Bike Transport: The Final Frontier

Some exciting news is that the wife and I have a new vehicle. Our first race of the year will be the Florida Ironman 70.3 and we are driving down from Maryland. We both have smaller cars (Civic Hybrid represent!) and neither of us is very comfortable with our hang-off-the-back bike carrier, despite it being a really good one. Since we planned to go all the way down the Florida, and for other reasons that we don't need to get into, Cin and I decided to buy an SUV as an additional vehicle, with the requirement of being able to transport the bikes inside it while leaving lots of space for all of our other race gear. We did a lot of shopping around and ended up being a Honda Pilot SE 4WD. It's a really sweet truck. One really good feature is this accessory. Yep, that's an interior bike rack attachment, to stand your bike up inside the Pilot.

We bought two of bike racks with the truck and then I went to install them. The general idea is that you mount the attachment to the cargo lid, which is a flip-up door that forms the floor of the cargo area. I did some measuring and experimenting before drilling into it, and it would fit fine...for a bike without aerobars. We both have aerobars, so this was a non-starter. With the attachment located at the back of the truck, connected to the cargo lid, there is simply not enough space for the handlebars to fit. After some experimentation, I decided to mount the bikes in the opposite direction, facing front, by mounting the attachments onto the back of the second row of seats (which we fold down). Mounting to the cargo lid is pretty elegant; you drill some holes and then use thick bolts to connect the attachment to a metal plate mounted on the other side. Nice and easy. Mounting to the back of the seats was a little more difficult as the seat frame is solid metal. Some self-tapping metal screws proved to be a perfectly good solution to this.

Here is a close-up on the installed attachment, on the back of the second row seats.

The attachment holds the fork and then you use a provided strap to secure the frame to some of the hooks on the backs of the seats and on the sides of the truck. This took a little while to figure out, but once you know what you're doing, takes about a minute or so to lock a bike in. We have both attachments set up in our truck and both bikes fit great. The ends of the aerobars are a good foot away from the front seats and the rear wheels are no where near the tailgate. The one downside to this is my seatpost; the vertical clearance of the truck is not tall enough for me to fit my bike in with the seatpost on, so I need to pull that off the bike to get it in. The wife's bike fits just fine. :)

Here is a picture of the whole thing, with both of our bikes mounted in the truck.

As you can see, there is plenty of room left in the truck for all of our other race gear. We're pretty happy about how this turned out, as we can now protect our bikes very well as we transport them and we have a solid vehicle for whatever race we want to get to. I'm also going to replace the seatpost clamp with one with a quick release so removing and reinstalling the seatpost will not be a bother.

Transport solution achieved. Success!