License Plate and Tail Light Kit for Yakima StageTwo Bike Rack

Video Transcript for Yakima StageTwo Bike Rack License Plate and Tail Light Kit Review

Hi, everyone. Aiden here with etrailer.com. Today, we're gonna be checking out the Yakima Safety Mate Kit here for our Yakima StageTwo bike rack. This is going to be a combination of light kit and a license plate bracket, so if you're in a state that requires your license plates and your light to be visible at all times it's gonna be a great way to stay legal. The StageTwo is a very large bike rack here and you can see with it folded up our license plate on the vehicle really isn't visible, and it even does block a little bit of our taillights here. So, aside from being legal, we also wanna just make sure we're safe.

This is gonna make sure all of that is visible going down the road so other drivers know your intentions and your license plate can be seen. And jumping in the vehicle here, we can see the lights in action with our running light. Our brake light. Our left turn. And our right turn.

So it's gonna give you all of your normal lighting functions for your taillights here so everyone always knows what you're gonna do when you're going down the road. Something else that's really nice that's included is that license plate light. You can see me turning it on and off here. So, even though we have our taillight functions, we're also gonna have that added light for our license plate so people can see it at night. This is going to be a direct bolt on installation for our StageTwo bike rack.

It uses existing holes that are already there so the installation process is really simple. And on the top of the bike rack here, we've got an existing rubber grommet with a special cutout that we just remove for our wiring to pass through the body of the bike rack here, all the way down to the 4 pole on our vehicle end here. So everything is really clean, really neat, and the wire is more than long enough to reach the plug. The 4Runner here, the plug is pretty recessed underneath there so if it fits here, I think it's gonna fit pretty well for most other cars too. So with it like this, you might notice that the lights aren't facing the right direction.

But they are movable, we've got a little hand knob right here that we'll just loosen up a bit. And from there, we can actually just tilt these lights to face flat, re-tighten that so they stay still, and you can see with the way the license plate is attached it's on a flexible mount, so it'll naturally just kind of fall into place when you tilt these lights. So everything remains visible, whether it's flat or folded. I did have some initial concerns with that rubber piece just worrying about its durability over time. But I do think it's a very thick material. I think it should hold up pretty well over time. We've been working with it today and I haven't noticed any issues, any flexing or just anything that would be unsettling to me that I would worry about, and I think it's gonna be a great fit. Now, there are plenty of other bike racks out there that come with optional light kits, or ones that even come with lights installed already like the Kuat Piston. And that's really nice that it's all ready to go out of the box, but I do like this light kit just for the simple fact that if you don't need it, you don't have to get it. But when you do choose to get it, it is going to be very large lights. They're not small. They're easy to see. They're plenty bright. And all the wiring is very clean here. Everything's run throughout the innards of the bike rack here, and the only wire visible is this portion here running to our vehicle and this small portion running to the grommet on the bike rack. So, I feel like it actually integrates really well, even though it doesn't come with it out of the box. And if for whatever reason the cord isn't long enough for your vehicle, it does come with a short extension so we can get that 4 pole all the way to our vehicle. Even if you don't live in a state where this is going to be required for legal driving, I would still recommend getting it, because if you ever travel out of state, you never know what you're gonna run into, and it's just gonna help keep you visible at night, even if you aren't traveling that far. It's a really good add on, and if you don't have the 4 pole wiring for your vehicle already, just put your vehicle information into our fit guide and check out what wiring kits are available for your vehicle. Otherwise, I think it's gonna be a great addition to your StageTwo and make it into a very, very functional and safe bike rack. Thanks for watching..