etrailer | Kuat Piston Pro X Bike Rack Review KU95VR

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Hi everyone, it's Evangeline here at etrailer, and today we have a pretty cool bike rack. This is the Kuat Piston Pro X three-bike platform rack. So this is gonna be a great way to get the bikes with your friends, your family, all loaded up ready to hit the trail. Now let's get those bikes on there. One of the quickest setups of three bikes onto rack that I've seen here at etrailer. But before we hit the road, let's talk about the details.
So this looks good, but if you look closer, you'll realize that we had to get a little bit creative depending on the different types of bikes you have. For those larger frames and especially those mountain bikes you will have to do some extra things. So this has a 53 inch wheel base, and if you have a mountain bike with a dropper post you may have to lower that seat down in order to get it to fit, or you can try sliding your bike back a little bit which is what we did here. So I need to bring this bike back a bit more, so that we can clear the handlebars on the other bike. But listen to the click.
Right there. That's the first click to ratchet it down, so you can only move your bike this far out to get it to click. A feature I do like though is the selective loading and unloading feature. That is if you need to get this middle bike. Usually for other racks, you'd have to take the last bike out then you can go towards the middle bike.
Here, you can just open up one tray, one, bring that all the way down, and go to the other side, two. Bring it all the way down. You're still gonna have to maneuver around those handlebars and those pedals and those gears, but still it's a nice little extra option for picking the bike you wanna get off and being able to take it off. Now, I don't recommend this for heavy bikes because it can get a little tricky for the larger ones. Now compared to your two-bike Piston Pro X which had a 67 pound weight capacity, the three-bike version has a 50 pound weight capacity per bike.
Which means if you have your extra heavy electric bikes, that's something to keep in mind. But also a good rule of thumb is have the heaviest bike closest to the vehicle and then have your smaller and lighter bikes on the outside. Now that weight capacity is also important because of how much weight will be on your rack when you tilt the rack away. So for that tilt away feature, you have two options. One is to try to hit the lever with your foot. Unless you have short feet like me, that's not gonna happen. The other is just to pull the lever. So reach in through the bikes, pull that lever, and let the rack drop down. So that's gonna be a lot of weight coming down and it is gonna tilt pretty deep, but even here on our Tesla, it doesn't hit the ground. Now you wanna tilt your bike rack away with the bikes on if you wanna open your hatch or your trunk or lower your tailgate for your trucks. And this gives you all that space to grab your bags, your backpacks, or even change out your shoes after or before your ride. So with having multiple bikes on there, you also have a longer rack. So measuring from the center of your hitch pin hole to the end of the rack or for this point, that's gonna be 41 inches. So driving around, you can see the bikes move. We're going to go through the test course just so I can show you the up and down movement. So this is alternating speed bumps, and everything's holding together. There's a little bit of side to side movement, but you can see that it's holding onto the front and the rear wheels. And while things are shaking, it's all shaking together. And that's very important because you want a little bit of flex but not too much. With your three-bike version, you're gonna have two cables and two spots to lock your bikes. So you could try to use one cable for all three bikes or utilize both of them. So a single cable is gonna be about nine feet long, and that will help you figure out if you can run it through your bikes. I try to get it through the front wheel as well as through the frame, and if I can through the rear wheel if possible. But that will change depending on, you know, the size of your bikes and how they're built. So for example here, I try to run it through the front wheels as well as the frames of all of our bikes. But having to go through the end and then into the lock, it's not gonna make it, so we're just gonna have to reorganize. But once you figure it out how to wrap the cable around your bikes just pop that incident lock, it snaps into place.