As easy as it might seem to buy a hitch mounted bike rack for your car, there really is a certain amount of planning that you need to do. If you choose a model that is wrong for your bicycle or your car, you could end up with a product that scratches your bike’s paintwork. Even worse, it could hold your bicycles in very poor fashion and some enterprising passerby could steal one. So how exactly are you supposed to go about buying a hitch mounted bike rack that doesn't do any of this?
Now if you think about it, what you need to get done is pretty simple. You just need something that will hold one or more bicycles securely to the back of your car. You want a product that will hold everything there securely, safely and without damage. It's just that there are so many choices out there at so many different price points that it can be difficult to know which way to head.
The hitch mounted bike rack is a rack for bicycles that you firmly attached to the hitch for the towing point of a car at the back. They make them in different kinds for different models of car. A class I hitch is what you would use for a small SUV or a small car. These come with openings that are 1.25 inches wide. If you have a small pickup truck or something like that, a 2 inch opening would be more appropriate – you should get a class III hitch.
If you have more than three bikes to carry, a class I hitch would not be appropriate – they are limited to three bikes. There are some kinds of hitch mount racks that give you a mounting tray on which to stand your bikes, too.
The great thing about a hitch mounted bike rack is that it's really easy to install. You just need to hitch it to the hitch. Not every car is capable of handling a hitch though. With small cars, you may actually void the warrantee if you did that.
To make sure that your bike is nice and safe, be sure to put a sheet of protective material between bikes so that they don't jostle against one another and scratch. You also want to make sure that once you have your hitch mounted and loaded up with bikes, the whole thing doesn't completely block your view of the road behind you.
That could actually turn out to be dangerous.
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