etrailer | Installation Guide for the Front Runner Slimsport Platform Rack on a 2021 Toyota RAV4

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Hi, everyone. Aiden here with etrailer. Today, we're gonna be taking a look at and be showing you how to install this Front Runner Slim Sport roof platform on our 2021 Toyota RAV4. Now, a roof platform is a great way to carry a lot of stuff with you. You can mount up tents, kayaks, bikes, really any of Front Runner's accessories can work great with this platform system. Not to mention this is going to be a really good look on the RAV4, in my opinion.

Now it is going to be a much more permanent install and it'll replace the existing rails on the roof of your vehicle, but the result is something that's very much custom fit and solid. And all those custom fit pieces can be seen really well in the front wind fairing, which has a perfect contour to match the roof of our RAV4. The install brackets along the side here you'll see follow the shape of our roof line really well, keeping this pretty sleek and low profile and giving us solid attachment points on the side rails of the roof and even towards the back, it fits around our antenna perfectly fine and has plenty of clearance for our hatch here. So you're really maximizing your roof space here. This covers pretty much the entire top and still you're not sacrificing any features of your vehicle like the hatch.

Now, Front Runner makes a couple of different styles of platforms, the Slim Sport that we have installed today and the Slim Line Two. The Slim Line Two is gonna be a little bit different in the sense that it has much longer slats, or wider slats that is, and a side rail around the whole thing, so there's a bit of a lip. The Slim Sport here is gonna differ in the fact that it's completely flat and these bars are gonna be less wide. Now, where I think that's actually a really big advantage is for clamp around accessories. These are gonna be much more similar in size to a standard crossbar on a regular roof rack, so if you have any rooftop accessories like a bike rack or a cargo carrier or a kayak carrier that clamps around the bars, they're probably gonna work perfectly fine with this system without the need for any other adapters, which is great, but on the flip side of that, if you don't have any rooftop accessories yet, there's a wide variety of Front Runner accessories that will channel mount into these slats using standard M8 bolts, and that's gonna be a great way to build this out to your needs.

The other thing is those channels are always accessible. The openings are exposed on the sides of the rack here, so we can always pretty easily slide in those bolts and mount our accessories however we see fit. From the tallest point of the roof, you're only adding about two and a half inches of height to the roof line of your RAV4, which is great because it, like I said, it's pretty low profile and for most garages, I think it'll be just fine for clearance. Now when you add accessories on top of that, take some extra caution just because any rooftop accessories, they're not always gonna agree with low clearance situations like garage doors or parking garages, so I always err on the side of caution there, but when it's unloaded and not in use, I think it would be totally fine. The other thing to consider here is the weight capacity.

Front Runner doesn't list an explicit weight capacity for the platform because it's really well built and it can handle a lot. Realistically, the limiting factor here is gonna be the roof of your RAV4, so check your owner's manual and see what the roof is rated to handle and they recommend to not exceed that weight. The thing to consider though with that is the rack itself does weigh something. It's gonna be about 76 pounds, so it's not super light, but for what you get, it's actually pretty good, but you do want to take that empty carrier weight away from your total capacity and not overload the roof of your vehicle. And the other thing to consider here is the installation. I know I touched on it briefly, mentioning that it's going to replace the existing rails that we inchesre on the roof of your RAV4. Removing those is actually really easy. The place where you're gonna run into maybe a little bit of trouble is the fact that you have to drop the headliner down partially and you have to enlarge one hole in the back of the roof. Now that might sound pretty daunting at first, but I promise it's really not too bad. If anything, it's gonna be just a bit time consuming and in some places where we have to reach up above the headliner, you're just kind of going in blind because there's