with no bikes loaded, you can still use your backup camera perfectly fine. Now I'll get the bike lifted off here after I undo the one strap.

So I'll just loosen it from the frame, and after that's off, I can just lift the bike up and over the sides. Once I set this to the side, we can check out the flap that actually hides our handle for the tailgate. Because when the bikes are unloaded, we get full function of our tailgate. By undoing the hook and loop at the bottom of this flap here, rolling it up, and using this extra hidden strap to feed through this top buckle and back to itself to keep that held in place. Now our handle is open. So from here we get full use of the tailgate. We can lower it, get things in and out of the back, and we can better see how this system with the bikes and the bike straps works. There's a series of straps that run the entire length of the tailgate pad here and you can take these five bike straps and set them up however you want. So if you have certain intervals where maybe we've got a few bigger bikes off to the side that need more space from one another and some smaller bikes on the other side that can sit closer together without interference, we can do that. You're not restricted to just fixed intervals. And then whenever they're all closed up, they just stay in those loops. And one thing we even found is because of their length, if you wanna have them set up between two loops, because that's where your bike just seems to naturally fall, it's long enough to do that too. So you get a lot of customization with it. You can also see the four straps that hold this to the tailgate itself. They're gonna wrap around these buckles, around the bottom of the tailgate, and hook onto the front with these metal G hooks. The metal's gonna be nice and durable, all the stitching is reinforced there, and it gets a very strong hold on the tailgate. I'm able to shake the whole Maverick back and forth without this shifting, which is great. It means it's fit on there solid and I don't have to worry about it shifting around. Underneath, there's going to be a soft felt lining. You can see that on this flap really well. That's going to keep your paint protected as we have this on the vehicle. And then the rest of the material on the outer sides is going to be this TPU construction. I think it's gonna be really durable and in our testing it's been very resistant to water and dirt. Anything that does get on here just wipes off very easily and if you take a wet rag, it'll look good as new. Plus the material is recyclable and biodegradable, which is pretty cool. Aside from all that though, I think where it really excels is the fit. For a compact truck like this, most tailgate pads only have two options, a large and a midsize. Where the midsize is more meant for the Tacomas, the Frontiers of the world, and maybe not necessarily something smaller like the Maverick. I think this is gonna be a really solid fit for the Maverick because it's been designed to be a good fit. It's a little bit more narrow than most of the midsize tailgate pads, and because of that, it fits well on the Maverick. If you've got a tunnel cover, it's not gonna interfere with the rails near as much and it's gonna give you probably the best fit out there while still being a very functional bike rack and let you carry up to five bikes. This has just been our look at the Kuat HUK Compact tailgate pad on the 2022 Ford Maverick. Thanks for watching.