One thing that has always annoyed me is that you seemed to have to have a tow bar (dragkrok in Swedish) on your car to be able to fit a bike mount. And tow bars are not that common, there are several good reasons not to get one, like added cost, not usually available on used cars, and that they compromise crash safety to some extent. But to put my bike on a car it seemed that I had to get one. I was thinking about how to build a bike mount that could actually work on a regular station wagon by making use of the cargo rails, in some clever way.
But it seems I do not have to invent and build and market this thing myself: it is already available! I found a whole set of varieties from a company called Thule when I browsed a biking catalogue recently. Seems to fit quite a few varieties of cars including even the odd sedan! Good to know that they exist if I ever need to carry bikes regularly.
Sweden must be an odd place as just about every outdoors shop and absolutely every bike shop in the US has a wide variety of bike mounts for a variety of car shapes. Also Yakima is the major competitor to Thule for roof mounted (with or without existing cargo rails) carries. For strap onto the back carries there are all sorts of brands.
Interesting. I guess this shows that bikes travel by car more often in the US than in Sweden. As an aside, the Swedish outdoors shops I have seen are more likely to focus on functional clothes, backbacks, boots, and tents. Bikes are sold in bike shops as a general rule.
I am really looking at a mount for rails that hangs off of the back… the Yakima models all seem to be for the top of the car which has to have lousy aerodynamics. And they do not know about European cars in their fitting system 🙂 Funny to see how different it is, having a whole section for pickup trucks and sedans… while Thule is mostly about station wagons and hatchbacks.
Interesting.