etrailer | Let’s Check Out the Yakima OnRamp LX Bike Rack for 2 Electric Bikes

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Full transcript: https://www.etrailer.com/tv-review-ya...
Hi, everyone, Aidan here at etrailer. Today we're gonna be taking a look at the Yakima OnRamp LX. This is gonna be a platform-style bike rack capable of carrying up to two heavy e-bikes, and like the name suggests, it comes included with a ramp here. So loading and unloading those heavy e-bikes is a lot easier. You don't have to lift it all yourself. So let's check it out.

So the OnRamp LX is Yakima's second iteration of the OnRamp, and it's gonna be the new version that you'll see. And one of the big pieces they changed was the ramp. They made it quite a bit wider here. So bikes with wider tires are gonna work really well on here. On the old ramp, they tended to get stuck, but it's gonna work essentially the same way.

If you're not familiar with it, it's got these teeth on the top end that'll grab into some slots at the end of your tray, and it'll work on either side of the tray too. So we we inchesre able to wheel the bike off front tire first and we can hook it into that slot and load it up front tire first too. That's locked in, so I'll grab my bike and roll it up. Now as I push this up the ramp, obviously, you still got some weight of the bike to push, but it's not near as bad as when you're lifting it all. And you may run into issues if you've got two bikes kind of having to tilt it outward like this to either avoid your other bike or the center mast.

But it's not too bad overall. First thing we'll do though is just take the clamp on our center mast, wrap that around our bike frame, wherever it lines up the best, and cinch it down with the strap to hold the whole thing upright and keep it in place for us. And the secondary contact points are the wheel straps. The trays actually have these slots to tuck them into, so when you're ramping up or down, they don't get in the way of your tires. It's a huge improvement on this new OnRamp.

But they'll just speed through the tire or through the wheel and pull down at a 45-degree angle, giving us a lot of stability 'cause it pulls the bike down and in on both sides. And the other thing is that you've got wheel chocks now, so as it's pulling, it's gonna wedge the bike further into those wheel chocks and that's one of the pieces that helps give this an 80-pound weight capacity per bike. Now that 80-pound weight capacity is super impressive. It's gonna work great with most of your passenger vehicles, but I would advise, depending on the vehicle you're putting this on, just checking your tongue weight and what your vehicle can handle because two 80-pound bikes plus an almost 50-pound bike rack on its own is gonna be a fair amount of tongue weight. And if your vehicle can't take that then this rack isn't going to work to its fullest capacity. But that 80 pounds is also RV-tested and approved, so you can put this on some motor homes and stuff too. And with an off-road capacity of 48 pounds per bike, you're not gonna get e-bikes if you're going off-road but you can still take it and load some heavier bikes there too. And the ramp, when you're done using it, also stores on the bike rack so you can just lift it up to release the teeth. It can sometimes get caught on your tire if it's a little bit bigger. Got 29-inch tires on there right now. But this will collapse down just by loosening up these two hand knobs and removing them. And the ramp separates into two pieces to either be in that expanded state or slide them together into this collapsed state here. I don't love the two piece design, especially when you consider that now you also have two hand knobs, so four separate pieces total to hang onto, but the ramp's pretty lightweight and easy to carry. The one thing I'll say is before you tighten that one hand knob up, just check these center slots here, make sure they're aligned because that's gonna be the mounting location for our ramp. And it's a bit of a tight fit between the vehicle here, but you can access it through the bottom of the bikes too. That mounting stud will face in towards that first tray. So we'll just slide the rack over and use the remaining hand knob to tighten it down. That way it's always around, you don't have to worry about forgetting it 'cause it just stores directly on the rack. And I know we covered the attachment points for the bike rack, but I do wanna say they do a great job at holding those bikes steady. Like I said, those strapped the bottom pulling down and in give a lot of that stronger hold to k