Field Tested: Yakima's HoldUp Hitch-Mount Bike Carrier
The Yakima Holdup bike carrier has a built-in bottle opener. Yeah, I know, so do flip-flops these days, but still.
But first, why the hitch-mounted tray-style bike carrier? Hitch-mounted racks make transporting bicycles easier because you don’t have to be Yao Ming or carry a stepladder to get your bike on top of your roof. If you are driving a four-or-all-wheel-drive rig, you are already nodding your head, especially if your ride is a 50-pound downhill mountain bike. Second, hitch-mounted racks save gas over roof-mounted models by reducing your vehicle’s aerodynamic profile. I couldn’t find any studies on it, and I’m not the sort who records my mileage, but I’m pretty sure you’d pay off the cost of the rack ($415, yakima.com) in a season or six in gasoline cost savings. Some people don’t like dead bugs getting welded onto their bikes when they are transported on the roof. Those people probably won’t care about the Holdup's bottle opener (just saying), but hitch-mounted racks fix that too. Why the tray style, which supports the bike from below rather than dangling them from the frame? Loading bikes onto the Holdup is very fast—like 10 seconds—even with mountain bikes that have strange geometry and don’t easily work on the less-expensive dangler-style models.
The updated-this-year Holdup works beautifully. It loads quickly—simply slot the wheels into the wheel trays and swing the ratcheting arm onto the top of the front wheel and clamp it down. Then you clamp down the rear wheels with the classic Yakima rear-wheel snugging band. Hard to describe, but its pretty obvious in person. It accepts any bike type—from giant downhillers, even 29-inchers, to svelte road bikes. When the Holdup is empty, you can fold the arms and the front wheel trays up and then pivot the whole rack up upward to a vertical storage position against the bumper of the vehicle. Also, when you remove the rack entirely, it doesn’t take up much room in the garage. Some of these tray-style hitch-mounted racks have clearance problems on steep driveways. The Holdup curves up from the receiver and places the bottom of the bikes several inches above the hitch, which should eliminate scraping on all but the steepest transitions. Lastly, the Holdup includes a cable lock that snaps to the rack and allows you to lock your bikes to the rack, your rack to your car, or both, which is nice.
So, what are the improvements? The '09 Holdup replaces the straight pin on the tilt mechanism with a spring-loaded pin. Much better. The old version didn’t tilt away from the vehicle for hatch entry, and lastly, on the '09 version, the ratcheting keeper arms have an internal stop that prevents them from falling off the end of the rack and dragging on the ground, which sometimes happened on older models with careless operators.
—Frederick Reimers
Reimers, the former editor of Canoe and Kayak magazine, is a freelance-writer based in Portland, Oregon.
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