Hollywood Racks Express 3 Bike Carrier with Hatch Anchors - Fixed Arms - Trunk Mount

Video Transcript for Hollywood Racks Trunk Mount Express Bike Rack with Hatch Anchors Review

A.J.: What's up, everybody It's A.J. with etrailer.com. Today, we're going to be checking out the Hollywood Racks Express trunk-mounted bike rack. So, there are a couple of different versions of this bike rack. You can get a three-bike version. Another thing to think about is, it is in kits that goes for a hatchback.

So if you have a hatchback vehicle, you would want to get one with the kit.Now, it's going to mount up to your trunk with these straps. You can just set them in place, they hook in underneath your trunk. You can see it's catched there, and that's what holds the rack to the back of your vehicle allowing you carry bikes without having a hitch or having to have anything installed on your vehicle. You can easily just throw this on the trunk, load up your bikes and start your adventure. Let's check it out.You have the pads here on the arms.

So anything that touches your vehicle will be padded, so you don't have to worry about scratching or causing any issues. The hooks themselves are rubber coated, so there's not going to be any scratches here along your trunk. And if you come down here to like the bottom of our trunk area, there's the pads here where it makes contact and the same rubber-coated hooks at the bottom, holding the bike rack in place.One thing to be careful with though, is that the bikes are really close to your vehicle. If you take a look at the pedal, you see how close it is to the back of the car. When I move it back and forth just a little bit, you see there's plenty of room if it does shake back and forth, so it won't come in contact with the vehicle.

And something that helps that out is this red strap in the middle, that's built into the rack. You want to run that through the frames of your bike. I kind of did a figure eight here at the two frames so that when I pulled it tighter it brought the bikes closer in together, which would bring that pedal further away and kind of hold them in here together more towards the middle.Now, another thing that keeps the bikes in place are the cradles and the straps on top. We've got rubberized straps. They're easy to pop off there, and then they're also easy to stretch over your bike frame and get them attached nice and tight.

And I'm going to go ahead and remove them so we can take a closer look at the cradles here. I like the straps, they're nice and thick and easy to pull. Sometimes you have those straps that are maybe a little bit cheaper, they're harder to get that stretch out of and they don't feel like they're going to last because they're either super thin and feel like any pull I could actually snap it. But these don't feel like that, they're easy to pull, they seem like they're going to last because I see quite a bit of thickness there with the rubberized material, so it's going to hold up.The cradle itself is just a rubberized plastic, so there's not much padding or protection here. So if you have a higher end carbon frame bike, I probably wouldn't put it in this rack. There's no protection, there's not even grooves for the brake lines and stuff on your frame. But otherwise it doesn't seem like it's a harsh material. It didn't damage the bikes we've thrown on here, so I think it will be fine. If you're looking for that extra protection, these cradles don't have it.Something to keep in mind is the spacing of the arms. I'll show you with a tape measure here, from center to center it's 15" apart. So why that's important, we couldn't get our mountain bike to fit over there. You see we have a bike adapter bar here that gave us that space to add the bike onto the rack. Otherwise, we weren't able to get these arms through here, there wasn't enough space for it. You see how it kind of tapers up here, and these are bulky cradles, so we couldn't get it to go. It kept getting stuck on this, and then you just find out you don't have any room and there's no way to work it on there.But if you get a bike adapter bar, then it's no problem, you can still get it on there. There was a little bit of work to it still. We had to push these cradles in like this to get it over the first, and then do the same thing with the second, and then when we set the bike down in there we had to rotate the cradles up. And that's how we got the bike adapter bar onto this rack. So there's a little bit of work to get something like that on there. If you don't have a mountain bike with the spacing issues, you won't have to do that. On our other bike you saw that I took off, no problems at all, it was just a road bike, fit on there plenty of room within the frame to get it all strapped down.So, some other things to think about is the cradle spacing this way. It's going to start off and be default 7 1/2" in between, so just keep that in mind if you have the bulk of your bikes, or things are getting inaudible 00:04:24, you can move these a little bit more. And something I suggest doing, is if you have the space, just move the cradle out a little bit more. That way it gets it further away from the back of the vehicle if you're having those issues, you're worried that it's going to make contact, or something like that. You can easily adjust that and fix it.The whole bike rack is made out of a black powder coat steel, so it's going to hold up to the elements. I don't suggest leaving on your vehicle all the time. It's pretty easy just to pop off, fold up, throw it in the trunk. I would do that, it'll last a lot longer that way. It also has a weight capacity of 35 pounds per bike, so just keep that in mind when you're loading up with your bikes. Now I mentioned how easy it is to get it installed, let's check out how we did it.This is how it lays when it's flat. You just turn these knobs, you loosen it, you'll see it separate here. We'll do that on both sides, and bring our arms out a little bit like that. So we're going to put the bottom pads here on the bumper down here, and we'll adjust the pads on the top. You want your arms to come up a little bit, you don't want them facing down, so it looks good right about there. Maybe bring out the edge a little bit more. There you go, that's a little more even. So now you'll line up the teeth, and tighten it back down. You want them to go into place like that on both sides.With those in place, we install our clips. So you want to kind of hold onto the bike rack with one hand, and then put your rubberized clips in the gap here between your back window and the trunk. So we'll grab on there, there, and still holding the bike rack I'm going to grab and start to tighten them down. We'll just pull them through the buckle, make it a little bit tighter so it can kind of hold itself now with this one, I can go do same thing on this side. Now we'll come back and add our secondary clips that go at the bottom of the bumper. You see how these kind of jut up a little bit more, so you've kind of got to work them in there. I suggest coming out here to a corner or to the side of the trunk, it's easier to slip this in, and then slide it down. Again, it's rubberized so you have to worry about it damaging anything.And now your trunk mounted rack is installed. I'm going to come back through and roll up our straps and the excess, and kind of tie it to itself to keep it out of the way. So as you saw, it wasn't that bad to get it installed and didn't take me that much time. I even did it a little slower than normal because I was just being careful. I suggest going around to the each strap and keep tightening them down so they all get there. Because you know, you get this one all the way tight, you got to get this one, this one, this one, then come back and make sure it's still tight all around, then you should be good and ready to hit the road. Well, thanks for hanging out. I hope this helped.